I often get questions about the technical part of the blog like how I’ve built it, what camera equipment I use and how I make money of the blog, so I’ve decided to share all my secret with you, all in one post. I’ll go through EVERYTHING – it will be a smorgasbord of all my up until now blogging secrets and I hope it will come in useful to you ♥
Let’s start at the beginning
I don’t blog from a blog platform like blogger or blogspot. I operate on my own from my own domain where my site is built by moi – the result of something you’ve created yourself will always be better, and you don’t have to add any ugly ads someone else is making money of either.
1. The property:
I chose one.com to host my domain because it’s Europe’s biggest hosting company and the prices are far better than any other for what a blog like mine needs. I have done quite a bit of research regarding hosts and I feel confident one.com is the best choice for a blog like this. It’s really easy- choose your domain, choose your disk space – that’s it. One.com has an incredible chat suport feature and they will help you with everything 24/7 – incredibly useful! I have the 60GB package.
2. The house
The house of your domain will a software called wordpress.org (NOT wordpress.com), and this is what allows you to write posts and pages once it’s installed onto the domain. Once wordpress is installed you can also install plugins which can do anything from displaying social media icons in the sidebar to apply a spam filter to the comments. WordPress has an extensive forum where you’ll find answer to anything you’ll need.
Plugins I recommend: Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Comment Luv, Jetpack by WordPress.com, Pinterest Pin it Button for Images, Shareaholic, Social Media Widget, W3 Total Cache, Wordfence Security.
3. The design
In wordpress you can install a theme, this is how your blog will look like. The theme I use is called Thesis 1.8, and it’s hands down the most brilliant theme a novice can have! It’s super easy and highly customizable which means you can make the blog look exactly how you want without needing to pay lots of money to web developers, and as far as I know it’s the only theme that lets you change literally ANYTHING you want. By doing it all yourself you also get the opportunity to change something exactly when you want to, and not having to depend on anyone else.
I’ll give you an example of the Thesis brilliance. With traditional themes you often have to write a geek code of the header image you want to use, and implement the code itself through a file transfer protocol. Pretty boring stuff. Running The Thesis Theme however, you can upload your header image through the built in header uploader right in the dashboard of wordpress! Thesis also has built-in SEO to make sure your blog/site ranks as high as possible in search engines making sure you get as many people clicking through to your blog as possible, something that would require quite the work to accomplish with a theme that doesn’t offer this. Thesis also have an extensive forum where people are really friendly and helpful!
Now that you have the blog built up we can talk about the content and how to make money off all your hard work which I bet is a lot more than you initially thought? ;)
1. First impression
The first impression of the blog is incredibly important, by the first three seconds your visitor will decide wether to hang around or leave and of course we want to make them want to stay! Obviously the design and look of the header will play a big part, but good quality photos in your posts are probably just as important. The wider the photos the better imo, so I use 900 px.
2. Lights, camera, action!
Now, let’s talk about the equipment. I use a Canon 7D and I have three lenses I like to use. For most pictures I use a Canon EF-S 17-55mm f2.8 IS USM Lens, or Canon EF 50mm – f/1.4 USM Lens which is great for close ups and details. For very teeny tiny details I use a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 USM Macro Lens. I’m lucky to have a boyfriend to take photos of me a few times a month, the rest of the time I use a tripod with a remote control. For editing I use Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Mac) (for pc: Adobe Photoshop CS6 ). Again, you will find lots of tutorials online and it will take time to learn but it’s worth it :)
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f2.8 IS USM Lens
Canon EF 50mm – f/1.4 USM Lens
Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 USM Macro Lens
3. Bring in the dough!
Affiliate
Affiliate links are links generated with a personal code which means you’ll get a few percentages of what your readers buy through clicking your links. First step in becoming an affiliate is to promise yourself to never include links because you want to make money! I recommend writing from your heart and when you’ve finished your post you can read through and see if anything of what you’ve written can be linked to. Your readers trust in you is worth far more than anything a link to a false recommendation will give you, even if someone is willing to pay extra for it. Readers are smart, they will see through it and stop visiting your blog and without readers you don’t have a blog. Most online stores have an affiliate program, so there really is no need to link to products you don’t whole heartedly recommend.
Which affiliate networks to sign up to
To become an affiliate you need to sign up to affiliate networks hosting the programs, there you will find your personal code.
- Affiliate Window is the one I use for beauty products. This network has a great overview graf which let’s you easily see how your links are doing. Its also got a deeplink generator which is quick and easy to use as well.
- Skimlinks I use for everything else. Skimlinks is really easy to use as it automatically turns every single link on your blog to an affiliate link if the product is found in one of their merchants stores, meaning it does all the work for you!
- Recently I discovered an affiliate network especially for fashion bloggers with lots of useful features, and so far it’s the most rewarding affiliate network I’ve been part of. I’ve probably doubled my income since I started using it. They only accept bloggers through invites, so if you’re interested pop me an email with a link to your site as well as your first and last name through the contact form in the nav menu and I’ll send an invite ♥
Recently I discovered an affiliate network especially for fashion bloggers with lots of useful features, and so far it’s the most rewarding affiliate network I’ve been part of. I’ve probably doubled my income using it. They only accept bloggers through invites, so if you’re interested pop me an email with a link to your site through the contact form in the nav menu and I’ll forward you an invite ♥
Co-operating with brands
Writing about a brand that you’re not an affiliate of might even get you some money too, if they like your review they might contact you to work closer with you which is not only rewarding but a lot of fun as well as you get a closer relationship with a brand you really like and learn a lot along the way. That’s how I started working with Locks & Bonds.
Ads
An overload of ads is never a good idea, but if you spend a lot of time on your blog it’s only fair you get some income from it. A few ads which blends in nicely with your blogs design is ok. Check up AdSense, the google ad network. You can also become a member of a blog network which means they pay you a certain amount per visitors in return for you to place their ads on your blog but often the ads are huge and they make more money of the ads on your blog than what they pay you.
That’s all there is to it folks, please leave your advice in the comment section so we can all help eachother out! :)
Good luck and have lots of fun with it!! :D
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