Wedding Blog Advertising — Does It Work?

Photo credit: Rob and Sarah Gille­spie. Click to see the full wed­ding feature

How­ever…

Here it comes! Hot on the heels of that resound­ing ‘Yes’, comes the qual­i­fier: some­times. And if you get it right. And that’s infi­nitely harder to define and explain and share — much as I’d like to share the secrets of wed­ding blog adver­tis­ing with sup­pli­ers on a daily basis, it sim­ply ain’t that simple.

For months, years even, I’ve wanted to write a com­pre­hen­sive blog post about wed­ding blog adver­tis­ing: how to make it work, what you have to do to get it right, who should adver­tise on blogs etc. Can’t do it. There’s too much to talk about and frankly too many ques­tions with com­pli­cated answers!

So I’ve decided to talk about wed­ding blog adver­tis­ing in stages. A series of lit­tle blog posts which will share tips and answer ques­tions one at a time. I hope they’ll help you — they’ll cer­tainly make you think about adver­tis­ing your busi­ness on a wed­ding blog.

1. Wed­ding blog adver­tis­ing works if you push it!

If you decide to adver­tise on a wed­ding blog, you can’t just send your ad and leave it at that. You have to make your blog adver­tis­ing an active part of your wed­ding busi­ness promotion.

It’s not only up to you, of course. The wed­ding blog­ger has to play a role: shar­ing your face­book updates and blog posts when they can, for exam­ple. Retweet­ing your updates, keep­ing in touch — help­ing you share your news with their wider audience.

But as a wed­ding busi­ness owner you should help your wed­ding blog advert get noticed by:

• Shar­ing your lat­est wed­dings, shoots and projects with the blog­ger: ask­ing for them to be blogged
• Com­ment­ing on blog posts, being an active part of the com­mu­nity on the blog you’re affil­i­ated with
• Offer­ing quotes and opin­ions for blog fea­tures, even guest blog posts on sub­jects you’re pas­sion­ate about
• Post­ing on the blogger’s face­book page, shar­ing your images and com­ments on as many posts as you can
• Gen­er­ally keep­ing in touch, even with quick emails or mes­sages on twit­ter — this is espe­cially impor­tant if you’re adver­tis­ing on a blog with many spon­sors: you’ve paid for the space, and it fol­lows that you’ve paid to get traf­fic, enquiries and orders from your ad — so if it’s not work­ing, use the blogger’s exper­tise to work it harder! Ask for more — more space, more men­tions, more images… what­ever you can get for your money!

My research, inbox and face­book / twit­ter mes­sages all tell me that wed­ding busi­nesses who do all of these get more from their blog adver­tis­ing than those who don’t. Do you?

Claire x