DOROTHY’S BLOGGING TIPS
• Blog on a topic you are passionate about. It will motivate you to keep at it.
• Note down details whenever you can. The seemingly little things always make the most interesting reads.
• Just do it.
Dorothy set up her blog, drasticmeasures.blogspot.com, on April 12, 2005, to share her first day at fashion design school, having quit her job at an American investment bank. “I had been working for seven years when I enrolled in a part-time dressmaking course, and I found that I really enjoyed it,” says Dorothy. “It set me thinking about what I really wanted to do after hitting 30.”
She decided she wanted to be an entrepreneur. Having always been creative, she combined both dreams by setting up a fashion business. “I figured the longer I waited, the less likely I would be to do it,” she adds. “If not now, then when?”
To become equipped with the necessary skills and know-how, she signed up for a one-year course at a private fashion design school. The blog was initially created as a way of updating her friends on her new life. It also provided an opportunity for her to document her time at school, especially since “it was so exciting to be going back to school after all these years”.
And the response has been encouraging, reveals Dorothy, who is married. While most of the readers are her friends, there have been some who have simply stumbled onto her site and read it regularly.
On her own reading list are several blogs by her own girlfriends, which she enjoys as they put “a lot of feeling” into them.
Dorothy admits she was surprised at being able to sustain the blog for such a long time because “I didn’t expect to be disciplined enough”. But she was and now it has evolved into the setting up of her online fashion boutique, www.dottedlineshop.com, in October. It features elegant apparel such as cropped tweed jackets and polka-dotted pencil skirts.
Having achieved her dream, Dorothy refuses to get obsessed with consistently updating the blog. “I’m quite erratic,” she says, laughing. “I can go for a week without an entry, or put up several in a day. I blog only when I feel like it. “But now that the blog is linked to my store, I try to keep it interesting for visitors. There’s a lot going on, so there’re always things to blog about.”
|
