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Originally uploaded by icanteachyouhowtodoit

Let’s face it… there’s not a whole lot of money in fashion blogging. At first anyway. You have to work hard, work smart and be in the know.

You also have to have nice looking content, good writing, and be persistent.

Unfortunately… the nice content can be a challenge if you want to make your blog original. There are lots of free resources out there if you take the time to learn about internet culture, programming and professional blogging. One concept I’ve only recently come across is open source. If you are running your blog on WordPress.org, you are probably aware of the amazing capabilities of this concept.

Open source is a set of principle around developing software, more specifically to us, it’s code that’s openly available. I find this topic really interesting, but for now… we can stick to the fact it’s free software… it’s free, but you can donate to the programmers if you like. I use WordPress and an open source template… the good part is it’s free, and I can customize it. The bad part is, I’m the one who has to do all the work.

Finding good programs to use is another issue so here are some places to look:

Images: Blogs like Just JR and Miss Dior Couture make wonderful collages with found images. I don’t know what software comes standard on you computer, but chances are, you may not have Photoshop. It’s an essential tool for blogging. I used it for nearly every post. If you can’t shell out the $1000 for a licence for CS2… try GIMP, it still has a bit of devlopment to do… but you can give it a try. I’ve seen the features, and it looks pretty extensive particularly for what we do as bloggers, so if you have a super old copy of Photoshop… you might want to give this a try.

Email: I don’t know what kind of blogger doesn’t need a good email program. I use gmail for all my accounts. I recently bought a domain name, and didn’t want to have to pay for the extra hosting for the emails, so I used google apps. With that, you can have like 100 email addresses and it uses the gmail interface, so I didn’t have to learn anything new. I’ve also heard that Mozilla Thunderbird is a great email application.

Hosting: If you are just starting out, and are intimidated by paying up front for hosting (many companies give a discount if you pay up front) going to NearlyFreeSpeech allows you to pay for what you use. A beginning blogger may not use too much space… so it’s worth a dabble. As you learn what you need, you’ll feel more comfortable about investing in your website. Again… I know I should have said this earlier, but it helps to have your own domain name. They aren’t expensive… but after I had to move from Blogger to WordPress, it was a hastle to inform everyone… change all my feeds, etc… I lost traffic, and my new site doesn’t have the same pagerank as my old one. But now I have way more traffic than before… pagerank… well.. that’ will change too.

Templates: When I moved, it was because I couldn’t find the right templates to with my old platform. WordPress has tons of open source templates it was just a matter of finding one I liked with a support forum that I gelled with. Once I got my site up and running the author of the code complimented on the work I did! It was really nice.

Tracking your blog: I used to use Technorati, but lately I’ve lost interest in them because I knew that there were links that weren’t showing up. Google now has a blog search that you can Google your blog address and it will search the entire internet for every link that pops up. It also has an RSS feed option so it can also email you when someone links to you!

Image by icanteachyouhowtodoit

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