Bryan Boy, Tavi and Susie Bubble

Sure, almost anybody can start a fashion blog — all it takes is a few simple clicks and voila – but it takes a special kind of fashion blogger who can write and maintain a blog that’s well-written, creative, entertaining, and informative and who has an audience that extends beyond a small circle of family and friends.

So how, exactly, can you evolve your fashion blog so that you gain a greater audience and gain a stronger footing in the fashion world?

At the Evolving Influence Conference, held in New York City on February 15, 2010, fashion bloggers  - including some very high-profile ones like Tavi, Susie Bubble,Phil Oh, Yuli Ziv, and Jennine Tamm – discussed these very questions.  We’ve compiled some of the tips they shared that will help you elevate your fashion blog to the next level.

1.  Get Off Your Computer and Go to Events

A lot of blogging takes place in the home — that’s one of its charms.  However, as Melody Biringer of CRAVE stated at the first panel (“Fashion Blog Marketing”), remember that there’s a whole world out there for you to explore, and you can actually build your blogging network, gain resources, and discover new friends – as well as get creatively inspired – by going to fashion-related events and meeting people.

As Biringer suggested, you can even meet up with local retailers and see if you can do events with them.  Moreover, there are plenty of opportunities for going to fashion-blogging or online media-related events that mix and match the online and the offline together, which sites like Ladies who Launch and Crave can help you find.

2.  Make a Niche and Be Specific

A plethora of blogs are out there.  In order to stand out, you need to give your blog a boost by making your content specific and not all over-the-place.  Do you love vintage?  Then make a vintage blog.  Do you love shoes?  Make a shoe blog.  To be specific doesn’t mean you always have to write about one kind of thing all the time, but especially when you start up a blog, it definitely helps to have a theme running throughout your blog that will make it unique and therefore attractive to readers.

Fashion Bloggers Panel - NYFW

Erika Miller of Elle.com offered some great advice in the first panel when she said to ”Find people who are related to your niche.”  This means you should seek out other bloggers who offer related content, creating a community that will help your blog become a better resource as well as more interactive.

Build your networks by linking to these bloggers as well as exchanging RSS feeds, and as Nichelle Pace of StyleMom suggested, guest blogging is always to build relationships online and gaining leverage in your niche.

Furthermore, as Miller pointed out, creating a niche and being specific will generate keywords for your blog that’s great for SEO (search engine optimization) and will help you jump up in rankings.  Search Engine Optimization may sound like a scary term, but Miller said that for the not-so-tech-savvy bloggers, creating good SEO is as easy as making sure you tag your posts, images, and videos and making sure you use consistent keywords throughout your posts.

In the same way that you want to connect, share, and converse with other fashion bloggers, Miller states that you also want to “Build a relationship with one piece of content to another piece of content.”

3. Keep Your Blog Fresh, New and Relevant

Don’t bore your audience.  While you want to have a theme, don’t post about the same kind of handbag or shoe or shirt over and over again!  Make sure you keep up with the news – fashion and otherwise – so that you can relate to your audience and know what’s out there.  As Corinne Leigh of Threadbanger advised, you want to keep things topical.  There are always ways to integrate current news with seemingly no relation to your blog through clever titles, off-hand jokes, and so on.

Pamela Castillo of Market Publique also suggested that you have to have original content. Castillo said that, “As a resource, you have to provide useful information that people will come to you for, and only to you for. Have original content; take your own photos, and be open to criticism” (quote from The Fashion Spot).

This idea of original content goes along with the idea that you should blog about what you love.  The reason that people love to read blogs so much is that they’re informative and personal and therefore fresh.  Tavi of Style Rookie confessed that the reason why she blogs is that she cares about what she’s talking about and likes to write to an audience that also cares about what she cares:

“You can write about what you care about.  There’s always someone who also really loves, like, Seinfeld as well as dead dolls, as well as Prada.  I think the few times I’ve tried to do more news reporting, I can only go so far until I have to make a Freaks & Geeks reference.  For me it’s easier to write as a personal-style blog.” (New York Magazine)

IFB Evolving Influence Panel

4. Make It Authentic

While some bloggers like to think of themselves as a brand (an idea that has potential for some blogs), Shubhanker Ray of G-Star Raw warned that too much branding might make your audiences turn away from you.

Ray thinks that one of the reasons that fashion blogs are so fascinating and fresh to people is that blogging makes fashion accessible to everyone with a computer and the Internet.

Unlike major brands, who might seem frighteningly large and influential to the everyday person, blogs equalize fashion.  He stated that “Social media and blogging effectively breaks down barriers and take things from being an elitist fashion world to one that democratizes.  This is a meltdown of the traditional system” (quoted from The Fashion Spot).

Whatever you decide to do, make sure that the stance you take with your blog is one that you believe in.  Be transparent in your ideas and the choices you make for your blog, as audiences can tell whether a person is being fake or not.  As Amed stated, what’s cool in fashion is often the things that are not forced upon people, so don’t try to force ideas that you don’t even believe in on your audience.

5. Keep Up With Technology

Last, but not least, keep up with technology and the issues going on in the online world because, as the recent FTC rules about blog endorsements have shown, these issues can affect you even if you don’t know that much about technology.  Even 13-year-old Tavi expressed her surprise at how fast technology is moving and how fast it is changing society.

To keep up with technology doesn’t mean buying all the latest gadgets and knowing everything there is to know about how to make digital videos.  However, as the landscape of technology changes and as various forms of technology become more and more accessible to everybody, you want to know the basics of what’s out there and what’s popular.

It wasn’t too long ago that blogs didn’t really cross-integrate various kinds of media, but now you see bloggers making videos, uploading photos to Flickr, tweeting, creating music mixes that go along with their blog’s themes, and so on.  Keep up with the basics, and you’ll not only entice your readers, but you’ll probably find new creative outlets that will invigorate your love for fashion.

(Photos Courtesy of  Independent Fashion Bloggers | Photographer Dustin Festenmacher)

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