Is Blogging Your Wedding Business a Step Too Far?

Aside from wedding photographers who usually do blog, it seems to me the last step in the flurry of social media activity required from a wedding business these days is a business blog. Could it be that we're all so time-pressured now a blog would be a step too far?

How wedding businesses will use social media in 2012

Think back five years or so: we were all doing the same things, weren't we... if you're anything like me your wedding business keeps you busy from dawn till dusk in the peak wedding season, and then when it gets a bit quieter you're still busy promoting your business via the wedding magazines and any other way you can think of.

Essentially, making your wedding products takes up a lot of time. Running a wedding business is a lifestyle more than a simple job. And the demands of twitter and facebook - even Pinterest - came on top of everything we already had on our to do lists... everyone was doing it; it's difficult to take the decision not to, right?

But blog­ging? It seems a lot of wed­ding busi­nesses either haven’t con­sid­ered blog­ging, or have seen it and thought “no way, I need to sleep some­times!” Is it worth blog­ging your wed­ding busi­ness then, or can you really afford not to?

My thoughts in favour of wed­ding busi­ness blogging -

1. A blog is a great way of show­cas­ing your lat­est news / designs / events with­out hav­ing to update your website
2. Blog­ging needn’t take up the time you think it will. I write my wed­ding cal­lig­ra­phy blog in advance: writ­ing posts for a day, four times a year or so, and sched­ul­ing them as updates. Four days a year, in total!
3. Google is tak­ing more and more notice of reg­u­larly updated sites — ie blogs. If you’re not updat­ing your web­site reg­u­larly, blog­ging will bring you traffic
4. Blogs are a net­work­ing tool as well: you blog, you com­ment on some­one else’s blog, they com­ment on yours, you do this more and more and widen your inter­net reach — and now Google is look­ing at inter­ac­tion and social search when rank­ing sites too
5. Time man­age­ment is key: could you use some of the time you’re spend­ing on twit­ter and face­book to update a blog instead?
6. Begin­ning a blog isn’t as hard as you might think. And it can be free — visit WordPress.com when you have 10 min­utes free and just try it!

Against wed­ding busi­ness blogging

1.  If you’re get­ting enough orders / earn­ing enough money and you don’t fore­see this chang­ing any time soon, there’s no need to try and improve things by blogging
2. If you strug­gle to man­age your time and your social life or fam­ily life is suf­fer­ing, it’s prob­a­bly more impor­tant to give your­self some ‘me time’ than get into the habit of swear­ing at WordPress
3. Some peo­ple are really ner­vous about blog­ging. If you find the idea stress­ful, now isn’t the time. You prob­a­bly use face­book already — it’s another way to pro­mote your busi­ness in the same con­stant, fast-moving way as a blog.

What do you think?

Do you have a wed­ding busi­ness blog? Are you con­sid­er­ing writ­ing one? If you have an opin­ion on the sub­ject, or a ques­tion for me about blog­ging a wed­ding busi­ness, don’t be shy — share your thoughts by com­ment­ing below

I have a guide to blog­ging a wed­ding busi­ness due for pub­li­ca­tion soon — sign up to Eng­lish Wed­ding blog updates so you won’t miss the launch date.