Be original. There are hundreds of thousands of fashion bloggers. Yawn. If you want to blog about fashion, find a way to do it differently. Find an unusual niche, but make sure it’s something you are passionate about. Above all, be passionate about what you are blogging about because if you aren’t you will soon run out of ideas and your blog will die.

Be you. You are not like anyone else. You have your own way of talking when you are with your friends. You have your own style, your own mind. Let people see that and fall in love with you for it. People like and need genuine people. You are more likely to grow a dedicated audience when you are unapologetically yourself. This is your spot on the web, do whatever you want with it.

Be inspired. Get out of the house, go and do stuff, write about it. Follow other bloggers you admire and learn from them. Connect with them. Collect the things that inspire you. Use it.

Be inspiring. Most people read blogs because they want a break from the mundane and they need help. The most successful blogs on the internet are the ones that entertain or help people. Be both! It really depends on your niche, what you blog about, but do what you can to entertain, inspire and help other people. Share your knowledge, inspire with your passion about your chosen subject.

Encourage and reply to comments. People love to say their two cents and be included. At the end of each post I write, I try to think of questions that my readers can answer in the comments section to encourage them to leave a comment and then I try to reply to each comment to make them feel welcome and valued. This grows a dedicated audience because you show that you care about your readers.

DON’T

Bore. Always remember that people have very short attention spans. And even more so on the internet. You need to get to the point quickly and make it easy for people to consume what you write. You do this by breaking up your text into shot paragraphs and using relevant images in between. Blogs that just have walls of text are an immediate turn off. No one has the time to sit and read an epic long post with no paragraphs and no imagery to describe the essay they are reading. Try saying what you want to say as concisely as possible.

Expect immediate success. It takes a long time to grow an audience. You have to stick to it and that’s why it’s so important to be passionate about what you’re blogging about. If you don’t eagerly look forward to creating content for your blog, you’re doing it wrong and no one will like what you’re doing either. It was trial and error for me with The Dame. I have change my point of focus with this blog a couple of times in order to find where the real juice that excites me is and I suppose it will evolve with me as I change and evolve myself.

Getting paid to blog takes a long time. You will read many blogs where they talk about how they started making thousands from their blog in just six months or something. That is rare and you really do need to have a definite niche without much competition to do that. Yes, you can sell affiliate marketing on your blog, but that can take away from what you’re writing about, unless you’re blogging about retail bargains of course, but then that is a saturated market already, so why would you? Blog for the love of your chosen subject and eventually someone may pay you to do it. That’s what I’m looking forward to anyway.

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The Dame