Today’s post is written by IFB Contributor Mademoiselle Robot! This is part two of the post All the Pretty Voices… Noise or Symphony?
Nowadays, everyone and their dog has a blog, and even the fashion blogosphere is getting incredibly crowded. So how do you make your blog stand out from the crowd? By developing a unique & personal voice. Here are some tips to help you doing so. [Read more]
Image by SC Flasco
I don’t want to bother people. My blog isn’t big enough. I don’t have enough time… I hate half the newsletters I get in my box.
These are all the things I keep telling myself about newsletters. But then there are newsletters I get that are really helpful, I enjoy getting them, gosh, sometimes I wish all my content just magically appeared in my mailbox. Newsletters are a useful tool too keep in touch with your readers, to keep them updated with your content, and it also reminds them to visit your site, increasing your traffic.
There are loads of benefits to starting a newsletter for your blog, traffic building, monetization, building a report with your readers, and it’s never too early to start. [Read more]
Kingdom of Style is one of those blogs that just continually inspires. The Queens, Michelle and Marie give constant sources of inspiration to their impeccable style. Queen Michelle often shows her DIY projects that are experiments in fashion as well as personal endeavors. If you haven’t been to the site, you should check it out. The following post is their own key to how they’ve become so successful:
If I had a quid for every time someone asked me what makes a successful blog, I’d be off buying new shoes this very second. Whenever someone does ask me this I always feel disappointed that I can’t offer them a solid formula but the simple truth is, I have no idea what makes a blog successful. Sometimes it just happens.
Of course, how one defines a successful blog is very much dependent on one’s definition of successful. I think a blog can be successful on many different levels.
But here are some things to consider:
[Read more]
Image via Garance Doré
Blog vs. print may be coming to a close, or maybe “independent blogs” vs. “media corporation blogs representing print magazines” may be coming to terms. I think. Scrolling through my rss feeder today, I came across Elle Magazine’s New Style Blogs article… It got me excited to see which blogs they picked, and what they had to say about us.
While the slew of Internet startups that emerged around this time [the mid-90's] tanked when the boom went bust, blogs have prospered, evolving into the creative outlet for people to share (and typically over share) information about their lives, for anyone interested�-or bored-�enough to read on. As a result, we’ve noticed that more and more quality, style-focused blogs are cropping up, offering a visual cornucopia for the fashion savvy in the way of street style images, “Last Night’s Party” type scenes of downtown debauchery (that often include inadvertent galleries of choice vintage pieces and designer duds) as well as the occasional eBay link for items you may have missed but, turns out, need to own.
Image by Yves Lorson on permanent vacation’s photostream
When I first started blogging, I thought it a mere obsession. I tried to blog every day, developing a ritual by chronicling my personal style. Once it became a habit, and the more involved I became with my blog, the more time it took, and the more I demanded of myself. I love the growth, and it’s opened the door to many other opportunities, but at what cost?
Once I asked a fellow blogger how much time she spends blogging, she replied, “oh, about 2 hours a day” She has a pretty successful blog, so I thought I was doing something wrong because I was spending nearly every night researching, getting linked into various social networks, looking for new blogs….etc. Juggling everything in my life started to get pretty intense. Then I realized, it was stress.
[Read more]
A few weeks ago, I tuned into Cotorture’s blog radio show Fashion Blogging and SEO With Vyque of Fasshonaburu.com Vyque gave several great tips on how to increase traffic by making your site more searchable. Some of her tips included tagging your images, linking to other blogs and adding a meta tags in your site.
I decided to do some research on meta tags, and implement them on my sites, mostly because I was already practicing some other tips, and frankly I found the whole subject of meta-anything confusing. If you are just getting into the wonderful and enchanting world of HTML code… SEO type stuff, you’ll hear about meta tags.
Meta tags have been around for a long time, thier function is basically to define the webpage.
A meta tag is inserted after the HEAD tag, it’s where your page title is, many blog platforms has that already included in the template, so I left mine out. The “keywords” element was popularized back in the 90’s and a few search engines used them, until spam sites took advantage of this and used keywords to mislead users. Most search engines have stopped using the keywords element of the meta tag BUT the “description” element is still useful to us, it’s where we can write a description of the webpage.
After getting all gung ho over the the whole meta tag, page description thing, I went to go put the code on my page, only to realize that XHTML always needs every tag to be closed. Blogger Tips and Tricks gave some very good suggestions on this topic…
So in the end, your code should look like this:
This way, you can better control what page descriptions go out there… oh dear, many times I searched my blog, only to find random bits of whatever post Google picked up. Hopefully it wasn’t embarrassing. Either way, I threw in the keywords element in my own, just out of superstition, perhaps I’ll get some extra traffic, but more importantly, I have a better understanding of my website.
If there is anything I noticed about fashion blogs are heavy use images and heavy use of images.
Are you using images to boost your readership?
First of all, since Chris from Fashion IQ posted How-To Burn Your RSS Feed, I not only have done this, but have collected every fashion blog with a RSS feed subscription on my Google Reader. It really helps to have your posts stand out if you have images….
Ok, so let’s put on our trendy ‘nerd’ glasses and talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results“
In other words, make it easier to find you through Google, Yahoo, or yeah, whatever else is out there. You can give your images alternate titles or give them keywords that are search engine friendly. That way when someone types in say, ‘Facehunter’ in Google images they get this:
Someone has obviously done a great job of tagging all of Facehunter’s images…
So how do we do that? It’s actually very easy once you find out how…
This is how your code should look:
(tag)
img src=”yoursite.com/images/shoe.jpg” alt=“these are the keywords I’m targeting” width=”75″ height=”100″
(tag)
If you are using blogger, the image upload tool leaves an empty tag for you to fill:
under “Edit HTML” tab, you can insert your keywords there. It’s really easy. Just don’t overdo it with words that don’t fit into your blog, else you may be left vulnerable to spambots. Although I haven’t experienced this, I have read that warning, so I’m passing it on to you.
Well, I hope this tidbit helps with your traffic!
Here’s a fantastic post from Lesley @ Fashiontribes.
The mystery of how Google ranks the quality of a particular website is - like the whereabouts of Osama, how Promises stays in business…& Paris Hilton - developing one of the great unsolved puzzles of our time. The subject of countless articles, blog posts, and even an entire industry devoted to making your site sexier in the eyes of Google, PageRank (PR) was devised by co-founder Larry Page during his Stanford days spent researching a new breed of search engine. PageRank (yes, it’s spelled that way, and yes, it’s a trademark of Google) denotes whether Google deems your site valuable & where on their food chain
you rate on a scale of 1-10; ten = good, one or less = bad (& very bad). Not only does PR affect what you can charge for advertising, but it directly impacts where you place in a Google
search and your corresponding Google traffic.
Lucrative Linkwhoring
Naturally, an industry has sprung up to help lesser sites buy their way to a higher PR. Although ethically questionable, a number of larger blogs have been accepting payment in exchange for linking to lesser sites - solely for the purpose of boosting the smaller site’s PR. Linkwhores & so-called Blog Link Farms fill their sites with these lucrative links to the lower foodchain sites, regardless of whether the content of the lesser site actually relates in any way or is deserving of a higher PR.
As a result, Google recently penalized a number of high profile, popular sites by significantly lowering their PR. Forbes, The Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Engadget all dropped from PR7 to PR5; ProBlogger & CopyBlogger from PR6 to PR4, and the longtime #1 listing in the Google search “Make money online” -
John Chow - was completely removed from the index; search for “John Chow” now & JohnChow.com comes up around page 7 notes Courtney Tuttle. (Search Engine Land has a more complete list of the major sites who lost PR ranking.)
A Google-Sized Hypocrite
According to Google, the official reason for the PageRank adjustment is to preserve the quality of links & ensure they lead to relevant editorial content rather than a “bad neighborhood”; ie. to help protect users from inadvertently clicking on an unrelated site (essentially like clicking on an ad) or ending up on a web-spamming site. It is their search engine so they have every right to penalize you for selling links, points out Search Engine Land about the fact that Google isn’t actually dictating to people what to do with their sites. “Don’t care about Google?” they ask. “Sell all the links you want…If Google traffic is important to you, don’t sell links.”
However, the tech-centric bloggers have identified the real issue as this: these links are supplanting Google’s cut of the link business; if you want to earn link revenue, they want you to use their AdWords.
Mashable illustrates the hypocrisy of Google’s PageRank punishment by showing how your typical Google search yields well-placed AdWords which lead straight to an impressive quantity of link spam. And the company’s apparent lack of loyalty has offended a googol-sized group of early adopters whose enthusiastic word-of-mouth rave reviews initially helped sell Google to the non-tech masses. “The people who supported you in your early years and the people who have the ability to influence the non-tech folks…those are the exact same people you are currently attacking,” warns a disappointed Twenty Steps. “It’s not a wise move to piss them off in great numbers. Sure, you’re currently top of the pile but with every one of your snidey little digs at the SEO community or the web development community or the blogging community, you chip away at your power base.”
In a delightfully dramatic flourish, he even quotes the lyrics from an 80s Human League hit:
You were working as a
waitress in a cocktail bar
When I met you
I picked you out,
I shook you up and turned you around
Turned you into someone
new
Now five years later on you’ve got the world at your feet
Success has been so easy for you
But don’t forget it’s me who
put you where you are now
And I can put you back down
too
And Now for the Good News!
The banned Mr. Chow shrugs off his disastrous PR penalty by pointing out that link sellers will simply come up with a new pricing structure that has nothing to do with PageRank. Courtney Tuttle agrees, asking: “Does Google want PageRank to be irrelevant? If they do, they’re doing a fine job.”
And TechWag finds a silver lining in the fact that the downgrade against massive sites, combined with the fact that good content is now a more valuable tool for luring people to your site, is actually good news for smaller blogs. Why? It rewards what we do best - blogging. “Pretend like search engines are not even a traffic option, and instead focus on repeat traffic and referral sources that no one can take away,” advises CopyBlogger, explaining that the real reason for their success has been to ignore SEO gymnastics & subterfuge, and focus instead on producing high quality content. “While people work hard to attract links to rank better in search engines, you’ve got to realize that some of the highest quality traffic comes directly from the links.”
from Fashion IQ:
Hi all,
It seems the majority of fashion blogs are on the blogspot platform. Till recently, that has meant a lot of complications when using Feedburner to track subscriptions and feed activity. No more. Now pretty much any blogger can integrate Feedburner without too much fuss.
But why should you use Feedburner?
Ok… ready to go?
Here’s quick start instructions for Blogger (blogspot), Wordpress (selfhosted), Wordpress.com and Typepad. Feel free to contact the Feedburner Team if you have questions or issues.
Till Next Time,
Chris
You put a lot of work into your blog. All that time looking through pages and pages of trend forecasts, creating style.com lookbooks, commenting on sites, and of course writing, has gotten you a blog you love. Your own. So how do you let us know you are out there? Here are some helpful tips to get you started:
1. Claim your blog on Technorati. I find this the easiest way to keep track of who is linking to me, and what they are saying. It’s the first thing I have done. This may not increase your traffic, I personally have not noticed any traffic coming from Technorati, but it’s a handy tool.
2. Get a third-party traffic counter. Google analytics is what I use for my blogs, it’s free, and amazing how comprehensive it is.
3. Use key words to tag your posts. This will help make your blog more search-engine friendly.
4. Be an active commenter. One way to help get the word out is to comment on other people’s blogs. A good chunk of my traffic comes from links from other fashion blogs, I got most of those links by developing relationships with other bloggers. It also adds to the sense of community by encouraging posts that inspire discussion.
7. Reveal as much as possible. The one thing that hooked me into fashion blogs, is that I felt that by reading them, it was like having a very fashionable friend who told me all her beauty secrets, only she was far away, and nobody else knew her, so it made her all the much more special. We all have something to give, and why not be as honest and authentic as possible? I guarantee you’ll shine though that way.
8. Use your own voice. You are charming and delightful. We want to know it.
5. If you are new, you don’t need to be jumping on the bandwagon. I know, I know, it’s hard not to talk about fashion week… it’s so exciting to see all the coverage come in. But if you want to make your blog stand out, it’s not going to do so by talking about the same thing every other person is talking about. Let the bigger blogs take care of the big news, take a moment to develop your own voice.
6. Invite guest bloggers. Ok, I haven’t done this before, because I interview so much, so in a way that’s inviting a guest blogger. I found it’s great to bring in the outside world onto your blog, it’s adds depth, and give your blog another perspective than just your own. I have found it’s opened my eyes in ways I never knew possible.
9. Make your blog visually appealing. I get compliments that my blog looks ‘professional’ actually, I’m a graphic designer, and if I can’t make something look professional, well… I’d be out of shoe and home. I know blogger has some good templates and use photos and block quotes to make it easy for the ADD blog reader to get a clue about what you are writing about. But don’t get carried away… too much is too much… just like Coco Chanel said, “before you leave the house, take one thing off”
10. Build your brand. With all the other networking tools out there, myspace, IQONs, flickr, facebook, stylemob, makeup alley, all of which I participate in it’s easier to build a presence if I stick to my brand.
Anyway, I hope this helps… this of course is a big topic, what are some ways you build your traffic base?
image via Face Hunter
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