The Definitive Guide to Advertising on Wedding Blogs Pt. II

Please read the first part of this article before continuing.

My best wedding blog advertising experience has been with Offbeat Bride.

I’ve renewed several times, done two sponsored posts, and a sidebar ad. In my most successful year on Offbeat Bride, I booked 5-6 weddings with one $350 investment in their vendor guide.

To put this in perspective, each wedding I book from The Knot costs me about $200! Every wedding I book from Offbeat Bride costs me $50-$75.

For a featured listing on The Knot, I pay $410 for 2 months, which is about the same as I pay for an entire year on Offbeat Bride (currently $460).

I had decent results with both Wedding Chicks and Green Wedding Shoes.

I got one booking and a handful of inquiries from my $300 investment in Green Wedding Shoes (a very California-centric blog and I am in California).

I got a fair amount of traffic from my $200 investment in Wedding Chicks and a wedding I DJed was published on Wedding Chicks while I was an advertiser, but I had no bookings.

My worst wedding blog investments have been Artfully Wed and Grey Likes Weddings.

Not only did I not get any bookings from these blogs but I didn’t even get 5 clicks from either site during my 12 months of advertising. Yikes!

Both of these blogs are great examples of “hands off” blogs that just put up your listing and that’s it. My ad on Rustic Wedding Chic was free, and it has generated a few clicks over the years but no bookings. (If you have a rustic wedding business, take advantage of their free vendor guide ASAP.)

Takeaways About Why Some Blog Advertising Works and Some Doesn’t

Why do I think advertising on Offbeat Bride was so much more successful for me than the other blogs?

• As a tattooed, nose-pierced, feminist, vegetarian, female DJ…my company fits in there.
• They are “hands on” with their vendors.
• Offbeat Bride has a very unique and loyal group of readers with a strong sense of community. For example, Offbeat Bride has a forum for members to share with one another—it’s not just about looking at, as they call it, “wedding porn.”
• Many of the wedding blogs blend together with similar branding and content. Offbeat Bride stands alone and is not confusable with any other big-name blog.
• I’m located in southern California where we are no doubt blessed with having a higher-than-average amount of offbeat brides. Although my non-tattooed, non-nose-pierced, meat-eating DJ friend, Liz Daley, in conservative Williamsburg, Virginia, told me she also had great success with her listing on Offbeat Bride as well.

While my sponsored posts on Offbeat Bride generated a great deal of traffic within 2 weeks of their publication and 1 booking, they cost me around $700 a piece. A lot of vendors have insane success with their sponsored posts, but that was not really the case for me.

How to Find the Right Wedding Blog For Your Business

If you have a niche market (and you should), a simple Google search should give you some ideas. I recommend checking a website called WeddingBlogs100.com that ranks the top 100 wedding blogs each year.

Also, consider local wedding blogs for your city, state, and region. If you have any of your weddings published, apply to the blogs that have published you as they often give preference to vendors they have already given their seal of approval to.

Once you find a blog you like, see who else is advertising there. If I’m going to be the only DJ on the site or the only vendor in my state, I pass.

How to Get Your Biz On a Wedding Blog For Free

Many wedding blogs allow guest writers to submit articles.

Your article must not be sales-y. It should contain actual helpful tips for the blog’s readers (for example, I published a guest post on Offbeat Bride called “Mexican Rap and Line Dancing: How to Rock Offbeat Wedding Music Without Alienating your Guests.”)

The blog will give you an author bio with your post where you can typically link to your own website.

And, finally, to get on a wedding blog for free, get one of your weddings published!

As a DJ, this is a little out of my hands because submissions for publication typically come from newlyweds and photographers, but for us non-photographers…network, baby!

I have told photographers before that if they gave me access to the wedding photos, I would submit them…and I did.

What’s your experience advertising on wedding blogs? Let me know in the comments below.