marketing consulting for wedding professionals    Writing, branding, logo design.newsletter design

How to Find Great Ideas for Blog Posts

My clients are always asking me what to blog about. It seems that finding ideas for blog posts stumps way to many people. It shouldn’t.

I don’t care what segment of the industry you are in, as a wedding professional you talk to brides everyday. Whether it’s in person, on email or a comment on social media, you connect with your target market everyday. More importantly, you answer their questions. Right? How to write a good blog post

That is your gold mine for great blog post ideas. Those questions, that you can usually answer without even having to think, are a road map to your editorial content. If brides are curious enough to ask the question, they are engaged enough to take the time to read about it. I’ll bet you could fill a months worth of posts off the top of your head by just asking yourself what the most asked questions are.

If you want to mine it further, start writing down the question brides ask in your meetings. If you are meeting with a bride, chances are good that you are already taking notes, just add this to your normal note taking. Make it a point to gather at least one question from every bride you talk with.

If you keep getting asked the same questions over and over, try to find out why. I’ll bet five brides will give you five different answers to why they asked it.

Now obviously I’m not talking about the very common “How much?” If that is the only question you are hearing, you are not listening.

In addition to brides, you also work with a lot of other vendors. Flip the coin: What questions do you ask them? If you had the need to know, your readers may also want to know. I’m not saying give away company secrets or that secret source for that fantastic new ‘thing’, but sharing knowledge and a few insider tips isn’t a bad thing.

I have found that questions usually come in two varieties: quality, information seeking questions and bat shit crazy. Don’t discount bat shit crazy. Something made them ask it. Find out why. Worse comes to worse, make one of those quirky little  Xtranormal videos out of it. (here are some funny ones from the past)

It has been my experience that people tend to over think blog posts. Stop thinking of it as writing the great American novel. Just talk to your readers like you would to your friends.

 

 

 

Website for A Wedding Planner

I just finished a lovely website for a very lovely lady, Marva Munroe.

Marva plans weddings all over the Bahamas and wanted an update for her site that reflected recent changes in her growing business. She also wanted it to be mobile friendly.

Not only did we make it mobile friendly, we made it mobile responsive.

Huh? Mobile responsive means that the site rearranges itself depending on the screen size it is being viewed on. In short, it will align differently on an iPhone than on a desktop.

As always, click the image to view Marva’s new website.

website for a destination wedding planner

Facebook or Your Website? What’s More Important?

I was out trolling the internet for inspiration this morning and ran across a  little website I rather liked until I saw this on the portfolio page…

For current photos, please visit our blog or facebook fan page.

 

Excuse me but that is exactly backwards. Exactly Backwards. Your social media presence is (or should be) designed to funnel people to your website, not the other way around.

Your website is the main hub of all your marketing. Everything else you do should be designed to get them to that point. It is where you have (or should) the most real-estate to capture their undivided attention. It is where your contact forms are, your full portfolio, your pricing information and for goodness sake your freaking sale pitch. Why would you use it to send them somewhere else?????

But wait! there’s more…

What this one statement told me is that first off, the website was not designed with the clients needs in mind. You, as the site owner, should have full control of your site. You should have full reign to update any and everything on it. Moreover, you should have been trained on how to use it. If you weren’t, you are being held captive by your web designer.

Then there is the issue of the blog being on a different url. Why? Your blog should be a fully integrated part of your website. Your blog is one of your best SEO tools. It is a near effortless way to add important keywords and tagged images for the search engines to delight over. Why put that much effort into a blog in the hopes that people will make the leap to your website. Dang it, they should already be there.

{can’t your tell I am just slightly irritated}

How about this…

Your blog is an integrated part of your website, just another page really. You work hard and keep updating your blog. The best of the best pictures you also ad to your gallery/portfolio. Every time you do that, your site is set up to automatically post it to both your Facebook page and your Twitter account. Now doesn’t that sound simple?
How about…If you have a website, a separate blog and are still putting all you effort into your Facebook page you are working way to hard. Just like the hub that it is, your website should not only be the central point you bring everyone, but it should also radiate out your hard work.

One page to rule them all

or is that to Lord of the Rings?

The Power of WordPress

If you are still using a Flash website or something like Website Tonight, you may want to take a look at this infographic from TechKing.

Isn’t it time to switch to WordPress?

While you are at it, add a premium theme from StudioPress. Yes, I am a Studiopress afiliate but that is because I use it and believe in it and the power of WordPress.

I’m not alone. Such entities as The New York Times, CNN and Fox News use WordPress to power their blogs. So does the NFL. In September 2010, Microsoft replaced Windows Live Spaces with WordPress. Do they know something you don’t?

Infographic: The Power of WordPress

The Power of WordPress by Tech King

Why The Websites We Build Kick Ass

Here at the Agency we build websites for small, very small, businesses that are sick of paying some web guy to update every little thing on their site. We build websites for clients that don’t want to spend an arm and a leg but know they need a great site, which is connected to social media and does amazing things for their search. We build these sites for clients that aren’t web-heads, some of our client have barely mastered sending an attachment with an email.
So therein lays the one thing that makes us different: our sites are beautiful and functional on the front and elementary on the back.

The Proof is In Our Clients Reaction
Last night I had a client meeting to do the final tutorial and hand off on a site we had built for a wedding association with over 200 members. Everyone involved is an over worked small business owner that volunteers what little time they can to run and grow the association. One of their goals was to have a site that they could mange themselves. The also wanted some fairly heavy backside integration with membership subscriptions, a private blog and an integrated email newsletter system.

At the meeting was a florist, a transportation company owner and the associations one paid employee, a part time accountant.(hardly the most techie bunch) I had created a manual for the association with all their passwords and the how to information on all the different parts it took to put the site together. In under an hour, all three of the attendants were blown away by how simple the whole thing was to manage. From managing the member roster and the email newsletter to pulling reports about subscriptions (the money part) to updating and adding new content to the site my clients were having an “I could have had a V-8” moment!  Why had they not done this sooner?

We had already blown the rest of the members away with the look and functionality of the public side, now we had blown away the association officers with the stunning ease of the backside. SCORE!

“Thank You For Making This SO Easy”

That is what I love to hear and that is what they said when we were done. What your website looks like is only half of the battle, the real beauty of a website from the Agency is what you can do with it all by yourself.  For a long time I struggled with my
consulting clients trying to get a website that worked for them, so we began to build them. We know who our clients are and that is why we build them the way we do. We know their skill level and we know how little time they have to devote to their site. We don’t build sites for geeks; we build site for small business owners that already have their plate full and are sick of getting their pockets picked by traditional web design firms.

Let me know when you are ready to move your site to this new way of thinking.

See for yourself. TWESA.com

What do Martha Stewart, the NFL and a Coyote in Wyoming All Have in Common?

What an odd question. The truth is that they have something important in common, something you that you also need: a great, functional website with a killer Content Management System. As different as they are, all three entities have sites built on the same platform we use to build our client’s sites. WordPress [Read more...]