Start Your Own Successful Wedding Business

Do you make wedding jewellery or wedding stationery? If you sell a physical product for weddings, consider:

1. Always ask your customers to provide a work address for delivery: somewhere where their order can be signed for on delivery so it won't be returned to the Royal Mail depot for them to collect.

2. Send some business cards, disguised as vouchers, with every parcel you send. When your customer receives her wedding jewellery at work she'll open her parcel and want to show her friends at work. If you've slipped 2 or 3 cards in with her order, offering a 10% discount to friends and family, it could mean many more orders through word of mouth!

My first useful blog post - this is what I had ready for the newsletter. Put aside an hour or two here and there, and grab some bits of webspace for your wedding business - for FREE!

So you have your website(s) and you’ve optimised the keywords, content and built links within your site to other pages. You have it pretty well covered, but you’d still like more visitors.

Where else are you visible on the web? How many backlinks do you have? Fancy some more?

You can strengthen your position on the web – all with the ultimate goal of a better google search ranking – by social networking, listing your business on directories, and uploading pictures and videos with links to your business website.

Social Networking

Facebook now has a facility for adding a Page for your business. If you’re not signed up, it will only take a few minutes to sign up and upload a few photos. Then regular short visits will keep your page up to date.

Twitter... I must admit I can’t see the point yet, and I joined last month. Perhaps I’ll have a eureka moment. Still, it’s all the rage this month and it all counts towards your Google search rankings.

MySpace – free web space and so long as you keep your page professional looking it can be as good as a blog. Google “wedding photographer myspace” (etc) to see any competitors of yours and how they use their MySpaces.

Forums – join forums which interest you, are busy, and allow ‘signatures’ where you can show your web address beneath every post. Don’t post comments to promote your business. Find something you’re genuinely interested in and share your views and thoughts with other forum users. For example, the Unofficial Mr Site Forum is a nice, helpful place for Mr Site users to get feedback on their website and learn about managing their sites.

Blogs

If you can spare 5 minutes, a couple of times a week, a blog is a great way of showing a personal side to your business. People like to know who they’re dealing with, so showing your sense of humour / warm fluffy side on a blog is nice.

Image Galleries

Flickr images show up well in search results (do a Google image search and you’ll see). Name your photos well and add relevant tags.

Photobox is another online photo sharing website, never a high scorer with search engines but nonetheless another free webspace for your brand.

Google picasa is another image sharing website. It’s not like Flickr – yet – but it will surely have its place in Google’s plans for world domination so it can’t hurt to upload some pics!

Local Directories

BT Tradespace is a growing directory, particularly relevant if your business is focused locally. Add a company description, photos and blog updates. If you don’t have a website then why not start off with a Tradespace as your main website?

Thomson Local gives you a basic listing with a link to your website

Yell.com gives you a basic listing with a link to your website. Beware the advertising calls that follow your free listing! Don’t part with any cash unless you really believe it would be right for your business.

Has this blog post been useful for your wedding business? I may at some stage add more info on some of the above - tips and tricks flor blogging successfully, perhaps. If this would be useful to you, please comment here or email to let me know!

Hello everyone,

We're taking a bit of a new approach to our newsletters - the downside of a successful wedding business is being so busy you have to sleep with one eye at a time, and keep working with the other*

... so the newsletter which I started writing at the end of March has been put on the back burner while I work on my own business.

I'm going to try a new strategy of running a blog - firstly on here and perhaps on Blogger - if I move it there I'll add a link here so you can all see.

This will mean shorter but more regular updates. When I have something useful to say, I'll update the blog for you to read, and I hope it will really help.

I'll post bits of my April newsletter (oops) on here very soon, so watch this space!

Claire

*Don't tell my customers I do that, please