A Look at Styledash

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Every once in a while I think it’s important to take a look at some interesting things that are going on in the non-seo, non-tech blogger space and see if you can learn something and get some fresh ideas. Today I’d like to take look at a weblogs inc. property Styledash.

Styledash is a combination clothing, fashion, beauty, gossip, shopping blog. Thank whatever deity you believe in that it isn’t one of those insufferable mommy blogs. While the basic page is one of those advertising saturated weblogs typical layouts, thankfully they publish full feeds so I don’t have to endure it everyday (there was lesson there in case you missed it).

Now one of the first things that’s important for shopping blogs is it has to be something consumers are interested in, buy regularly and has a wide variety of products. Now say you wanted to write a Kitchen remodeling blog, I don’t think it wouldn’t work as well. Sure there are new faucets, knobs, cabinets and kitchen styles to give you enough material, but how many consumers want to read about kitchen remodeling on a daily/weekly basis? Probably not enough to build a critical mass of RSS subscribers. On Styledash have a nice variety of products, they talk about shoes, dresses, skincare products and more. In fact they even do those nice shopping roundup posts I’m rather fond of.

To keep it from getting boring you’ve gotta dish a little every so often with things like models getting busted, cynical cat calling, and even a little political news gossip. We even get a little naughty humor in the underwear section.

Styledash is even trying to go social with a flickr photo pool and YouTube, although participation is a little low. According to Bloglines they have at least 167 subscribers, which is not horrible for blog that’s about 6 months old

So what can you take away from looking at Styledash? Well when choosing a topic for a blog make sure it’s something that has a reader base who wants to know something regularly. While there would be enough people to support a “wedding dress blog” they are only temporary “customers”, at some point they aren’t going to want to read what you are writing about any more. However there will always be people who want to read about shoes. If you’re running a shopping blog make sure you write enough non shopping content. I’d even suggest you need more non shopping content than shopping content. Write lot’s of tutorials and how to posts, link back to your shopping posts. Lastly don’t be afraid to try things in flickr, yourtube, myspace, or any other place that makes sense or looks interesting. You’ll never make a shot you don’t take.

Disclaimer

This has NOT been a sponsored review post, I was just trying to show you something I thought was interesting and might stir up some of those little grey cells, you cynical bunch you.

Sphere It

6 Responses to “A Look at Styledash”

1. Solomon Rothman Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 11:15 am

   Nice post, but I’m not sure about the significance of the bloglines subscription statistic. What percentage of your feed subscribers use blog lines?

2. Brian Thibault Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 11:42 am

   They should ditch the adsense and just do affiliate links in their posts. A lot of the items the “review” have affiliate programs.

3. Michael Gray Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 12:20 pm

   True enough I have about 1400 subscribers but bloglines says 211.

   I wondered about affiliate links doesn’t look like they are using them. possibly to keep journalistic integrity?

4. Brian Thibault Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 12:37 pm

   Yeah could be … although i’ve seen some good affiliate link cloaker php scripts out there they could use, and this site is really targeted toward people who don’t know what an affiliate program is, so i think they’d be okay.

5. Michael Gray Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 1:03 pm

   >affiliate link cloaker php scripts

   nope don’t know anything about those, nope not one bit (whistles so as to not attract attention)

6. Brian Turner Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 1:18 pm

   That’s actually a good idea - going to start something myself, I think.