Wonder how the magic of my blog comes together? Prior to starting my blog, I had no experience with photography, photoshop, or any graphic design for that matter. But I was passionate- I’m a writer, a true life-long lover of fashion, a trendsetter, and an artist. I had to start a blog to direct all of this energy to! Then I discovered Polyvore. I developed a real community there and in time, a pretty decent following. I gained my confidence, found my signature style, and then, launched my blog! I’ve found Polyvore to be such a useful tool for not only self-discovery, but what ended up to be the most important- a powerful blog tool.
How To Use Polyvore As a Blogging Tool:
1. Get Inspired. Polyvore is a serious community with inspiration everywhere. When I’m stuck in a writing slump, I grab a cup of coffee and explore Polyvore. You can search contests, trends trending on the site, the items of the day collection, and friends sets and item likes! I like to click around until something inspires me. Once it hits me, the rest falls into place and I can write from passion. I’m 11-months into blogging and I’ve yet to run out of ideas!
2. Create. Once you find your inspiration, you’ll want to create. You can create a set or a collection using the Mini-Editor, which is basically a very-user-friendly type of Photoshop. As you’ve seen on my blog, I prefer to style complete outfits using clothing only. But Polyvore offers a wide variety of items not limited to clothing. They also have home & beauty products, photography, backgrounds, color blocks, symbols, numbers, etc. There’s so many ways to create a million different styles of posts.
A few ideas: Day to Night Look, Top 5 Favorite Winter Coats, Save vs Splurge.
3. Share. When you publish your set, it will be shared with the Polyvore Community. But there’s now so many other ways to share your content on many different social networking sites. Polyvore sets are commonly found on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. Most importantly, you can share your content to your blog. Link your blog to Polyvore and it always shows as an option to share. There’s a few different layouts you can choose from so it is always customized. I always select to upload as a draft, so I can add my commentary and how-to style tips.
4.
Your Photos. Your Way. Ok, so it doesn’t always have to be about sets. Sometimes I go to events and take my own photos. A fun way to customize these photos is by clipping them to Polyvore and adding some creativity to them. As shown in my previous post
Lucky Magazine Movado ESQ One NYFW Party, I added some cool graphics and my own captions to my photos. I then put the photos into a collection on Polyvore and uploaded to my blog. When you upload a collection from Polyvore to your blog, it gives the cool layout option of adding a slideshow. I love this feature because it makes my post look professional (and not a visual overload). It’s similar to what fashion magazine’s, like
Lucky Magazine’s 10 Tips For The Perfect Sweater, post to their websites!
Add to the conversation! What Polyvore features do you find useful for blogging?
