• Free People Blog
Free People is actually a clothing brand. Their blog is one of the best examples in the niche.
Healthy food and recipes, do-it-yourself projects, yoga, homemade cosmetics and music are daily topics on the Free People blog. As this highly matches their target group's interests and hobbies, they are providing valuable content to engage their readers. They support this content with original "pinnable" photographs, which usually include clothes and products of the brand (even if the article is about a DIY project).Thus, their products get organic exposure. Moreover, below each photo on the blog, there is a link to the purchase pages of the products. This does not only get clickthroughs from users, but contributes to optimization by interlinking.
Users get frequently involved, as there many competitions, events and photoshoots run by the Free People blog. The bloggers also include frequent call-to-actions in the post, encouraging readers to comment. There are weekly posts called "Scenes from the Office" and "Office Style" which humanize the brand even further and let readers take a peek behind the scenes. Furthermore, the bloggers conduct frequent interviews with their colleagues, or designers, musicians, and people they simply find interesting.
All blog content gets shared on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr.
• Instinto de Vestir
This fashion blog is run by Alana Ruas, a Brazilian girl. Its traffic comes mostly from social media - especially Lookbook. Lookbook is a fashion social network, and a great marketing tool for fashion bloggers. All of the blog's traffic and popularity has grown organically, without much (or any) SEO influence.
The blog is monetized via affiliate marketing - promoting clothing and fashion items, and getting a commission each time one is purchased through the blogger's link. However, these links are scarce - they are not present in every post.
There ads on the side of the blog, which do not come from AdSense, but were placed there manually by the blogger. It is likely that she charges the brands monthly fees.
The blogger might be using other "invisible" techniques to monetize the blog, such as PR posts and paid links. As this is a high-traffic blog which has gained an authoritative statute in the fashion community, it is very likely that brands are requesting PR articles and links on it.
• Mojo Made
This is a blog by Morgan Joanel, an Australian singer who also crafts jewelry. She also posts about her daily life and personal style. Each posts includes a lot of images, but also a good amount of text.
The blog is set up on Blogger, using a theme customized in a minimalist style. As many other fashion blogs I looked at, this theme is mostly blank, allowing for big images without any distractions. The header and sidebar designs are also eye-catching.
• From Moon to Moon
This is a bohemian interior design blog, which also got its following and popularity completely organically, with no additional optimization efforts. It is supported by a very strong Pinterest account with a big following, which has also been grown organically.
The blog is set up on Blogger as well. The post frequency is varied, but there is at least one new post per week. The content usually consists of 5-8 images, accompanied by a few lines of text.
From Moon to Moon is not being monetized in the traditional ways, as the blogger does not support big corporations and likes to have control over the ads which are being posted. Thus, she hand-picks sponsors and manually includes their ads in the sidebar, for a fixed fee. She claims to be getting a lot of requests from all sorts of brands and trying to pick only small, local businesses.CONCLUSION
The first and most obvious conclusion after analyzing these (and others) fashion and lifestyle blogs was interesting: none of them are actually using AdSense. Although there are claims that high-rank bloggers are making hundreds (or thousands) per month with AdSense, there are also reasons not to have it on your blog. The main such reason is that AdSense clickthroughs bring a cents at the cost of a user leaving the page. Moreover, they cannot be controlled or designed, impacting the overall design of the blog in negative ways.
I did find affiliate links, and discovered new marketing programs - such as Share a Sale and Zanox, for example. However, they were few and scattered throughout the blog - they were not present in every post.
My conclusion is that, surprisingly, Pay Per Action marketing is not on the list of income sources for fashion&lifestyle bloggers. They are monetizing their blogs in invisible ways, which are harder to research. One guess could be PR posts and paid links. I noticed some bloggers were trying to sell their own products and services, and were using the blog simply as a promotion tool to bring in traffic to other websites.
I also discovered Blogger is the most widely used platform. Very few blogs had their own design, domain and hosting.