A blog of advice, discussion and resources to help Wedding Professionals increase their income

We have just decided to offer a cross-platform upgrade savings on our Kertesz premium WordPress blogsite for any site owner currently using a paid Flash or Blog template. And, even with this special offer we will do all installation and initial setup.

Limited time - Flash site owners and bloggers - save 30% on our complete hybrid BLOGSITE for Wedding Pros This offer provides a $99 savings, but only through Sunday Nov 23th

Increase your website ranking, enhance your customer engagement, easily update all of your own website and allow mobile devices to browse your site. That is what our Kertesz Wedding Professional Blogsite will provide you. Plus we do the technical setuo and configuration. And you get unlimited tech support. Our BLOGSITE will work on any webhost that can run WordPress, even Bludomain.

Learn more at -
http://www.thinklikeabride.com/theagency/2008/11/upgrade-your-flash-site-to-a-blogsite-and-save-99/

Use the coupon code “UPGRADE” and your total cost will be only $198.

This weekend I transferred a number of Blogger blogs over to WordPress. A frequent comment was that if they had known more they would have begun their blog on WordPress. While it doesn’t really matter on what platform you begin your blog experience with, like a spoon or a fork … Blogger and WordPress have differiences that deserve consideration as a tool to reach your objective. (Fortunately like a spoon or a fork, Blogger and WordPress are almost equally easy to use.)

So the choice depends on the objective. If your objective is to reach an audience that is primarily friends and family with a web-based journal, I think Blogger is probably your best choice, even over WordPress.com. On the other hand, if your objective includes presenting your business or profession and engaging clients and potential clients then self-hosted WordPress.org is your best choice.

If you already have a website, cost is probably not a consideration because all the basic software to operate a WordPress blog is free. Your web-host likely even has a “one-click” install function that you can use to do all WordPress the setup.

There are three important advantages with WordPress if you are considering using a blog to represent your business;

• With self-hosted WordPress you have control. All the text, images, add-ons etc are on your server … under your control. Want to move, delete, enhance or anything you (not Blogger) control all the files. Your business should be under your control.

• WordPress can expand as you need, it can even become the basis for a complete website. Recently businesses large and small such as the Time, the NFL, Martha Stewart, even the tiny Daily Coyote have moved from different blog platforms to WordPress. Over the last 18 months WordPress has become one of the premier website content managers allowing for low-cost and even do it yourself websites which can be managed without expensive software and hardware. You can even manage a WordPress based website from an i-Phone. Your business can benefit from a low-cost operation and future expansion options

• With WordPress it is easy and less expensive to route all your blog traffic using your own URL.  With Blogger all your traffic will go to Blogspot.  Blogs like Wedding Dish regularly get over 100 new visitors each day just from Google searches.  Your URL is part of your business branding, it should always be the basis of your web presence.

And the answer is … in summary, if you want to share a journal with friends and family Blogger is the way to go, but if it is to do with your business or profession WordPress is the best choice.

p.s. - I think you can do it for yourself, but if you want some WordPress set-up help and orientation, let me know we have some very inexpensive services that will get you on track quickly.

One of the dirty little secrets of the wedding press is that the oft-repeated statistic that the averge US per wedding spending is approaching $30,000 is really a lie.

Last May in a blog post titled “Lies, damned lies and statistics”, I pointed this out using recent figures from The Wedding Report. Using The Wedding Report’s own data I shared that over 80% of the weddings in their data set spent less than half the amount they reported as “average”.

Recently, Christina Fredrichsen of IntimateWeddings.com directed me to a Wall Street Journal article “Weddings Are Not The Budget Drains Some Surveys Suggest” which further exposed this problem and even interviewed some of our profession’s leaders who work to perpetuate the spending falsehood.

It is not that I am against lux weddings and upscale brides. The troublesome issue with the misleading wedding cost reports is that the reports are purposefully packaged to misrepresent and oversell wedding professionals and brides-to-be misinformation as to the cost of the typical wedding. This can cause many problems for both the brides-to-be and wedding professionals.

How many wedding professionals decide that their best business plan is to cater to the “upscale” bride? Weddings with budgets above 30K. And invest in expensive marketing to execute that business plan? And go out of business only to find that they were marketing to less than 5% of the market? And ignoring over 80% of the US weddings.

And think about the young couples feeling stressed because their budget seems so much less that what they read on The Knot or in Conde Nast. And possibly go into debt just for what they have been told is the “average” wedding?

In today’s new economic reality I feel that for most wedding professionals it would be much better to positionand market to serve the majority of the marketplace. What could be called the “Wedding Populaire” or even Volks-Wedding. The idea of the average wedding trying to reach an almost unaffordable level of extravagance is no longer stylish … or possible.

I just put up a new video which walks through the background automatic search engine optomization features in Kertesz, the hybrid professional photography blogsite. These features are installed and tested as part of every Kertesz setup, but they can also be easily added to almost any self-hosted WordPress website or blog.

What is important is that once “turned on” these features work automatically in the background, taking no additional time. This is just part of why WordPress based websites have a huge advantage in search rank results over virtually any other website platform. State of the art search optimization tools with astounding time savings!

Recently while exploring some discussion boards I came across a few threads like this one on Photo.net having to do with Google dropping Bludomain websites from their search results index. I came across similar threads on Flickr and the FM forum. Unfortunately the problem is not Bludomain’s, it can be any other similarly developed Flash site regardless of provider. The problem is based in the usage of Flash for an entire website.

A picture may be worth a 1,000 words, but not to a search engine. Google and other search engines only work with words. A Flash based site, like Bludomain, is basically just animated pictures. Take a look at the splash page “page source” of most Flash sites, even the most visually appealing. What you will commonly see, besides the page parameters, image calls and scripts, are the Meta tags related to title, description and keywords (a particularly useless tag) and a little text like “Skip intro”, “Website”, “Blog” (terms that very few brides-to-be will use in the wedding planning) and a note that Flash is needed to view the site. This lack of meaningful text content combined with scripts to launch your main site, which Google will not follow, is what leads to poor search ranking and being “kicked off Google”. I have written more in depth previously regarding the weakness of Flash sites’ search engine optimization.

Many photographers and other wedding professionals have discovered the internet marketing power of a blog, and added a blog to gain some internet recognition. A few, like Jessica Claire, have maximized that “blog power” for use as their entire website by creating a blogsite. And this is why I have spent the last few months developing a low priced blogsite for photographers and other wedding professionals (www.ProPhotoBlogsite.com) that can be easily managed by the site owner.

The important take away here is don’t be upset with Google or Bludomain or Flash, they are what they are are, don’t expect them to be different. By recognizing their nature and strengths it becomes easy to see how to use them combined with other options to dramatically improve internet results. As a New England sailor once told me, “don’t argue with the wind, just adjust your sail”.

Well the core project is pretty well completed. Thanks for everyone’s inputs.

I am working on finishing the support pages providing more in depth descriptions of the website’s theme, features and behind the scene configurations. Because of its robust nature and the need for it to include some flash features with additional XML and database data , the theme will be delivered as complete setup WordPress website. So things like the custom wedding oriented contact form and image galleries will all work “straight out of the box”.

This means purchasers will not need to spend valuable hours learning the code programming basics of WordPress. Even with that savings to purchasers, pricing will be extremely competitive compared to existing custom professional photography WordPress themes

And, I have decided to name it Kertesz, after Andre Kertesz.

ps - I just discovered that meaning of the name Kertesz is gardener. May it help all of our businesses grow!

In fact it won’t help any website.

I recently had an email from a Flash website owner who said that his website designer assured him that the META Keywords tag would help overcome a Flash site’s search engine weakness. Sadly, no.

Despite some SEO hype types, in reality the META Keywords tag is DEAD. Yep, dead … and has been for half a decade.

Danny Sullivan founder of Search Engine Watch first shared that fact with us in Oct 2002. More recently, Jan 2008, the Editor of Technologyevangelist.com expanded on the Keyword tag’s death, why search engines quit using the Keywords tag to rank search results and related a perspective regarding a friend of his website. And there is even this item from the Search Engine Guide Blog on why the only beneficiary of using the Keyword tag could be your competition.

So use the Keywords tag it if you want. But don’t pay for it, don’t spend much time on it and realize that it serves much less functional purpose than your appendix.

I really hope not! Every month brings another few scam emails targeted, however poorly, at wedding professionals. And occasionally, but thankfully rarely, there will be a question about the possibility of the email being a real opportunity. It is not. It is only an opportunity to rightfully wear this t-shirt:

For anyone that hasn’t been the “lucky” recipient, here is a copy of one of the most recent of the scam emails-

Subject - Wedding Taking Place in Austin TX
From - Mrs Rose L. W. <lola.walters@gmail.com>

Hello, My name is Rose Winans, I Live in Austin Texas,
but presenlt in Tennesse for the sake of the my Son's
Wedding, I will be back soon I am deaf if not i would
love to call about this enquiry, I will like to Make an
enquiry Concerning my Son's Wedding which would be
Coming up on the 29th of November 2008 , I need a Good
photographer who will be Covering all the event (5 hours)
In TX. Please let me know if you are Available and if
you have facilities to accept Credit Card Payments
(No Paypal, i dont have a paypal acc). Hope to hear from
you in other to know your Prices. ROSE

With the growing cost of Google adwords and our target market brides’ increasing resistance I thought it would be helpful to presisly show how you can discover the search words used most often. And benefite from using them in your website content at no expense.

First to discover the most productive bride’s search engine words use the public Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

In the quest to find methods to help improve marketing results for wedding professionals I often look at website options/techniques. Previously I have discussed the impressive advantages of using a rich featured blog engine as the basis for your website, but ignored the almost crippling impact Flash based websites can have on your Internet marketing.

Well Christine Boulton of Think Like A Bride has just posted just such an article on her marketing agency’s website complete with her attention to useful detail and frank discussion. Go read it - Flash Sites vs HTML Sites