Why? u ask?

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who also happens to also be in the wedding industry. She stated that this month (September ‘08) was really, really slow for them. Their bookings were down a noticeable difference from previous months. She also stated that a few other of her wedding vendor friends (2 photographers and 1 reception venue owner) had a slow month of September. I was puzzled because for me, this is a normal/average month.

So I decided to compare this years 2008’s online traffic with that of last year’s. I logged onto my  statistics portion of my website and saw the same trend going on for this year as last as far as online traffic goes.

It, of course, was consistent whit their statements. September is not necessarily the slowest month for online traffic, August is. September is the month that online traffic starts to pick up. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the long summer vacations and getting back to school, but there is a small dip on my online traffic during the month of august. Which makes sense, most people do not want to pick September as the month they are getting married. I believe it’s because of Back to school, because they will have to spend their entire summer finalizing their wedding, and because of the expenses most people have during the month of September.

The Website Traffic Numbers

So here is the graph for traffic visitors logged through google’s Analytics program.

If you pay close attention, you can see the same trends from early in the year 2007 show up in the year 2008. Even though my traffic grew overall this year by 100%, the trends remained the same. During January of 2007  there was a huge spike of visitors, the same as you see for January 2008. March had a spike in both 2007 and 2008. July had a spike both years as well. Now if you notice in 2007, August was low then September had a slight gain, and October just exploded with traffic.

This month you should start preparing your website for that explosion in traffic. Fix you landing pages, Prepare an email autoresponder, place an online form on your website, get started bloggin, aim for those keywords, rank high-er on the search engines… do something anything to get as much of these brides/clients as you can. There is an upcoming opportunity and you should be doing something, the slightest thing to get a piece of that. Because if the trend is the same as last year, and I’m sure it will, you have until the end of this month to capture all that traffic and maximize your profits from your website.

Happy Bloggin!

–
Francisco H. Perez
Bloggin Professional DJ in Houston