tarting a blog is very important! I have some very specific tips to help you learn how to begin a successful fashion blog. Do these things and you could end up with invites to fashion week events, work with fashion companies, and speak at fashion blogging events! My first tip is very obvious, as illustrated by the photos below (my first outfit photos ever! It's hard to tell, I know). Make sure you find a basement room that is nearly empty save a small stack of unrelated items in the corner and terrible wallpaper. Make sure to bend over and look inquisitive and jaunty. Please never use natural light. Make it very difficult to see your actual outfit, keep 'em guessing, as they say!

If you don't have a nearly-empty-basement room, a dirty laundry room will suffice. Foot grabbing is advised, but not required. Place faux flowers in the foreground for styling, and make sure you don't have images big enough to actually see anything.

Posing is important. Here are some great starter poses straight out of Vogue!

Color coordinating is also suggested. Again, I must stress: the size of your images must be miniscule.

If all else fails and you can't find a dim basement empty room, or a dim dirty basement laundry room, just set your camera on top the toilet in a large, handicap size bathroom stall in your college art building. Always look unenthused.

Selfies are the perfect way to get outfit details.

If you find that you want to venture outdoors to take photos, find clashing shades of yellow to wear. Also: forget to put on makeup. Choose a location that looks like you may have just escaped from a serial killer's basement dungeon in the middle of the woods.

Keys to success. CLOSE UP DETAILS. REFRIGERATORS.

And above all else: TINY PHOTOS.

other tips:

- accidentally name your blog after half the tagline of a steakhouse where waitresses wear booty shorts.

- use myspace.

- sell stuff on etsy.

- stop selling stuff on etsy.

- wear as many prints at once as possible.

- wear moccasins.

- endeavor to take most photos with your webcam.

When I started blogging, not many people seemed to even know what a blog was, or why someone would do it. It was so casual and dorky, and a lot more like a diary. Nowadays it seems like people are

intimidated

to start a blog. People feel like they have to prepare, have professional branding, and a DSLR. The whole point of blogging is more commercial, more editorial, and more professional. They're almost like mini-magazines, and I can see how it would be intimidating to start a blog! If you'd showed me my current blog when I first began and said, "Do it like this! This is what a blog is!" I would have been intimidated and felt totally inadequate to be able to make something like that. I was just a quirky art student in college, blogging about my art projects, my boyfriend, music, and random crap I found inspiring. If you'd told me I had to post at least 3 times a week consistently, provide new, fresh, and relevant content in each post, had stunning, styled professional photographs, a knockout website design and catchy blog name, I don't think I ever would've started a blog. But it seems like that's what the message is these days. That's what a blog is, and if you want to blog successfully you'd better do it like that.

I don't think that blogging is, or should be, done one way. The best thing about blogging is that it's totally individualistic. Everyone's paths are different and blogging can create so many different things. You can be a 12 year old obsessed with fashion who ends up starting a wildly successful online magazine for girls before she's out of high school. You can be a graphic designer who shares her projects and whats inspiring her and end up designing a line for Target. You can be a girl who blogs about life and style and ends up getting married, having kids, and continues to share about life. You can find a passion for graphic design and start designing for friends and other bloggers, starting your own company to do so. You can quit your successful blog and go back to being a non-blogging mom.

There's no such thing as blogging wrong. Sure, if you want to become the next Sea Of Shoes, you might want to follow some guidelines, but you don't have to be Sea Of Shoes. You don't have to be A Beautiful Mess, or Glitter Guide, or Bleubird, or Design*Sponge. You don't have to be anything, especially when you start. You can have tiny photos and dorky diary-esque writing. You can wear tacky outfits, and pose like a crazy person. It's okay to be small. It's okay to not know about SEO or Google Analytics, and it's okay to not care that you don't know. You can start a blog without having to pay a designer a thousand bucks to make a fabulous website design. Really, you can.

There's a little saying out there that says, "Don't compare your beginning to someone else's middle." Most bloggers didn't start out with photos taken with $2000 cameras and lenses, closets full of courtesy items from designers, sleek site designs, and thousands of followers. Even

I

still find myself comparing my own story's beginnings to other people's middles and it's discouraging and keeps me from focusing on my own goals and how I want to achieve them. Sometimes when I look back at my blog's beginnings, compared with the blogging standards of today, I'm amazed that people followed along with my tacky little life and wacky personal style. Seriously, where did you all come from? I'm happy you're here, it's been a fun time here on the web with ya'll.

I know that it seems like everyone and their mom has a blog now, but I still believe blogging can be personal and fun and not all about becoming the next internet-famous-fashion-phenomenon. I still believe you can make your blog work for you, rather than your blog making you work for it. I found so much inspiration and passion through blogging, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. My dorky archives are back there for anyone to see. Without them I really don't think my life would be what it is today. Blogging was there for me through heartbreak, making dreams into reality, falling in love, finding new dreams, and it's all archived in this little space online.

I'm super excited to share that I'm going to be rebranding my photography website in mid-march with

Promise Tangeman

and the

GoLive team

. I was

so

inspired when I helped out at their workshop in Seattle in January, I was like, "YUP, sign me up for this immediately. KTHXBYE." Being around other women who are kicking ass and taking names in the creative world is something that gives me so much life. It's like creative crack and I want all of the hits (do you take hits of crack? You get the point). I want my blog and my photography studio to be more integrated, and photography has become a big part of they joy I have in blogging. Making beautiful images is something I

love

, and blogging is what made that passion blossom. I debated for a while about whether or not to drop "Delightfully Tacky" as the blog's name. Was it holding me down? Did it box me in? Does it even describe me anymore? Also, Hooters? I was convinced for a long time that it was time to drop it and move on to something else. But lately every time someone asks what my blog name is and I say "Delightfully Tacky" they chuckle a little and get a kick out of it and I'm reminded of how much those two oxymoronic words have influenced my life. I remember sitting in my parent's kitchen, laptop atop my lap, signing up for a blogspot account and the name came to me instantly. Unlike pretty much everything else I've ever named, it was as if it named itself. It's become a name that I'm introduced as. In some ways

I

am Delightfully Tacky, and the blog is just named after me. Heck, for a long time I didn't even share my real name on the blog!

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Anyway, I think DT

might

be stuck, but I'm excited about freshening things up. I'll be giving this little space a new look at the same time as

Liz Morrow Studios

' launch so it'll be freshness all up in this interwebs, y'all! I've always done smash-and-grab design changes, never fully planned, usually just spur of the moment. Truth be told, this design never really got fully finished out, and I suppose that matches how blogging felt this past year. 2014 was a strange transition year that had me feeling all over the place. This year I feel so much more focused and I'm excited about leaning into that. I'm still a few weeks out from the new site launch, but I'm finishing up a brand new photography for blogging guide which will launch with the site, but I'm giving you guys a little sneak peek (fo' free!). Sign up below to get the peek in your inbox, and you'll also be getting some special previews of the new design, awesome giveaways that are happening along with the launch, and discount codes to buy the guide when it goes live!