DJ Rockin Steve

by Georgina Clatworthy

I came across a bride the other day who had a neat idea for her wedding planning and her wedding budget! She decided she would do all her planning online via a blog and set up advertising links as she went along. Basically, she would blog about how her online wedding planning was progressing and plug products and services for those vendors she was using along the way.

It’s a neat idea, especially as those vendors were getting some free advertising and she was getting a reduction on her wedding costs! So could this work for you? Well I have to say this is the first time I come across something like this, although I dare say she is not the first to try it. But with more and more brides embarking on online wedding planning (and most of you will probably be doing more planning online than you realize) why not make it work for you in financial terms.

Setting up a blog is easy and free; and many other brides like to read about how others are progressing, what their ideas are and who they are booking with. When you meet with vendors, venues and suppliers mention that you run an online blog site and ask about giving them some free advertising in return for a discount on their products or services.

Point out that you have a regular following of brides and that your site would essentially be providing referrals to them and potentially more business.
Granted your blog may not be the biggest site online when it comes to wedding planning, but many blogs do attract a regular core of readers and potentially many brides-2-be looking to use the same businesses you have. Don’t restrict your efforts to just bricks and mortar businesses either, make sure you ask any online vendors too, such as those selling wedding favors or bridal accessories. Also consider contacting other wedding related businesses, even if you are not using them personally. Many have affiliate schemes whereby you will be paid a commission for sending business their way who then go on to make a purchase.

The bride, whose blog I stumbled across, had had some success quite early on by negotiating a deal with her wedding photographer. She got a good price on her wedding photographs and his company got some free advertising. I also noticed that although she had only been running the blog for a few weeks she already had a healthy number of subscribers to the RSS feed and plenty of positive comments on her posts. Some proof indeed that she may just make the concept work and save herself money in the process.

You can have a blog site up on this forum and running in just a couple of minutes and it may surprise you how quickly visitors find you. Try to publish posts every couple of days to keep readers interested and to keep your advertisers happy! It can also be worth doing a little SEO (search engine optimization) research to help you realize the full potential of what you are doing and to place your site high up in the search engine pages.