Pictures are a very important addition to building your storefront on the WeddingWire network (and not just for photographers)! They serve as a means to showcase your business to today’s wired brides, establishing a connection with them beyond words. Therefore, it is key to make sure they look good! I found this great list of the top online photo editing sites that you can use to edit your photos and even spice them up with different backgrounds or effects. And if you are a novice like me when it comes to photo editing, you might find these sites very helpful!
Here’s a few of my top choices:
DrPic.com- Upload your images to this free image editor, utilize the numerous tools and then save your work to a disk or to the Web in whatever format you choose.
FlauntR.com- This site is big on backgrounds, self-created magazine covers and basic editing tools. You can even purchase prints of any of your designs.
FotoFlexer.com - A completely free editor with numerous tools such as distortions, layers, effects, smart scissors and much more.
Now that the election is finally over and it’s back to reality, the economy is still struggling. Those in the wedding industry have been relatively fortunate that the wedding industry tends to be more resilient compared to many other industries (think auto industry). That being said, as a business owner it’s still a time for compassion as we all need a little help from time to time. I was reading Seth Godin’s blog this morning and he wrote an insightful, two sentence post that I thought speaks volumes:
“Your customers and employees and investors will remember how you treated them when times were tough, when they needed a break, when a little support meant everything.
No one in particular will remember how you acted during the boom times.”
I thought this was a good quote for the current state of the union. This will mean different things to different people, but as business owners, the little things you can do for your customers holds the potential to help your business.
Ashley Conway and Katie Peck of the WeddingWire team traveled to Dallas this past weekend for the Great Bridal Expo, a bridal showcase that hosts numerous shows across the county. There was a great turnout at this year’s show, which took place at the Fairmont Dallas Hotel. Ashley and Katie had a great time meeting the local vendors who attended the show, including Robin Brogan from Your Perfect Wedding by Di Fiori and Shezad Manjee from Hakim Sons Films, who are both featured vendors on the WeddingWire Network!
Check out some pictures from the show:
Ashley Conway and Katie Peck (WeddingWire) showcased our booth, handed out t-shirts, rings, and local vendor guides!
Robin and KT (Your Perfect Wedding by Di Fiori) got in the WeddingWire spirit and modeled our t-shirts
Shezad (Hakim Sons Films) stopped by to say hello
Ashley met local photographer Jory Cordy
A big thanks to all the vendors and brides who stopped by the booth! We look forward to seeing you again!
We traveled to NYC earlier this week to attend two great events:
Martha Stewart Weddings Bridal Market Event
The Martha Stewart Weddings team hosted their annual Bridal Market event this past Monday at the Tavern on the Green. We were invited to attend and network with guests! The event was beautiful and we had a great time socializing with the Martha Stewart Weddings team and attending guests.
Here are a few pictures:
Carine Halabi (Carine’s Bridal Atelier), Darcy Miller (Martha Stewart Weddings), Lynn Carter, me, and Megan Hermeling (WeddingWire)
Vanessa Holden and Darcy Miller (Martha Stewart Weddings), Mrs. Bee (Weddingbee), Lee Wang and Lynn Carter (WeddingWire)
The Wedding Salon
We attended the Wedding Salon bridal showcase on Wednesday, where the latest wedding trends were displayed. The Wedding Salon bridal showcase brings together the leading vendors and the top spenders in the wedding industry. This year’s show took place at beautiful venue, The Prince George Ballroom, and showcased a variety of great vendors. We even got to meet one of our featured NYC officiants, Rabbi Andrea Frank!
Take a look at some pictures:
Rabbi Andrea Frank (A featured vendor listed on WeddingWire) and Katie Peck (WeddingWire)
Page titles are essential to your web pages for a several reasons, which include SEO and usability. Page titles are one of the first items that search engine spiders crawl when indexing your site, so page titles need to be relevant to the content on that page. Additionally, that page title appears in search engine results so if you want click throughs, it needs to be relevant. Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal details 7 criteria for effective page titles that are good to keep in mind when building or updating your website:
page title should be short and concise (unless you want it’s broken at the end);
each page title should be unique and the unique part should go first (if a visitor keeps several tabs from the same open, he should clearly see what each tab is about);
it should be catchy (to communicate an effective message);
page title should conform to the page purpose (e.g. calling to action or informational);
page title should be based on your keywords (for Googlebot to understand what the page is about);
page title should be focused (don’t try to include all your keywords in the title the home page);
page title should be semantically correct (Google is likely to apply some kind of semantic analysis to titles to make sure they are not spammy).
This past Friday we traveled to Cleveland for the last Running of the Brides event of 2008. The turn out was great, in fact it was double what they had last year. A record was almost shattered here as well. The first sale of the morning happened at 8:16am, the record for quickest sale is 8:14am. Finding a dress inside of 20 minutes is simply amazing considering how long it takes most women to find their dress.
There are some photos from the event on our Flickr page. We also had Billy J Disc Jockeys to entertain the crowd starting at 6am. There’s nothing like some electric slide at 6:45 in the morning!
The My Wedding in a Week contest in Philadelphia, presented by My 106.1 and WeddingWire, concluded last Friday as the winning couple, Lisa and Victor, walked down the aisle of the Columbus Ballroom in the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing, and then celebrated with friends and family over a Champagne Brunch. Starting on October 3, the winning couple had 7 days to plan their wedding live on the radio with WeddingWire and our team of professionals from the Philadelphia area, including The Queen of Hearts Wedding Consultants.
All and all the event was a huge success thanks to My 106.1 and the team of professionals who worked very hard (and very quickly) to make Lisa and Victor’s dream come true! WeddingWire would like to sincerely thank everyone at My 106.1 and the participating vendors for making this event a complete success from start to finish!
I’m sure many of you hear the same thing I do: the wedding industry is recession proof. And indeed there is some truth to that because people will always want to get married. But as the news seems to get worse each and the stock market continues it tumble downward, being prudent would be a smart idea right now. As a wedding vendor you have to consider your budgets carefully and as many of you start advertising on the search engines PPC ad systems, competition will drive the cost up over time. The folks over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog noted 6 strategies to consider right now that I think are worth paying attention to:
Haveclear economic targets. Be exact with how much traffic you want or will spend. Don’t be vague right now.
Use strong bid management tools. If you outsource your PPC, stay in touch with your account manager. If you do it yourselves, keep a watchful eye on it. Don’t just let your PPC campaigns sit around.
Shift ad dollars to stronger channels. Consider all your advertising options and use the methods with the greatest return, which may mean putting more into paid search and less into bridal events for instance.
Seek capped agency or technology fees. Just make sure if you outsource your PPC campaigns, that fees don’t eat into your margins too heavily.
Protect your bottom line first. Revenue targets set in 2007 may not work right now and you’ve got to be constantly adjust your targets right now. Protect your bottom line, what that mean a year ago is probably different right now.
Stay calm. Don’t over react and don’t be afraid to be creative with your advertising and constantly be testing new ad units.
Last week WeddingWire’s CEO, Timothy Chi, and CMO, Sonny Ganguly, joined many of you at the 5th annual Wedding MBA convention and presented on the best ways to reach today’s wired bride.You might remember them best as “Harold and Kumar”!So many of you asked to have “Sonny’s Top 10 Places to Surf ” that we thought we would just share with everyone:
1. MySpace - 71,486,821
• Build a profile for your business
• Browse through your network and connect
2. Facebook - 42,777,397
• Create a fan page for your business
• Build a wedding group or participate
3. Ning - 3,757,563
• Build your personal niche social network
4. WordPress - 134,875,738
• Create your blog and build incoming links
• Participate and comment on wedding blogs
5. Twitter - 1,723,476
• Create a following with your micro-blog
6. YouTube - 73,537,222
• Showcase your business with video content
7. Flickr - 22,511,915
• Create online photo albums and tag your pics
8. Digg - 21,632,429
• Build incoming links to the content on your site
9. Upcoming.Yahoo.com - 3,419,626
• Broadcast your events and the places you will be
10. Answers.Yahoo.com - 23,386,964
• Share your expert knowledge with brides-to-be
Share which of these you are currently using and feel free to post links to your pages with your comments!
Well maybe not all americans, but Cone Inc, a communications company, released the results of a survey they did of 1092 people earlier this month about their social media habits that I found on Search Engine Watch. The results of the survey indicate that 93% of the participants say that a company should have some sort of social media presence. Additionally, 85% of the same group say that the same companies should be interacting with them on social media outlets. Other findings include:
When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:
Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
Companies should market to consumers (25%)
It’s an interesting study that supports the common notion that social media should be a part of your overall marketing plan. Whether it’s a Facebook Fan page, a Myspace profile, a Flickr profile, or a company blog, customers today have many places to visit on the web today so being where they are is going to be key to attracting new business.
What social media avenues are you using to reach today’s brides? What has or hasn’t worked? What are your barriers to using social media if you don’t already?
1. 