Wedding blogs have become a micro-industry of their own within the wedding industry in just a few short years. Blogging is an industry that includes several different business models, some lucrative and some not. It's also an industry that is shrouded a bit in confusion and fuzzy numbers, in part because it is so young.
Because of this, I am starting a monthly feature that will list the top 20 wedding planning blogs by unique monthly visitor count (this information is public, by the way, and I have cross-referenced it with both free and paid sources). Out of respect to the bloggers, I won't post the actual visitor numbers, just the blog's rank in the top 20.
I was inspired to share this information after having several media kits sent to me with claims that are blatantly untrue. To be fair, much of it is just a lack of understanding on the part of the blogger of how to accurately read the statistics that Google Analytics and other tracking sites provide. While these inflated numbers may serve the blog's business purposes, they do not serve the business purposes of the vendors submitting material for publication and who are providing the ad revenue many of the blogs depend on.
It's important to note that higher traffic does not necessarily result in more click-throughs for vendors who advertise or are featured in editorial. For example, The Bride's Cafe consistently delivers more qualified and convertible leads for vendors who are featured than some of the other higher trafficked blogs do for the same vendors with the same variables (day of week and time post goes live being among them). Have a strategy in place that works for your business before you submit content or sign an ad contract with any website or blog.
Wedding Planning Blogs - Traffic Rank as of August 2009
1. Weddingbee
2. Offbeat Bride
3. Style Me Pretty
4. OnceWed
5. Elizabeth Anne Designs
6. Vintage Glam Blog
7. Snippet and Ink
8. Wedding Chicks
9. 100 Layer Cake
10. Green Wedding Shoes
11. Junebug Weddings
12. 'I Do' It Yourself
13. DIY Bride
14. Brooklyn Bride
15. Oh So Beautiful Paper
16. Southern Weddings
17. The Bride's Cafe
18. Blue Orchid Designs
19. Ritzy Bee
20. With This Ring
Monday, September 21, 2009
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Welcome to 
For millennials, the generation that accounts for more than 70% of today's weddings and the first to grow up with the Internet, technology has done more than give unprecedented access to information; it has physically changed their brains on a microcellular level. What worked in bridal marketing just ten years ago is no longer effective because the way today's engaged couples think is actually different than couples of generations past. In 
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14 comments:
thanks for this! i love adding more to my daily blog read!
Awesome post! Can you talk a bit more about how you quantify that Bride's Cafe delivers more qualified leads and converts more of them for their advertisers?
Thanks for giving newbies like me a veritable top 20 reading list and something to shoot for!
Awesome ladies! I can't wait until I'm someday in that top 20 list.
Great post, As always!!!
In my personal experience stats from 3rd party sources are rather dubious, no matter what the companies' claims about their particular methodology.
I often peek at my own stats from various sources and find that they can vary widely from source-to-source (and month-to-month) as compared to what my own server logs record. Server logs, in my opinion, are the most accurate as they're collecting first-hand data instead of relying on some company's super secret proprietary algorithm.
My April stats, for example, were off by about 20,000 unique visitors between two of the 3rd party services I surveyed. That's a huge discrepancy, right? The next month, those same two services reported vary similar results.
It's important to take the reported numbers with a grain of salt. If, for example, you're looking to advertise with a blog and have questions about their numbers, ask what method(s) are used to collect that data. That's a valid question and the site owners likely won't have a problem sharing that info with you.
Just catching up on posts...glad we made the Top 20...thank you for this insightful post! :)
Khris, I agree that many of the third-party sources are inaccurate, but there are several that have been consistently close. It is also why I use several sources each month (and I've been tracking these and others for at least 6 months now), including a couple very expensive sources that I have to pay for.
this is a really great read and i hope to hear more about this stuff in future!
i am surprised that some of the blogs listed are in the spots they are though. I would have through SMP was more popular than say OBB for example
Thanks for the info, so interesting to see the order! Could you post their traffic rankings? Daily uniques, monthly, etc... I'd love to see it!!! One day hopefully we'll be on this great list!!
Thanks again for the Bloggers Bootcamp! Hope all is well.
xoxo
The Lolliladies
Fun post and good info....I'd love to see this updated on a monthy basis - so interesting! :) A+H
hi there,
to answer the lolliladies ...
we use google analytics to measure our traffic and here are the stats for weddingchicks.com for the month of august:
• 65,294 Visits
• 39,154 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 181,215 Pageviews
we have an alexa.com ranking of 109,204
hope this helps.
the wedding chicks
i am curious to know how you assess convertable leads and how as advertisers, we can assess that information as well?
Great to see you in New Orleans Liene!! This was such a useful post to help vendors know who to submit to! I'd be interested to see how they currently look since I'm sure things are always changing. Thanks!!!
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