Most fashion and style bloggers are familiar with the online world and social media–after all, we’re posting our looks and our lives on the web on a regular basis. One way to complement your main blog is to use microblogging service Twitter, which offers an easy way to connect with online friends, network with people who have similar interests, broadcast to your audience, and keep up with events happening around the world–all in real time.

So how do you get people to actually follow you on Twitter?

The most important way is by engaging with other people and organizations using the service. If you’re new to the game or just want to increase the number of people following you, try a few of the following techniques:

1. Follow more people

This sounds simple, but when I first started using Twitter a few years ago, I just posted random stuff and wasn’t really following anyone. That’s not the point of the service. Making connections is a two-way street, so go forth and follow! Research shows that most people have a roughly equal number of follows and followers.

If you’re not sure who to follow, try these fashion lists:

• Twibes
• Listorious
• Mashable

You should also check out who other people are following–it takes a bit of time, but it’s a great way to find less well-known individuals who have a fun and interesting perspective.

2. Connect and respond

One of the great things about Twitter is the fact that two-way (and often three- and four-way) communication is so easy. If you see a tweet asking a question relevant to you, respond. Ask for help and give help when asked. Use Search.Twitter.com to find people talking about the subjects that interest you, and respond to them. Interaction is the most genuine, organic way to grow your following.

3. Be visible

Make sure your Twitter profile is part of your email address, your message board signature, on your business cards, linked to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media accounts, and prominent on your blog’s homepage. Include your Twitter handle (ie @StyleSample) so people can immediately see what you’re called, and link it to your Twitter page so people can easily find and follow you.

Add yourself to Twitter directories so people who are interested in similar topics can find you. Try:

• WeFollow
• Twellow
• Just Tweet It
• TweetFind
• TwitDir
• GeoFollow

4. Re-tweet

Use Search.Twitter.com or an application like HootSuite to see which of your tweets are the most popular, and then re-tweet them at various times during the day. This increases the possibility that different people–and new people, see your best tweets. Those people will then either re-tweet those posts, or start to follow you.

and, last yet most important:

5. Create and post good content

Even though it’s limited to 140 characters, Twitter is still considered blogging. Do what you do to keep your long-form blog fresh–create and post interesting content. Share article links, retweet quality posts, ask insightful questions, and don’t be afraid to include a bit of humor!

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

Many social media gurus say that a blog also serves as an online resume of sorts–and that’s pretty accurate. If you’re into visual arts like photography, illustration, styling, modeling, graphic design, or anything else that shows off your creative skills, a blog gives readers and potential clients insight into your personality and work ethic, as well as the caliber and quality of your work.

However, if you’re dealing with agencies, educational institutions, or more traditional clients, they may want to see your work presented in a more traditional portfolio style–well, as traditional as it can be online. If you find yourself in need of an online portfolio, here are some of the best options:

Free

Carbonmade

Carbonmade‘s no-frills setup makes it easy to get started, though customization is limited. For busy creatives, the site features fast and easy batch uploading, video hosting, and web analytics. The free service (called “meh”) allows you to upload 5 projects and 35 images, while the paid (“whoo!”) service costs $12 per month and includes room for up to 50 projects, 500 images, 10 high quality videos, and your own custom domain name.

Behance

One of the best known online portfolio sites out there, Behance allows you to create a free portfolio that incorporates text, image, video, and audio as well as embedded media from sites like Flickr, YouTube, and more.

Deviant Art

The other well-loved and well known online portfolio creation tool, DeviantArt‘s basic service allows you to use their wizard to create and publish your work. You can host up to 100 images for free, or pay for the Premium portfolio service for more benefits.

Coroflot

Coroflot includes a personal URL, traffic reports to see how many hits your portfolio gets, and unlimited file uploads. Bonus: if you’re available for freelance work, you can sign up for job alerts.

Create a separate page on your blog

If you want to keep everything in one place and set up a portfolio on your current blog or site, it can be as simple as creating a new page and uploading images of your work. This method will likely require more design and formatting work to look professional, so it helps to know basic HTML and CSS. You may choose to organize by project, client, or skill.

Paid

Dripbook

Dripbook makes it easy to create your portfolio using their drag-and-drop organizer, saves countless hours of tedious work by automatically reformatting and resizing your images, instantly synch updates to external sites, blogs, and social networking sites. The service costs $10 per month for a standard portfolio, but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Viewbook

The Viewbook platform makes it easy to you to create unlimited portfolio pages and albums to target to different audiences. You can publish galleries on blogs, social networking sites, and other websites. A standard portfolio costs $9/month and gets you up to 2500 images. You can also sell prints of your work (as a hard copy or digital file) through the site.

Design Taxi

Design Taxi is a paid service (9.99 or 19.99 per month), but it is a service. The platform allows viewers to export your portfolio to PDF (much more efficient than emailing a large file), and the company conducts portfolio reviews, publishes interviews with users, and sponsors events that showcase subscriber portfolios.

A few additional tips:

• Your portfolio should be a representation of your best work, so choose carefully. It’s not necessary to include everything you’ve ever done, as long as the overall body of work presented is a clear depiction of your style and skill.

• When including photography, illustration, or other visual work, use high-quality images and scans. You want your creative to look as crisp and clear as possible on screen.

• Make sure your portfolio is accessible (all-Flash sites are more difficult to index) and easy to navigate.

• Include a way for people to contact you. Either a contact form or an email address will work– both is best. The easier you make it for potential clients to get in touch, the more likely they will.

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

Sites we just can’t seem to stay away from:

Gary Pepper Vintage

Nicole of Gary Pepper Vintage is a hard-working entrepreneur who just happens to be gorgeous. Fair? No. Worth the read? Absolutely.

What I Saw Today

Designerman – aka Richard Haines – creates deceptively simple-looking pencil sketches of New York street style on his blog  What I Saw Today. You start to think “Hey, I could do that” until you realize it takes massive talent. Which we don’t have.

Couturious

Who doesn’t like styling models with designer clothing? Couturious is like old school paper dolls crossed with Cher’s computer wardrobe stylist in Clueless–completely addictive.

What are you lovin’ right now?

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

Informative fashion fodder, just in case you missed it:

• “Has our quest for convenience forever altered fashion?” Dumbing down American design (Part 1)

• Singapore’s Next Fashion Superblogger Contest: Cute bloggers, great style. And it’s sponsored by a mall! When will America catch on to this?

• Suddenly Print is taking the blog challenge seriously: Interesting perspective from a fashion journalist about the so-called showdown between print and online.

• We’re always interested in seeing what bloggers ’round the world are doing: Hong Kong’s hottest fashion blogger Cindiddy

• Gilt Groupe brings flash sales to the iPad: Online flash sale giant Gilt Groupe is keeping up with technology by introducing an iPad app. Tech-geek fashionistas rejoice!

• Speaking of technology, Go Try It On Will Be Your Wardrobe Consultant And Personal Stylist In One

• Interview with 15-year-old Danish fashion blogger, teen insider Nicklas Skovgaard. Way to make us feel old.

• Sure, you love fashion, but will you invest in it? New website allows anyone to invest $50 in young labels.

What were your favorite fashion stories this week?

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

In the current issue of Style Sample, Fajr of Stylish Thought wrote a great article about hosting your blog on your own domain. She recommends using WordPress (so do I–both this site and my personal blog run on WordPress), but it can be confusing if you’ve never purchased a hosting account or registered your own domain name. Here’s a great video tutorial series to show you the basics:

How to install WordPress from scratch (Part 1)

How to install WordPress from scratch (Part 2)

This video is a few years old, so make sure you download the most current version of WordPress. As of today, it’s version 2.9.1.

This guy uses Host Gator, but there are multiple site hosting companies to choose from. Some of the most popular are:
BlueHost
GoDaddy
Host Gator
1&1
DreamHost

Let me know if you have questions or need help!

~Tamia

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

You know how sometimes you’re cruisin’ the ‘net and you see something that triggers an idea for a post? You know how you subsequently forget the idea and the reference within 2.3 seconds of obsessively checking your Twitter feed for the 87th time? Well, there’s a better way to remember and document your inspiration!

Bookmark it!

Online bookmarking tools are a great way to store and save information and ideas for later reference, and are extremely helpful for those of us with short memories and even shorter attention spans. Here are three of the best:

Evernote

By far one of the most popular bookmarking and storage applications out there, Evernote allows you to “clip” links, webpages, online text, photos, documents, voice memos, and pretty much anything else you can think of, to your own personal account.

All tags and text are searchable–even images of printed and handwritten text! You can send notes to Evernote using Twitter, and there are also Evernote apps for your iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, and Android phone for clipping on the go.

Best for: Organizing your entire friggin’ life.

Instapaper

If you like simplicity, Instapaper is your best bet. Sign-up requires nothing more than your email address, and bookmarking is made easy by dragging the “Read Later” button to your toolbar. When you come across a page you’d like to bookmark, simply click the button and voila! Your link is instantly saved.

If you’d like to take it further, you can add folders to organize your saved articles, create an RSS feed of your bookmarked items (which you could add to your blog’s sidebar to share what you’re reading), and download the app for your Kindle or iPhone.

Best for: Simple, no fuss saving.

Bonus tip: If you use Google Reader, you can add your own Send To buttons for Instapaper and Evernote to share articles right from your RSS reader!

Read It Later

Read It Later allows you to save pages from your computer or phone using their easy bookmarking tool. With Read It Later, you can download your pages before disconnecting, so even when you don’t have internet access, you’ll still be able to read your saved pages!

You can add tags to categorize your entries, and it automatically integrates with Google Reader so you can save directly to your reading list. Read It Later is available as a Firefox extension or as an app for your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Pre.

Best for: Reading when you’re not connected

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

In issue #4 of Style Sample magazine, Valerie of Beauty and the Budget explained how to use Google Analytics to keep track of your blog stats. Tracking is extremely important as it’s important to know how many readers you have, what they’re looking at, how they’re finding your site, especially if you plan on advertising on your blog. While Google Analytics is one of the best known and most in-depth tracking applications, there are plenty of others, too!

StatCounter.com: Shows your most popular pages, the search terms visitors use to find your site, and the number of new vs. returning visitors.

GoStats.com:
Shows information about unique sessions, sessions per visitor, time spent on each page, and the path visitors take on your site.

SiteMeter.com: Provides detailed information about last 100 visitors to your site including which browser they used and their screen resolution, and visits by hour to see busy/slow periods each day.

AddFreeStats.com: Graphs search engine estimates, visits per visitor, and which Adsense links people click while on your site.

Most are as simple as signing up and registering your site, at which point you’re given a snippet of code to insert into your HTML. It’s easy and free and full of valuable information, so if you haven’t already, start tracking your blog stats!

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

MOD TV lets you live the glamorous life…at least for as long as the episode (and your imagination) allows. This podcast brings the exciting drama of the fashion world up close and personal. If you haven’t been so lucky as to sit front row at the hottest shows and mingle with supermodels (and let’s face it, most of us haven’t) then escape to the world where those dreams can become a reality.

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

Dear fellow fashion techies,

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

Keeping up with the latest goings on during New York Fashion Week can be exhausting, but uber-popular microblogging platform Twitter makes it easy to get the scoop on what’s happening in the streets and on the runways! Here are some of the best fashion insiders to follow for up-to-the-minute updates:

Styledotcom
Modelinia
Racked
Littley
Teen Vogue
FashionPulse
Fashionista_com
Lobese
The Moment
Village Voice
WendyBrandes
Colleen Nika
C0URTNEY L0VE
Harpers Bazaar US
Shoe York City
The Mad Fashionista
NY Thread
Paper Magazine
Everyone from Inside the Tents
Joe Zee

Those are some of our favorites…Post yours in the comments!

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

While roaming the ‘net, we came across a few high-tech(ish) sites that we thought would be of interest to fellow fashion bloggers. Here’s what we found:

Style
StyleRays is a site dedicated to creating an online community for users to share their sense of style for the world to see. It’s basically the Facebook picture function but instead of tagging your friends’ faces you tag what you’re wearing with a brief description. This is a great site to share your sense of style with other users, get feedback or look at other contributors. What I found most convenient about StyleRays is their sort functions in which you can search through photos by brand, style type, and genres and contributors. I will definitely start posting some pics of my own. ~David

Beauty
Daily Makeover offers fashion and beauty advice and lets you upload your picture to the site for a “virtual makeover” (free membership required). They also feature product reviews, beauty blogs (from the “Beauty Bloggerati” no less), and picks from their own editors. ~Tamia

Shopping
Sense of Fashion is a one-stop shop for those who are already well-acquainted with their personal sense of style and still want more.  It provides all the tools that are essential to evolving your look and elaborating upon your fashion knowledge in one pretty little well-dressed package.  Fashion blogs and trendy links aren’t all this fab site has to offer; “Fashion” ‘s sense surpasses others in that it’s like Ebay gone hipster.  A site for the true and eclectic fashionista, it eliminates the hours you would log on scrolling through possible junk dressed up as treasures, and just offers up the real treasures instead. ~Hayley

Who says geeks can’t be chic?

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post

According to their website, “Looklet is a brand new styling studio where you can combine every piece in our fashion collection to mix, match and create your personal looks. All clothes are real, selected by stylists, from real designers.”

What that really means is you get to play fashion stylist with a virtual model on a virtual set using real clothing, and will probably spend precious hours playing around with different combinations of all of the above. It’s sort of like your own private episode of Stylista, minus the faux-bitchy boss.

There aren’t as many clothing and accessory items to choose from compared to similar applications like Polyvore and the “model’s” pose gets a bit repetitive, but keep in mind that it’s still in beta and is being further developed every day. Check it out and see what you create!

Tweet This Post Post to Facebook Stumble This Post