image: Martin Schoeller for TIME

Dear Mark,

Last week, everyone was talking about Facebook filing its S-1 to go public. While I don’t necessarily know what that means, I get the basic idea. You are getting more investors, more stakeholders, and essentially, more money. $5 billion to be exact.

That is great, Mark. Really. You worked your tail off, and you deserve it. Let’s face it, you changed the Internet in a major way. TechCrunch writes that “Before Facebook it was nearly impossible to actually find people, you could “google” them but finding the person you wanted within one search wasn’t a given.  We now take it for granted, but that extension of people search and connecting them was certainly evolutionary.”

However, can I be honest? I’m a little nervous, Mark.

So, if I may, I have three questions I’d like to ask you.

Nothing too big or controversial. Just simple questions that affect me, the Facebook user.

1. How will the average Facebooker be affected by the influx of Marketers and brands looking to advertise on Facebook?

My fear is that in the coming years, Facebook will be inundated with marketers to the point that original content will be sparse. Facebook has become a huge part of my life, connecting me with friends, family and everyone in between. But throughout the years, it has become a bigger player in advertising and marketing. Now, I have ads on the side of my screen but will these ads eventually make their way to my news stream? Do you have new ideas on how ads will work in the Facebook Timeline?

2. How are you planning on making the world open and more connected?

In your letter to your shareholders, you stated that “Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” But now, with your IPO filing, you will have board members and stakeholders to answer to. Won’t those additions make it hard for you to do exactly what you want? Will their private interests affect you and Facebook?

3. What is your vision for Facebook in the next 5 years?

You don’t have to spill your entire game plan (although you could! I won’t tell!) but I’d like to know what you have in general in terms of updates and Facebook functionality. $5 billion is a hefty amount of cash to raise and the opportunities for growth with Facebook are endless. Will there be more video content? How are you going to keep your users with competition like Google +? Will brands have better fan pages? Can you just give me a slice of what’s going to happen?

Well, that’s about it, Mark. I know you are a busy man but if you could get back to me soon, that would be great.

Last season I wrote a post with tips for blogging about fashion week shows you didn’t attend. I provided tips for using images from larger publications and building content around your unique perspective rather than just a massive amount of looks without any analysis.

That’s how I typically  cover fashion week shows on my blog: I gather a few of my favorite looks, see if I can find a trend, or explain why I, personally, like that designer or collection so much. This season though, I felt inspired to take it a step farther.  I thought about the different ways a blogger could cover the shows – whether or not you were in attendance – that were a bit more original and creative.

Here are 4 out-of-the-box ways to cover fashion week:

1. Give your favorite looks a character

This is an idea sprung from a couple of different blogs. If you look at John Jannuzzi’s blog, Textbook, he dresses characters from literature and history in current runway looks. Another inspiration comes from Should Be On The Nanny – where the blogger puts runway looks on characters from The Nanny. Genius, right? Even if you can’t work Photoshop wonders like these two, you can still have fun with the idea of imagining what fictional characters might wear looks from the latest collections. Put photos side by side, give some explanation, use quotes or perhaps link to a YouTube clip. Have fun with it and use your imagination!

2. Re-create looks in your closet

Often times in the fashion world, what’s old is new again. Chances are, you can re-create or come quite close to emulating a FW / 2012 runway look with items already in your closet. If you can’t pull together exact pieces, analyze the trends you find. Whether it’s cut, color, pants over dresses, short hems, long skirts – you probably have the pieces necessary to get the message across. This is a fun way to show your readers that you understand trends and that you know you don’t have to be decked out in designer duds to look chic and current. Snap some photos of yourself in your best re-created looks or trends, and put them next to (properly credited) runway images.

3. Make Pinterest Boards of your favorite collections and looks

If you’re already on Pinterest – you know how addicting it can be! It can be a daunting (and probably unnecessary) task to cover all the shows on your blog, so why not put all your favorite looks, trends and collections into nice organized boards you can come back to later? You can collect a massive amount of images this way, and organize them pretty much any way you choose! Add a Pinterest badge to the side of your blog so your followers can find you images, and send out links to your boards on Twitter and Facebook as well.

4. Assemble a narrative of your favorite tweets to tell the story of a show

This is a post-type I used to envoke frequently on my blog. I think it’s so fun to look at the tweets of those who are attending shows, and hear their different perspectives. From bloggers in the 3rd row to @MrJoeZee sitting front and center, your timeline can produce a composite story of the hits and misses of a runway show or presentation.  Select your favorite tweets, whether they’re descriptive, funny or include photos – to share with your followers. Include links to each tweeter’s profile, as well as to a more comprehensive review or image gallery of the collection.

Alright, now who’s excited for fashion month to start? We’re just 3 days away from the beginning of NYFW and the IFB headquarters are practically buzzing with anticipation!

[Images by Nando Alvarez]

Over the years, my career as a blogger has really evolved. Here at IFB, I’ve taken more an editorial strategy role since the IFB team has grown. One of my daily activities is to focus on is how to bring more traffic in to the site through planning. Yes, you heard me planning! Luckily, we have great writers like Taylor, Ashe and Amanda… In the last few months, we’ve doubled IFB’s traffic, then tripled it. It took a lot of focus, and we did it! And here’s how…

1. Use Your Editorial Calendar

Who knows when the Editorial Calendar was invented, but it’s probably been an integral part of publishing from the very beginning. When it comes to blogging, you don’t need to make a big deal about your editorial calendar, but it makes a huge difference when you do something. Even if it’s on a post-it. Here at IFB, we generally plan or Editorial Calendars a week or two in advance, in a spreadsheet. This allows for creating a content rhythm, and mixing things up when it starts to look a little stale or repetitive. Editorial Calendars also help you stay inspired and keep you motivated!

2. Content Marketing

Everything I’ve learned about content marketing was from CopyBlogger. There’s so much to learn!  I can say that the little we’ve applied to IFB has had a profound effect on the traffic.  Borrow your post title strategies from magazines and newspapers (no more esoteric fashion puns!). Look at the types of posts you click on and analyze why. Reward readers by giving them something they need, what is your reader looking for?

3. Send Sticky Newsletters

Time and time again, the IFB newsletter has been our largest traffic driver. Since the beginning, I’ve personally sought to create a newsletter that would be useful. Email marketing is not dead, personally, I love the newsletter emails from Mashable, LinkedIn, Gilt, WhoWhatWear and Refinery29…as well as IFB. Look at the newsletters you love, analyze them and see how you can appropriate those principles to the newsletter promoting your blog. It’ll do wonders!

4. Host an Event, Either Online or In Real Life

The IFB Conference is coming up next week. Now it’s sixth season, it’s possible to say, that after every confernece the community grows. Organizing conferences is a lot more work than I would suggest anyone do, however, there are other events you can plan to promote your blog. You can pitch your idea to a brand to cover the expenses (or even get paid for some events), and it would be a great way to connect with your readers. Heck, I even hosted a garage sale in my apartment lobby and it was a great way to meet my readers and make connections.

5. Experiment, Monitor, and Drop What Doesn’t Work

I’ll try just about anything, once. With blogging, there is just about a million and one things out there that promise traffic growth. A “million,” said with Dr. Evil voice. The truth is, different people have success with different things. A newsletter might not work for you. Twitter might be your game, or these days, Pinterest.  Stumble Upon might be your holy grail one month and the next it’s all about Facebook. The traffic gods might seem fickle, but it helps to see what works by looking at the numbers that come in your analytics. That way you can see what is working, and have more information around why it works. Do your list posts work better than your outfit posts? Did that DIY post bring in enough traffic to justify the labor and, well, ok that DIY post was fun. Anyway you get the point. Looking at the numbers helps you make informed desicions about how to plan your time, how to experiment and how to know your traffic is really growing.

6. Set Clear Goals for What You Want to Achieve

If you start of by saying, “I just want MORE traffic.” chances are you’ll have difficulties structuring your strategy, you’ll also have a hard time knowing when you’re really getting to what you want.  Set your ultimate goal, which could be anything like 3,000k a month to 3 million a month or more if that’s where you’re heading. Then break it down into achievable steps. Three million visits a month might sound crazy, but bloggers are doing it, if you set your goal to three million from three thousand in one month, that may not work. But setting a goal of three thousand, to four thousand in one month is achievable, and you can outline what you are going to do to get there. My favorite way is to write our goals down on our white board. Seeing the goals and the outline of how we’re going to make it happen makes it easier to take steps and to recognize when it actually happens.

Of course there is a lot more we do behind the scenes, but basically this is where we start. How do you grow your traffic? What has worked the best for you?

We are so excited to bring you the first in a new series of posts on IFB. We’ve brought you the best advice from the best bloggers in the business through the Professional Blogger Spotlight, and now we’re turning the tables. Once a week we will be interviewing brands, to get their perspective on working with bloggers. What are they looking for? Who do they work with? How can you become more attractive to the brands you love?

To kick things off, we interviewed IFB favorite Grace Atwood, who, along with blogging over at Stripes & Sequins (as well as for us on occasion) is the Social Media Director for BaubleBar.

In what capacity does BaubleBar work with bloggers? 

We have been able to form really organic relationships with bloggers because we work with women whose style we really admire, and they work with us because they love our product.  We do gift some product to both bloggers we have formed relationships with as well as top blogger conferences, like IFB.  We also have our weekly Inspired Style feature on our blog, where we send select personal style bloggers an assortment of product and ask them to style it – it’s been really fun for both us and our customers. (And we’ve gotten great feedback from our customers that they’ve found new blogs to follow this way!)

We are now beginning to work on bigger collaborations that allow us to work more closely with the ladies we love to follow ourselves.  This week Kristina from Pretty Shiny Sparkly is taking over our Buried Bauble – every Friday we secretly mark down one item to $10 and give people a clue via email to find it.  We let her pick four Buried Baubles and she has created some great editorial for us to include in all the Buried Bauble purchases.  Collaboration is key here, and we work incredibly hard to come up with programs that are not only creative and interesting for readers, but also feel very on-brand and supportive for both parties involved.

How do you select bloggers to work with?

We look at a lot of things.  As an avid blogger myself, I follow nearly 300 blogs and constantly stay up to date with the who’s who of the blogging world to make sure we are reaching out to the bloggers that make the most sense for our audience.  I spend a lot of time on Alexa.com and Quantcast.  There are so many different variables these days (followers, # of comments on a blog, twitter following, Facebook likes,) that it can be hard to measure.  Everyone has an Alexa.com score, so that’s a good starting point.  From there, it’s less quantitative and more intuitive.  Factors like style, reputation, and site design also weigh in – and sometimes being able to spot a really great up-and-comer is invaluable.  If I visit the blog and find myself sucked in for the next half hour, I know it’s someone we definitely want to work with!

We like to work with bloggers who are creative, collaborative, and have a strong sense of personal style.  We also love finding bloggers with a very genuine voice.  We were over the moon to start working with Erica and Lauren from Honestly WTF because the two of them not only have incredible style, but there is something very authentic about their blog – going through it you really feel as though you have a strong sense of who they are.  A blogger’s ability to connect with their audience in that way is something very powerful and something that a score can’t measure.

What value do you think blogger collaborations have, as compared to traditional marketing?  

We work with bloggers for several reasons, but the overarching/obvious reason (besides the fact that our entire team is a bit blog-obsessed) is that bloggers really drive awareness of our brand, product and value proposition in an authentic way.  You can’t buy blog love – if they don’t truly like and want to use your product, it comes through in what they writeI think it feels more authentic – and more interesting!  There are a lot more opportunities to get creative and have some fun when we do blogger collaborations.  A blogger is a real person, vs. a model (though a lot of bloggers look like models!) with an opinion and sense of style.  One of my favorite parts of my job is getting the photos back from our Inspired Style bloggers – they always manage to style our sparkle in ways I would never imagine – it inspires me, and inspires our readers!

Do you have any tips for bloggers looking to engage with brands? How can they make themselves more attractive to brands? 

I can’t stress how important it is to have a great site, a great design, and a strong community and a following built up before you reach out to brands.  You must spend the time doing these things before you reach out to brands – if you don’t, you will not be taken seriously.  Know your numbers and your growth rates.  (If your uniques + Alexa score are on the lower side, but you are growing at 50% every month, that speaks volumes!)

A good media kit also helps.  I’ve received media kits from a few bloggers that were so incredibly good that we worked with them – despite the fact that their numbers were lower than what we would typically look for.  If you really want to work with a brand, you need to separate yourself from everyone else and do something to stand out!

Lastly, both as a blogger and in managing BaubleBar’s blogger outreach, I have found personally, that if you like a brand, and really want to work with them, the best strategy is to write about them.  Follow up with them by sending a note with a link to the post, and letting them know that you’d love to work with them down the road if they have opportunities for bloggers.  And ask to be added to their press list.  Trust me… the brand will take notice!

BaubleBar is one of the sponsors of this season’s IFBcon. (Purchase a ticket here, before they sell out!)

Stylish Beauty