This is part 2, as promised, of my series about how to start a fashion blog. If anyone is wondering what my credentials are….I’ve been blogging for over two years, I’ve had professional blogging gigs with Oxygen Media and I also have experience with search engine optimization and internet marketing. Today I’m going to cover posting strategies.

How Often Should I Post?
This is one of the biggest questions I hear coming from people, no matter what the subject of the blog is. And your blogs topic has a lot to do with how often you update. For most blogs, the bare minimum is about three times per week. For fashion blogs, I would recommend at least five times a week, once per day. If you were running a celebrity gossip blog or something news based like that, it would be something like 5-7 posts per day. But we’ll just focus on fashion blogs! Keep in mind that the more you update, the more invested your readers will be. They will also be more likely to return on a regular basis.

Anatomy Of A Post
In my opinion, fashion blogs are some of the best blogs out of any topic because it’s a great mix of visuals and text. Visuals are extremely important for blogs; they draw the reader in, and help to break up text. People in general are turned off by tons of continous text, and can easily develop “tl;dr syndrome” (too long; didn’t read). So having a photo accompany every 1-2 short paragraphs of text is a great thing. And if you have a lot to write at one time, be sure to break it up and leave spaces in between.

And as important as photos are, text is pretty much the bread and butter of your blog. Whereas human visitors love to see pictures, search engines are crazy over typed word. You want search engines like google to index your website and send traffic to your website, right? The search engines are attracted to pages with keywords in them, so be sure to sprinkle keywords that sum up your blog and the post in particular in each post. Put them in the title of your post too; you always want a catchy headline.

Establishing A Tone
The tone of your site is very, very important! This is all about making your personality come shine through what you write. This is especially important when covering news, because readers can go any where on the web and find the same information. With a fashion blog, your taste will sell your site to certain audiences, in part at least, but don’t neglect your voice. Celebrity gossip blog Pop On The Pop is an example of a blog with a very unique and entertaining tone; it only took a few months for this site to gain in popularity, and I think her tone is the biggest reason why it took off so quickly.

Getting The Readers Involved
Making your blog interactive is an extremely important. All blogs already have a comments function built in; that’s a great start, but it doesn’t end there. Give your readers an incentive to use the comments section by asking a question, starting a discussion or posting something a bit controversial or debatable. For example, The Purse Blog has a weekend discussion post and their topics aren’t always 100% relative to the subject of the site, but you know what? It gets their readers talking, and it creates a community within the site.

Another way to increase interactivity is to get a WordPress plug like Democracy Plugin from WP Plugins. This lets you easily embed a poll into a post or in the sidebar. Now all you have to do is be creative and come up with a few things for your readers to vote on!

Next Up: How To Make Your Fashion Blog Popular