Blogging is a great way to get your name out there and display your talents to the world. It's not only a way to share your personality, but it's also a great way to meet new people, share ideas, and allow people a glimpse into your mind.  Before you start creating your own blog, you should first ask yourself a few questions:

• Why do I want to create a blog? What is your true motivation? Is it to help launch your career, or is because you want a place to fill with your thoughts, likes and interests.
  
• What kind of blog do you want to create? Are you interested in posting cool pictures, writing product reviews or showcasing your personal style? There are so many types of blogs out there and it is important to know what type of content you want to publish.
  
• Why would anybody be interested in reading your blog? What can you write about? What will set your blog apart from the hundreds of thousands of other blogs?
  
• How much time can I set aside each day to blog? Blogs need to be consistently updated at least once a week, if not more. Blogging can become very time consuming. Think about whether you actually have enough time to contribute wholeheartedly to a blog site and make frequent posts.

When creating a blog, it's important that you choose the right blogging platform for you. Over the years I have bounced around from different platforms and have summarized some of the most popular blog hosts below. Trust me, choosing the right platform right off the bat will save you a lot of time.

• Blogger - Blogger, also known as Blogspot, is a Google-operated site that allows you to heavily customize your blog. I would recommend this for people with moderate web design skills. They also offer a lot of templates that you can search for and download online. I would contend that it is one of the top blogging platforms for fashion bloggers; everyone from The Satorialist to Mane and Chic uses it.
  
• Wordpress - Wordpress is another very popular blogging platform. I would recommend this for people with a high level web design knowledge. They do offer templates for those without, but they are not nearly as cool as the ones you can create if you know CSS. If you don’t know what CSS stands for, try the blogging platform below instead. Wordpress offers more customizing if you are willing to pay more for it. Both Blogspot and Wordpress are free, but if you are interested in creating your own domain, that will cost you extra.
  
• Tumblr - Tumblr is gaining popularity every day. It is a great platform for anyone who is not too technologically savvy because it offers really neat templates and essentially blogs for you. Trust me when I say it is the easiest out of the three. For my personal blog, I finally chose to use a Tumblr because it is more about me posting pictures or videos of things I like, and Tumblr allows me to do it quickly. It's also really easy to share images with other bloggers.

After creating and designing your blog, you'll need to promote it. Promoting your blog is vital to your site’s success. What is the point of spending time blogging if no one else reads it? Below are a few ways to promote your blog.

• Use social media - Share links with your friends on Facebook and Twitter every time you update your blog.
  
• Comment on other blogs - Read other blogs and comment on them. People will see the link for your site and will hopefully click on it. Plus, it's a good idea to create relationships with other bloggers.
  
• Include tags for all of your posts - A tag is a keyword or term that helps describe an item. For instance, if you posted something about New York Fashion Week then these words could be your tags: New York Fashion Week, Fashion, New York, Clothes, Lincoln Center, Mercedes-Benz, luxury, etc. Tags can be found again whenever people browse or search the web. The tags can lead people to your site.

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By: Anuli Akanegbu
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