Wedding Blog 101: How to Get Real Leads and Make Money

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Question: Does blogging really work to get more wedding business?

“Good afternoon, Stephanie. Thanks for all your help thus far. The advice on your site is AWESOME! It’s actually working!

“I downloaded The Price Shopper Email Formula. Since implementing this email, I have tripled my callbacks. This is great! You gave me gold! For FREE! Thank you so much.

“I have always wanted to start a blog and now that I have started out in the wedding business, I thought maybe this would be a good topic to write on. What do you think? Do you think it would help me… um… you know… ‘Book More Brides’?”

Laysha

Answer:

Hi, Laysha.

I’m so happy to hear about your success with the email template!  That’s awesome news.

Yes, starting a wedding blog is a GREAT idea.  The benefits include:

  •     Attracting free, targeted website visitors and leads.
  •     Networking with other pros to build relationships.
  •     Proving your expertise and value.
  •     Qualifying and pre-selling leads.

However, it’s not enough just to BLOG.  In fact, what most wedding pros are doing doesn’t use even half the power you get with a real money-making, bride-booking blog strategy.

To make sure you get maximum results out of your blogging activities:

  •  Blog EVERY week consistently, 2-3 times per week.

 If you write one post and then abandon your blog for months at a time, this
strategy won’t work.  Posts don’t have to be long; even 400 words is
perfect.

  • Use local keywords naturally in the title and content of your articles.

 “Local keywords” are the phrases couples type in to find your service,
usually the name of your area or region followed by your type of service.
For example: Boston wedding photographer, Orange County wedding
officiant.

  •  Take the time to add a description, tags and keywords to all your images.

Search engines can’t read your images (yet!), so they depend on text descriptions to identify the content you add.  Use descriptive words and include the name of locations and towns in your images descriptions when relevant to get more local website visitors.

  • Add social share buttons to your blog so that couples can easily share with one click.

Your WordPress blog or website makes it a snap to add them with one of these social share plugins.  These buttons can be added to ANY website, and it’s a must.  If you want people to share what you’re doing, make easy for them!

  • Share and promote on social media, especially Facebook.

You can use Facebook apps such as Networked Blogs or RSS Graffiti to automatically share your new blog posts on Facebook.  Your articles and resources need to be easy to find in the social media world.

  • Take the opportunity to include the wedding vendors and couples you work with in your blog posts, then send them an email with your thanks and a link.

This is an easy way to get other people to brag about your post, link to it and share it with everyone they know!

  • Above all, write about topics that are valuable and interesting for your target clients.  If you want people to read and share, it’s got to be good.

Learn how to avoid these common blogging mistakes and write one or more of these 4 Money Making Blog Posts to optimize your success with blogging.

What do YOU think about blogging?  Does it work or is it overrated?

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How to Recover From a Negative SEO Attack On Your Website

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A couple weeks ago we discovered that some unknown party has launched a negative SEO campaign pointing nonsense backlinks from poor quality sites at our domain.  The intention is to make it appear to Google as if we’re creating these “unnatural” links ourselves, so that Google will punish us by removing us from the rankings.

In non-geek speak, these “bad backlinks” mean that fewer people are finding us when searching for wedding marketing and wedding business related topics.

The reason we discovered this attack is because it worked, at least temporarily.  We noticed our rank slipping, launched an investigation and uncovered the reason why.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if a competitor tries to poison your wedding business like this.  It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that this might happen to you.  Just in case, here’s how to recover.

Fighting Back Against Negative SEO

1. Diagnose the problem carefully.

You can find out if someone is trying to use negative SEO against you by running a backlink report from Majestic SEO or by searching your backlinks displayed in Google Webmaster Tools for strange anchor text and suspicious websites.

It’s normal to find a few of these spammy backlinks pointing to your site, and it takes hundreds to do some real damage.  However, if you notice an unexplained increase in backlinks with anchor text that doesn’t make sense or hundreds websites that have nothing to do with weddings linking to you, you may have a negative SEO problem.

2. Get as many of these links removed as you can.

We found over 500 of these “bad links” pointing to our website.  The only way to get them removed is to contact each website owner and request that they be taken down.

Oh, the pain!

Fortunately, there are a few tools you can use to make this job easier.  Rmoov, SEO Gadget’s Link Clean Up and Remove’em allow you to identify spammy backlinks, contact website owners and track your removal progress.

If you’re not able to find contact information for the website administrator, turn to a Whois Lookup.

3. Submit any links you can’t get removed to Google and Bing using the disavow tool.

If you aren’t able to get these links removed within a couple weeks, which is likely, you can submit any remaining backlinks you don’t want counted to the Google disavow tool and the Bing disavow tool.

Note: there’s quite a bit of controversy about the disavow tool in the SEO world, with many paranoid SEO experts wondering exactly what Google is doing with this information.  Even Google suggests that it be used only as a last resort.

After taking all of these actions, there’s no guarantee that your website will return to its former ranking, but you should see improvements within a month or two.

How to Protect Yourself

Which leads me to the Big Lesson learned from this whole adventure…

Don’t depend on any one source for all of your leads.  Ever.

Not Google searches.  Not your favorite wedding vendor.  Not your advertising.

Each lead source your business has is like a leg holding up the stool that is your business.

Imagine that your stool has three legs.  If you kick one leg out, it falls over.  Goodbye stool, goodbye business.

But if your stool has four, seven or ten legs, knocking one leg out still sucks, but the stool remains standing.

The more diverse your lead sources and the more places where brides and grooms can find you, the less vulnerable you are to disaster.

If a competitor tries to attack your website in Google, but couples can still find you on Facebook and you still get referrals from several other wedding businesses, it won’t kill your business.

Fortunately for us, Book More Brides gets lots of visitors from Facebook and LinkedIn.  So even if our Google traffic tanks, people can still find us.

Do the same thing for your business.  Be prepared for the unexpected as much as you can and keep flourishing no matter what comes your way.

Have you ever had trouble with competition?  Leave a comment and share your story.

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Wedding Website SEO That Works: 5 Steps to Getting to Page 1

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Question: How can I get backlinks for my website and raise my page rank?

I’m looking for ways to promote my wedding band, especially finding ways to get links back to my website to build page rank and increase listings in the serps.  Do you have a book or video that i could purchase which has info in it like this to help my wedding band business?

Ron

Answer:

Hi, Ron.

I’m an amateur SEO geek, and I take it pretty seriously, because there is so much misinformation out there.

A “quick fix” backlinking strategy may work temporarily, but it will only hurt your website’s authority and ranking in the long-term.

I’ve seen many wedding vendor websites that have tried to game the system by buying backlinks and by stuffing their pages with keyword phrases.  You may recognize them by the paragraphs of linked keyword phrases at the bottom of the home page on their websites.

That strategy backfired with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, and those websites have lost much of their website traffic and ranking in the search engines.

The most reliable, safe way to get backlinks is to earn them by adding content to your website that brides, grooms and other wedding vendors naturally link to and share.

Google’s gotten really smart when it comes to identifying purchased and low quality backlinks.  When you purchase backlinks from a service or get them from Fiverr, dozens or hundreds of links show up instantly, leaving a huge footprint Google recognizes as low quality link building.

Think about it: how normal is it for your website to go from zero to 100 overnight?

At best, these links do nothing for you; at worst, your website may disappear from search engine results entirely.

Stop focusing on the links and focus on creating amazing, sharable content on your website instead.

Here’s how to get backlinks naturally and organically:

1.    Use the Google keyword tool to determine the keyword phrases brides and grooms type in when searching for your type of service.  Ex: “Outer Banks photographer” or “Dublin wedding planner.”

2.    Publish 2-3 blog posts per week containing those keywords about topics that are interesting and relevant to your brides/grooms.  Include images and video.  Be sure to write for real people and don’t overuse keywords or it will alienate website visitors and work against your SEO efforts.

3.    Add social share buttons so that your posts and images are easily sharable on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

4.    Use an app like RSS Graffiti or Twitterfeed to automatically share your new blog posts on Facebook and Twitter.  Become a resourceful active participant in social media to attract couples and encourage them to share, comment and link to you.

5.    Write guest blog posts for other wedding-related websites in exchange for a link back to your website.  This is the valuable type of backlink that increases your ranking and authority.

This isn’t a quick fix, but it works powerfully.  With consistent blogging, social media activity and guest blogging, you will establish yourself as a wedding expert very quickly. You’ll earn valuable links that will propel your website to Page 1 and attract targeted leads in the process…and you won’t have to worry about getting smacked down by Google.

If you want more detailed instructions, this SEO training for wedding pros is an excellent investment if you can get in.

What do you think about backlinking and SEO?

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How To Use Links To Create Good SEO

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Woman_On_LaptopGood SEO on your wedding website isn’t just about using the right keywords in the right place. There are quite a few different things that search engines are looking for which improve your ratings which Christian Arno writes about in his article.

One of those things is links. You can have inbound links which lead from another website to your website, inbound links which link one page of your site to another page and outbound links which lead from your website to other websites and content you have published on other websites.

While you don’t want to overuse links and should keep it to about 2 – 3 links per article, it is crucial for you to have those links. Without them your website it a dead fish in water and the other SEO work you do won’t get you many results. Remember, SEO is a pattern. If you are missing one piece it’s not going to give you the results you want. What do you think?

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When Does SEO Become Harmful?

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GearsYou have probably heard quite a bit about the importance of SEO in building a website. But is there such a thing as too much? According to Dr. Pete in his article the answer is yes, especially when it comes to tweaking your url’s.

For instance, it seems like a good idea at some point to make your url’s short, sweet, to the point, and keyword specific. I mean, if it works on your web pages it would work the same in your url’s right? Well, yes and no. If you cut out all of the unnecessary stuff and keep the page title in the url that can be helpful. But if you have already established the content on your site the risk isn’t going to be worth it.

If you haven’t already heard about “the Google slap” now is the time. Basically what happens is that a site works so hard on their SEO that their entire site becomes spammy, the content quality goes down, and when Google looks at it they decide to remove it from their search engines. Since you want to build your business and keep moving forward just keep in mind that you have to always maintain balance. Content is king, not SEO. What do you think?

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Free SEO Tools to Turbocharge Your Online Marketing

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Nearly everyone who has a website or blog has heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and knows the importance of utilizing it for marketing. However it is easy to do the basics and think that is all you have to do. That results in a small return for the amount of time put in.

There are a lot of free tools out there to help businesses who can’t afford to hire a SEO specialist. You don’t have to be a specialist to get a huge boost with the SEO on your wedding business website.

Google Keyword Tool helps you find the best keywords to use on your website and in articles. Rank Checker from SEO Book helps you see where you rank with multiple search engines, and Ontolo’s Query Generator helps you find potential guest bloggers which will help you build your incoming links. For more programs and information on how to boost your SEO marketing check out Ken Lyons (Senior Online Acquisition Marketing Manager at WordStream, Inc) post.

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Now May Be the Time to Start Tweeting

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Wedding businesses with websites and blogs may be interested in adding a twitter account to their site. It used to beBusiness_Man_with_Chart the case that the main reason to have a twitter account was to reach a different audience, and therefore it hasn’t always seemed like the best option for professionals in the wedding industry.

Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today writes that Google just changed all that at the end of 2010. They have decided to use Tweets to rank web sites and blogs via Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It may not make a huge difference on how you site is ranked at first, but over time your tweets could help move your wedding business page up the ranks in Google’s search engine.

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So What is SEO Again?

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I’m gonna be frank when I say…I have no clue was SEO is.  My boss is talking to me about search engines and how people find certain pages…and she brings up SEO.

I nod and smile…and then make a mental note to look up SEO.  

So here I am looking it up so I can get a good understanding of what SEO is and how it works.  And you know what?  Come to find out it’s a super duper important thing any online business owner…or any business owner with a website…needs to know about!  

Knowing what SEO is will definitely affect the decisions you will make for your website…and ultimately increase your traffic.  And when traffic is increased, what else is increased?

Making Sense of SEO is a very informative blog I found that explained it thoroughly but briefly, which is exactly how I like it!

What have you done to make your website easier to find?

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How To Wipe Out Spam Email

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Spam.  Who doesn’t hate it?  articles

The good news is that there are some great tools to deal with the mystery minced meat of mail! I’m a fan of Gmail myself, which is pretty cool in this area and of course is FREE. Here is a great blog from Lifehacker on some options to deal the killing blow to our least favorite type of  correspondence.

P.S.  Steph says I’ve got to stop rhyming in my posts..BUZZ KILL.

http://lifehacker.com/5713914/how-to-wipe-out-spam-email-in-your-inbox

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