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Why Do You Blog?

June 29, 2010 By 1 Comment

I create blog-sites for a lot of different clients. They all have different reasons for doing it.

At the root of why most of them blog is for marketing, but not always. I have had a few that want to keep their website but add a platform that they have control of themselves. A lot of them understand that they can just replace the old site with a blog-site and maximize all there efforts into one url.

If you are only blogging because someone told you that you have to then you are bound to fail. You will end up resenting the effort you have to put into it and your writing will show it.

The best blogs come from people that have a genuine desire to share. They want to share their knowledge, or the cool things they find, or brag on their friends, or tell a story that is evolving over time. The best bloggers love what the have to share, they are connected to it and in turn to their audience. You can’t fake that.

I run across clients from time to time that over think it. As a consequence they never post, they are paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong.

Here is the best advice you will ever get to get you started:

Think of your blog as a conversation with a friend. That friend that you can talk to for hours.  That friend that values your opinion even if the disagree with you. That friend that shares your passions. Then write ever blog post as if you were talking to them.

Write in the same tone you would use with them. Think of your readers as your perfect pen pal.

Then just enjoy the ride.

Once you have found your voice, then you can worry about all the geeky details.

Filed Under: Inspiration, Personal Coaching, Rants & Raves Tagged With: ,

Two Schools of Thought on Social Media Posting

January 26, 2010 By 2 Comments

There are two distinct schools of thought on how to handle how you use social media: short and frequent versus longer and less

social media graphic

social media graphic

often. Is there really a difference and which style is for you.

The conventional wisdom for blogging was that the best strategy was to put up short posts on a daily basis. Limit yourself to 500 words or less but do it every day.  This is the part that got a lot of my clients groaning. The thinking behind this was that in the eyes of the search engine every post represents a page on your site. Another factor was to keep subscribers happy and coming back. Well with the rise in popularity of microblogging sites like Twitter a new thinking is beginning to emerge.

First let’s look at Twitter. If you are on Twitter than you know what I am talking about when I say that there are too many people clogging the twittershpere with mundane stream of consciousness nonsense. “Yum, starbucks here we come” “Uploading Saturday’s wedding”  “Such a nice day and no photo shoots”  Please people, I have a life, I don’t want yours. Then along comes an article on how the CDC is using Twitter to keep everyone informed about the Swine Flu issue. (which, btw, I found on Twitter in the first place)

Be Simple and Selective on Twitter, Don’t Over Complicate: Unlike many of us (myself included) who congest Twitter’s airwaves with excessive banter, the CDC exercised impressive restraint in sharing only the most essential content. In a weird way, its Twitter account @CDCemergency felt more authoritative precisely because it didn’t spray unnecessary junk our way. Everything it shares is important, timely and actionable. When it arrives, you know it’s important.

Precisely because it posted only the most essential content, you pay more attention to it. I follow close to 500 people on Twitter; it is the ones that only post meaningful things that I really pay any attention to at all. Do you want your followers to hear what you have to say or are you just posting to hear yourself tweet? Constant tweeting can be a plus for name recognition but are you getting recognized for what you want to be known for?

Some one that is doing frequent right on Twitter is Bravo Bride. They post about once an hour but always with a new item on their For Sale boards. It’s almost like watching the Home Shopping Network pop up on my twadget sidebar. What a wonderful, guilty pleasure.

As for blogging; more often doesn’t have to be the only way.  There is such a thing as evergreen posts; those posts that will be just as relevant 2 years from now as they are today. Suppose you write really great how to posts, those will most likely look good for the life of the blog. It’s ok for these to be longer. They may also have the added benefit of looking better to the Googlebots and if they are really good they may just land on the front page of Google and stay there for up to a year. One of the keys is that these posts have to be really well done. Mediocre just won’t cut it for a long post, so edit, edit, edit.

If the posts you write tend to be more topical and time sensitive then you have to be a frequent poster. Just by the nature of the beast you will want to lean toward quick hits here. Think of them as more of a news flash than a well researched feature article. Get your facts right, make your language concise and hit it and get it. Toss in a couple of well labeled images and you are on your way.

Here is an example of the difference.

Short post:  Amber & Josh’s Wedding.

This would be an example of a post that would be short.  Get in all the important information and relevant keywords like your location and the venue complete with town and state. Use your great pictures and let them carry the information for you.

Long Post: Why Amber’s Wedding Makeup Looked So Great & How Yours Can Too

Same wedding, maybe even same images but this time you are giving the brides tips on how to achieve the look they want in their pictures by using the right makeup tricks. Yep, you may have to pick up the phone and ask the makeup artist a few questions, do a bit of refining but you will have a post that has staying (and search) power.

There isn’t anything wrong with either approach. There isn’t anything wrong with a combination of the two. What you want to be careful of is mixing them up. No one wants to read a 1500 word review of some strangers wedding. If you go long, make it packed with information that your readers can use.


Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

How Are You Using Social Media?

January 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

For our industry, blogging and email marketing are the most effective tools in the social media tool bag. Yes there are  Facebook and Twitter to be included but for most of my clients the first two are the most powerful and easiest to incorporate into the mix; the last 3 take a measure of dedication and devotion that not many of you have. Heck some days even I don’t.

Our most effective tool is email marketing. I’m sure you have put a bulk mail program like A Weber in place but have you customized your template? Is there a lead generator on your website for people to sign up? Do all of your email blasts look alike and friendly? Do they include your branding and pertinent information like phone number and hours of operation? Do they have links to your website? Or are they just plain, boring text messages that lie there like yesterday’s news? This is advertising people!

How often do you send out an email blast? This isn’t like the old days when you had to pay someone like the Knot an arm and a leg to send out a blast. Today’s bulk mailers are dirt cheap and completely DIY for very many of us. You should be sending out a blast to your lead list at least once a month, every other week is even better. Surely you can think of something to say that is short and informative. You are trying to build a relationship with your leads.

When I say leads, I don’t just mean brides. You should have a lead list for other wedding professionals too. It goes back to networking. The other professionals in your area are the true influentials in your market. Keep them informed on what is new and exciting in your field and you will quickly become the go to guy in your market. They will bring the brides. I hope I don’t need to remind you to do the same for them.

The other most effective tool is your blog. I know you have a website but a blog is different. As I have said in the past your blog is where you let your personality come through. It is where you show your excitement. Your excitement get’s others excited. Talk about your events and your products. Use your blog to show case upcoming promotions and highlight your successes. Corporate blogging, unlike blogging for profit, is about showing the human side, the personality if you will of you and your company. Because of that difference, your posts don’t have to be long winded research pieces. They should just be short little bites that illustrate your day.

Blogging platforms today are a breeze to use and when you add all the cool free tools on the internet that you can use to enhance them your blog should be a lively place for prospective clients to visit.  Pop up a slide show of last weeks wedding or one about the backstage setup on your last big catering job. Do a slide show of a recent trunk show to show how much fun the brides were having. Keep it up to date and exciting.

Oh thing you must understand about social media marketing is that rather than broadcasting your message to a massive group and hoping it lands on a few friendly ears you are building relationships with a small group of influentials and encouraging them to spread your message. To that end, one of the things you can do to get your message out to the right people is by reading and posting comments on their blogs. You should be following blogs of like minded individuals in your market and making a connection with them. Let’s say you are a photographer that wants to expand into destination weddings. You should read a list of blogs written by wedding planners that specialize in destination weddings and you should comment frequently and intelligently enough that they begin to recognize you. When you do get to the point of pitching them they will already know you. Hmmmmm, that’s a good thing, no?  Suppose you are a caterer, you should be leaving comment on the blogs connected to venues you like. Again, it is about making connections and building relationships.

Social media marketing only works if you work it. The thing is that it get easier to use every day and the cost is next to nothing.

Filed Under: Ask Christine, Branding Tagged With: , , ,

Save on Blog Writing for SEO

January 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

After yesterdays article on labeling your images I realized something. Wedding professionals have begun to wake up to the positive effects of blogging. They are adding blogs to their website and posting occasionally but still aren’t seeing any results. Well the truth is it takes more to reap the search benefits of blogging than just having one. There is an art to writing blog posts for SEO. It isn’t hard, you just need to know what makes those posts so valuable and then follow the pattern that works for your business.

The investment you make in writing an effective blog post has long lasting effects. For example, due to my recent down time, I have only posted twice on my Wedding Dish blog this January. Amazingly enough, my traffic still doubled that of January 2008, thanks entirely to posts I had written over the life of the blog.

You can learn how to write effective blog posts, it really isn’t that hard. What you need is to see exactly what one looks like for your business. The best way to do that is to have a few professionally done. You then have some solid examples to follow.

That is where I come in: let me write some posts for you. I normally charge $127 for 4 blog posts, as a first of the year special I am offering that service for $99. Just enter the coupon code BLOG at checkout.

Chris at Work

Chris at Work

You send me a couple of images and the who, what, where and when of the event. I’ll put together a few paragraphs that are keyword rich and craft effective labels for your images; then all you have to do is post them. Easy. It saves you time, starts you on your way to effective posting and saves a few coins in the process.

At the beginning of the month we ran a special on blog transfers and I want to make sure that all those clients get off to a fabulous start. I also want to show you how easy it is to do. This offer will only be good for a limited time so don’t delay. Kick you 2009 off with a bang by doing something that will pay you back for years to come.

Filed Under: Blog, Website marketing Tagged With: , ,

Blogging For Wedding Professionals Part 3

December 18, 2008 By 1 Comment

Tracking Your Stats

Blog Stats

Blog Stats

I am fanatical about tracking the stats on my blogs. I don’t mean just page views and visits, either. While those can give you an idea of how you are doing, the real meat is in the referral stats and the entry page stats.

As I said in a previous post, the search engines read each post as a new page on your website, (disclaimer: at least they do on a good blog platform). By monitoring your entry page statistics you can easily see which post is getting the attention of your readers. Go back and analyze the top few posts and see what it was that you did that is attracting so much attention. Was it the topic, the image or a great use of key words and phrases? Is there a common thread among them? Whatever it was, repeat it.

Look at your referrals with the same mind set. Which words or phrases are resulting in visits to your blog? Look at the searches and follow the links if need be. Find out what terms brides are using to find you. I think you will be amazed by what you see. It isn’t generic “keywords’’ like wedding flowers; it’s extended strings like “wedding centerpieces with branches and crystals”. It’s not “wedding gown Denver” its “sweetheart neckline wedding gown by Monique Lhullier discount”.

This is why blogging is so powerful. Every time you post you add words and phrases that brides are searching on. Those build up over time. If a particular term is strong for you, keep posting on topics that relate to it using similar terms.

I also get a remarkable amount of referrals for Google images over on my Wedding Dish blog; something like one in three is from an image search. Now remember, the search robots cannot see what is in your pictures, they only read the words you put with them. The key is to title, label and describe your images when you post them. Again, click through the referrals in you stats to see what they were originally looking for when they found you. Now use that in your posts.

If you follow this, and continue to refine your posts by the referrals you are getting you don’t have any choice but to raise your traffic and your visibility.

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Website marketing Tagged With:

Blogging and SEO

December 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment


Why is blogging such a powerful tool for search? A lot of it has to do with the sheer mass on content that gets added to you site over time. If you post 3 or 4 times a week you are adding 12 to 16 new pages to your site every month, over a year that’s an amazing 144 to 192 NEW PAGES a year. Yes Virginia, the search engines do look at how many pages you have.


Now if you figure that every one of those posts contains 2 to 3 possible terms that your future brides may be using to search, you have built a powerful base of keywords, without really trying.
Without really trying I mean that you can’t just write a blog post as a frame for your keywords. You may or may not know that I ghost write for some blogs. The first thing a client says is I want you to include these keywords. Sorry gang, it doesn’t work that way. Don’t get me wrong, keywords are important to search but just seeding your posts with them doesn’t work. You have two end users for your blog: your readers and the search engines. If you write exclusively for search your readers will disappear.


If you want to write effective copy for your readers you have to think more about what you want to say and less about the keywords you think you need..First off, brides don’t search by keywords, they search be questions and descriptions. Second, the images you choose and how you label them may be your most effective search weapon anyway. Unlike a static website, you get more than one chance to hit the words they are using to search.


Let’s look at how that works. Suppose you put up a post talking about a recent wedding and you use descriptive words. Example:

Contemporary Wedding Centerpiece in Yellow and Orange

Contemporary Wedding Centerpiece in Yellow and Orange

“I loved how this contemporary centerpiece of red and orange gerber daisies turned out for Sara & Mike’s wedding at (local hot venue)in (town) last week.” Follow it up with “Designing the floral décor for (local hot venue) is always fun because it offers so many possibilities.” Now label your image as “Contemporary wedding centerpiece at (local hot venue), (town).”
Every one of those highlighted words is a possible search term but the paragraph reads well to the end user. You add a dozen posts like that a month and without really trying you are going eventually cover just about every possible search term that a bride could use to describe what you do.

Are you starting to see how this works? It is about volumes of descriptive words that you use every day to tell people about your work that just build up over time. You bundle that with a well designed blog that is built to be search friendly in the first place and you have gold.
The bonus is that once indexed by the search engines, those posts are there forever. I am still getting hits off a post I put up nearly 3 years ago on an old blog I don’t even post to anymore. Yes, I do check that stuff and use it to improve my search rankings, but that if for tomorrow’s topic.

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Blogging Tips for Wedding Professionals

December 16, 2008 By 2 Comments


Bride Trying on 2Be Wedding Gown

Bride Trying on 2Be Wedding Gown

I keep hearing people say they can’t blog because they don’t know how or what to write. Just stop that. You do know what to write and you do know how; well that is if you are capable of carrying on a conversation about something you are passionate about with a friend. That’s what blogging is really, a conversation with a friend that shares your passion.
Blogging, and all of social media for that matter, is about personal engagement. It is about sharing your thoughts on a particular topic and inviting feedback. You aren’t writing your thesis and there isn’t a white collared professor that is going to nit-pick your syntax. If you can use spell check and have mastered elementary school grammar, you’ll do fine.
With that out of the way, the question of what to talk about is next off everyone’s lips. Don’t over think it, my friends. There are only 2 rules to this:
1. Stay on topic
2. Think about what your audience wants to know

Stay on Topic: this is easy if before you ever start to blog you write the tagline or mission statement for your blog. Use one brief sentence telling your audience what they will find in your blog, then just stick to that. It doesn’t have to even be a sentence, just a phrase works. For instance:
Beautiful Wedding Gowns and the Things That Go With Them

Now just keep every post to that topic; don’t go off the reservation and start posting about your dog or your vacation. If you own a bridal salon you can’t tell me that you don’t run across at least 3 things a week that make you go, “Ooooh,pretty”. Isn’t that why you got into the business in the first place? Now keep a list of those things and start sharing. Use as many descriptive words as you can and tell why it made you notice it. There you are done. No research, no struggling, just a running stream of consciousness on something you love.

What your audience wants to know: Whatever business you are in, your customers ask questions. Well here is your platform to answer in detail after you have had time to think about it. Let’s keep with the bridal salon example. Show a real bride in a gown and explain why the cut of that particular dress worked well on her particular figure. Tell why the color works when a different one wouldn’t. Give them real information; they will keep coming back for more.

As I said at the start, blogging is just a new form of conversation. You mastered conversation via email and you can master this too.

Now that I have convinced you that you can do it, tomorrow I go into why it works to help your search rankings and how you can master that too.

Filed Under: Blog, Personal Coaching, Website marketing Tagged With:

The Value of Blogging and Organic Search

July 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I hear it all the time, “I don’t have time to write a blog. Is it really that important?”

It is only that important if you want brides to find you in today’s world of social media interaction. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Website marketing Tagged With: , , ,
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