How to find bloggers and columnists

[Grumpy_Carl]

Hi

But stuck on growing the community aspect of a fashion website i am developing. The site already has a comprehensive shop with 200,000 products in, a large article and video section in but it is lacking a little in fresh, up to date content.

The long term plan is to create a large forum and have a good level of interaction there but that will take a while as the site grows. To get the site growing I want to bring in columnist and bloggers to write about what they are liking in fashion, which famous people are wearing what and so forth. The trouble is I am having issues finding people. There are tons of people running their own wordpress sub domains with similar sites but not sure where I would find these kind of people. I would be looking to reward them with their labour by either paying per post or allowing them to put adsense etc on their pages.

Anyone else grown a community from the start, where did you find bloggers etc?

thanks.

Carl

[EGOL]

I need to establish a strong brand so being invited to write becomes an honour and people would jump at the chance.

Fantastic attitude.  You will kickass!

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks for the replies gents'. I guess I'll have to do it the old fashioned way of going out and reviewing fashion blogs and try to convince people that they should write a blog on my site instead of their own. I need to establish a strong brand so being invited to write becomes an honour and people would jump at the chance.

[NakulGoyal]

Carl It would be best to identify and create a list of those part-time bloggers and find their contact information, twitter, facebook etc and then reach out to them. You could also possibly acquire their wordpress/blogspot subdomains and have the content "move" to your site if it's relevant as well as hire them for future posts. I know wordpress.com hosted subdomains can be redirected to domains for a fee. I am not sure if blogspot has similar ability, guess not.

[DenverKelly]

Or check Odesk.com. You can filter providers by skill, cost, customer ratings and can find some decent authors if you check their portfolio.

[EGOL]

There are tons of people running their own wordpress sub domains with similar sites but not sure where I would find these kind of people.

Go out looking at these blogs, find one that has great writing, offer that person a job.  That gets you someone who has done the work for a long time - probably because they enjoy it.  If you post a job announcement for applicants it can be hard to tell what you are getting.