Do you struggle with blogging? You’re not alone! As a wedding vendor, blogging your work is crucial to showing off your talents, attracting new clientele and giving curious potential customers more of what they want to see.
It’s a process that can be streamlined to take as little time as possible while still occupying a permanent spot in your workflow. How to blog a client’s wedding day in a way that will have the most positive impact for your business and for your clients? Keep reading!
SELECTING IMAGES TO BLOG
If you’re a not a photographer, make it a habit of asking the photographers you work with to send you the gallery. Bring a business card or send them an email so they have yours, and follow up if necessary! Photographers, you should be sending ALL vendors you work with on a wedding day a copy of the gallery. Depending on the gallery service you use, you can even create a separate sub-gallery with just images that would pertain to vendors (i.e., excluding all the family shots).
Once you have the gallery, it’s important to choose enough images to share to show a solid representation of the day and of your work, but no need to over-share. Only select images that represent your best work and/or the main parts of the day.
How many images should a wedding blog include? That’s up to your discretion, but no matter what, think quality over quantity. Think from a potential client’s perspective: are you really going to scroll through 100 images, no matter how beautiful they are? A blog post shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to digest and get the gist. Pick 15 or pick 50, but make sure each one adds something of value to the blog. That said, no need to overthink it. If you can’t pick between two similar images, flip a coin and move on! The reader will never know otherwise.
SEO TIPS FOR WEDDING BLOGS
When crafting your blog, keep these SEO best practices in mind:
Image size: you want to be sure your blog loads quickly. Large image sizes can hurt load times. There’s really no reason for blog images to be more than 1mb each. Consider the “800 rule”: if you can export them to a decent width (800px or more) while keeping them under 800kb each, that’s great! Programs like BlogStomp and Narrative can help with this, along with easily creating drag and drop image layouts, and sites like Bulk Resize Photo are great for batch-resizing images to achieve much smaller file sizes without losing image quality.
Image names: Rename all images to include a keyword and/or your business name – anything but IMG_1234.jpg. If you want to take things a step further, add alt text to every image (here’s a great hack from Dawn Elizabeth studios for batch-adding alt text!).
Credits and links: It’s a good idea for SEO purposes and for ethical purposes to give credit to all vendors with an external link to each of their sites. To further boost your SEO power, include a link or two to pages within your own website, like another related blog or your About page.
Pinterest: Go ahead and Pin some of the very best images from the blog to your Pinterest page, and title each image with keywords brides would actually search for. The general public isn’t going to be searching for the name of your couple, but they might be searching Pinterest for Outdoorsy Groom’s Cake or Vow Book Ideas or Tropical Altar Florals.
WRITE! Write a good paragraph of text to go along with your images. More on that next!
WHAT TO WRITE ON A WEDDING DAY BLOG
There’s really no need to give a recap of the entire day. Potential clients don’t want to read a novel – they want snippets. So make them memorable snippets. Was there a particular moment that stood out to you? Something that embodied the uniqueness of this particular couple? Something that made this wedding truly one-of-a-kind? An awesome venue, location, or vendors? Something funny that happened? Something you took away?
Pick 3-5 noteworthy, unique elements to the day and share about these details from your heart. Whether you have one big block of text at the top followed by all of your images, or your text is sprinkled throughout the blog and paired with relevant images to the details you’re describing, it doesn’t really matter. Just write like you’d speak! Keep the tone light and conversational.
We hope these tips help you as you tackle more wedding day blogs. Do you have any best practices you abide by when blogging clients’ wedding days? We’d love to hear them!
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Written by Kaitlyn Bullard
Image by Kristen Edwards Photography
