Developing an Effective Publishing Strategy

When you're submitting an event to a wedding blog for publication, it's important to recognize what being featured on a specific blog is going to do for you. Many people think of publishing their weddings online in terms of how many couples are going to call them after seeing their work. While that is certainly a benefit of being published, it's not the only one. Here are three things to consider when developing your online publishing strategy:

Getting Clients From Being Published
The number one and the most obvious reason wedding professionals want to be published on blogs is so that the blog readers will click back to their site and hopefully hire them for their services. If this is your goal, then keep in mind that high amounts of traffic don't always equate to high amounts of click-throughs back to your site. Some smaller blogs with super loyal and highly-targeted followings deliver a much higher return on clicks and subsequent bookings than their more trafficked competitors. Bigger isn't always best when it comes to this particular goal.

Increasing Your Brand Visibility From Being Published
Perhaps your goal is to be able to have anyone anywhere say "oh yes, I've heard of that company," regardless of whether they're going to hire you or not. While this may not translate to short-term sales, it does have several long-term benefits, including making it easier to expand into other markets (as opposed to starting from scratch because no one knows your name), helping build a brand platform for book or television deals, and so forth. Getting editorial features or advertising on highly-trafficked sites are helpful in accomplishing this goal because more people are seeing your name and work.

Increasing Your SEO From Being Published
One of the most overlooked benefits of getting your weddings published online is that the links in the editorial features help your site with search engine optimization (or in other words, helping you get to the first page of Google). A highly-ranked site will give you more search engine credit than a lower one (most often the newer blogs), but the lower ones help, too. Plus, even though the feature with the inbound links to your site may not stay on a blog's front page for very long, it does stay on the site forever, quietly building more benefits for you over time. The "non-exclusive" publication option on Two Bright Lights is great for this arm of your publishing strategy.

Developing an effective online publication strategy can help your business beyond just the immediate sale or booking. Create a plan that is multi-faceted so that you can incorporate all three of the goals above rather than focusing on just one aspect.