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!
Can your email address build your brand? Absolutely. Part of my job here at WeddingWire is to manage our email communications with our member base. When I look at an email list of vendors I’m constantly amazed with how many vendors still use email addresses from Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, and local ISP’s (ie - Verizon, SBC Global) as their business email address. What’s more amazing is that they have websites with their own personal URL. If you own your domain name, there’s no reason for you to not have an email address that uses your domain. Having your company name in your email address is branding and I’d say adds to your credibility. It’s an ultra competitive wedding market right now and these are the little things that speak to your credibility as a business owner. This is one of those things that potential clients won’t notice when you have your domain in your email address, but when you don’t, it definitely gets noticed.
It’s easier than ever to use your domain in your email address. If you host with a company like 1and1.com or GoDaddy.com, then you defintely have email addresses waiting for you. If you use a private company to manage your website, contant them about new emails immediately as they should have emails for you as well. Even if you’re a true do it yourselfer and host your website on a computer in your own home and only have a domain, Google Apps provides business solutions to manage email through Gmail while still maintaining email addresses that end in your domain and not gmail.com.
The bottom line is having your company in your email address is a must these days. Even you think too many people have your current email address to change, simply start replying to emails with your new one and people will have your and improved email address.
Another of the many factors that goes into search engine optimization is link building. One-way, incoming links to your site help determine the popularity of your site. So if you want to find out who is linking to your site, one popular way is to use Yahoo! Site Explorer. There you can simply type in your domain and it will return all links to your site. It will also return internal links so filter them out by selecting “InLinks” and then choosing “Except from this domain”.
If you haven’t submitted your website to the major search engines in a while (as a fews months) or better yet since the last time you changed the content on your site, I thought I’d just provide links to the major ones for your convience. Enjoy.