Bloggin’ For Wedding Vendors

Every Post I write has specific objective, whether it’s to inform, to teach, or to prove something to work, I write to create something useful for my readers.

Most people still don’t trust blogs as a form of marketing, or think it’s not worth the time and effort, or whatever excuse they’ve made up in order not to jump into bloggin’. So this post is for those of you…

In my Houston DJ website, I recently published an article promoting the upcoming Houston Bridal Extravaganza Show, the main objective is, of course, to inform my readers and to make them aware of the show and how successful it can be to attend. I think all brides will find it useful, so I promoted it because I believe in it. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) objective is, of course to rank high for the words Houston Bridal Extravaganza Show, on the search engines and have the brides click on my link and get some free publicity that way.

This can be referred to as white hat SEO, since I am not doing anything illegal or anything that goes against any ethics. I am simply using the power of my blog to put my website in front of where I think the brides will go, by providing valuable information to them… as a result Google.com awards me with a very high ranking for my website.

Want Proof?

Google (without quotes): “Houston Bridal Extravagazna Show”, “Bridal Extravaganza Show”, or “Houston Bridal Extravaganza” and see the results for yourselves. Also notice how you will get different results for each set of keywords.

If you notice, my DJ in Houston Website, FHPEntertainment.com shows up in the top of the search results (in cases over huge corporate websites like the Houston Chronicle: See Picture above), and that’s only because of the length of time that I’ve been bloggin’ consistently. Again, the hardest part is getting started.

So, this is just one of the perks of consistent bloggin’, building up great content for both the search engines and the readers.

Oh, and of course the end results is, more visiting my website, seeing my name and face, and of course getting to trust me because I’m everywhere.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Bloggin DJ in Houston

I am NOT a search engine marketing guru, but I hold #1 and #2 spots on all the search engines for ALL my targeted keywrods.

Ranking high on the search engines is crucial if you do any kind of online marketing. The people who know the secrets want to charge you an arm an a leg for something they cannot guarantee. Once you stop paying them, you lose out on the benefit and you see your search traffic and website visitors die down.

Blogging allows you to keep your website up to date. Just by writing at least once a week, you can keep your search engine rankings and your search traffic at a constant level and you don’t have to depend on your online marketer for your website’s success.

Here are a few tips to consider if you want your search engine traffic to remain at a constant level.

1. Post to your Blog Often.

   Search engines want to give its users, the brides (or anyone using the search engine), the most up-to-date results as well as the most relative results when they search for something. The rule of thumb I use is, the longer I go without posting to my blog, the lower my search engine result will be. Ideally I would like to post an article every weekday to my blog, but in reality I only get to do so about once or twice a week. Also, if you establish a fan base for your blog, they will expect to read from you often. They want that free, valuable advice you have to give them. Some visitors will even rely on what you have to say. Even though at first you may think this is not good for your business, it is. Giving away, free valuable advice helps those brides that are about to make a decision.

2. Target a Wide Variety of Keywords in your Titles.

   The bloggers with most creative minds will prevail here. Being creative is key to gaining getting a successful blog going. Everyone is creative, everyone has a unique twist to things, it’s just a matter of trusting yourself and doing it. Especially if it’s different and nobody has done it before. In a previous post, How to find Related Search Engine Terms, I give you an idea of how to find some popular keywords, I even gave you some of mine so you can just change it to fit your niche inside the wedding industry. For example, I am running a series of blog posts that pertain to a specific venue and adding what I do to it. Let me show you.. Now this may seem like something easy to come up with, but who do you know that’s doing it.. Nobody? I thought so.. Again Easy to do, it took some creative thinking on my side (patting myself on the back) and it has worked like a charm.

   Examples: Paraiso Marabilla Wedding DJ in Houston, Bella Terraza DJ Houston, and Sweetwater Country Club DJ.

   Whenever the people search for either of those venues my website comes up, whenever they look for a DJ that has DJ’ed that venue i should be one of the first websites to come up.

3. Install All in One SEO Pack for your Wordpress Blog.

   This one plugin for wordpress does all the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for you. You just install it and it does the rest. I’ve noticed about 20-30 more visitors to my website since I installed this tool. So all the keywords that I am targeting are getting ranked pretty well in google.com. Again, Search Engine Optimization is critical for getting your blog listed on the Search engines and this does EVERYTHING for you. Without this, the previous step is useless

4. BONUS TIP:

   Always, always, always… Aim to help someone with your experience. If your blog is not about helping others, it will never succeed no matter how far high in the search engines you get it. SEO is for the robots that crawl your webpage, but good, juicy, helpful content is for the readers that land on your site. Think of it this way, brides are absolutely clueless about weddings, if you give them a golden nugget that saves them time, saves them money, or saves them both… you will hold a place in their mind and fighting for mind space is what all marketers are aiming to do. Once you are in their mind as someone they can trust… you’ve made a happy customer.

Blogging success, like anything else, does not require a brain surgeon…err marketing guru, just a little work and determination. Follow the 3 tips above and you are on your way to reaching success through blogging.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Owner and Blogger of a Wedding DJ in Houston Blog

This past weekend, June 7th 2008, I showed up at my wedding, greeted the Wedding Coordinator, Mandy Millen from Every Little Detail, who did a great job and was there working great as a team with me. I would highly recommend her to anyone looking for a Wedding coordinator who is on top of things.

Then the photographer showed up and I was pleasantly surprised to see Dave Jones, who I’ve never formally met but always ran into at all the NACE Meetings that I’ve attended. It was a pleasure to finally formally meet him . He mentioned he had a blog, gave me his card and this morning I checked out his blog, which included pictures of the Recent NACE 50th Birthday Celebration in Houston. His pictures are amazing. I was there and he really captured some great still shots of that day. I looked at his blog this morning and let me tell you, this man has an eye for photography. His pictures are great quality, colors are very vivid and the images are unbelievably beautiful. I added a link to his blog on my Vendor Blog Links Section, just to the right of this page and you will see a link to his blog, where he showcases a few of his beautiful pictures.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco,
Blogger Wedding DJ in Houston

To prove the point of how effective blogs are, let’s do a case study on a website I released a few months ago. It’s ran by a blog.

In January, I was at a wedding reception doing the Master of Ceremonies and DJ duties. They had this one thing I had never seen at a wedding before, and to tell you the truth, at first I was very skeptical about how it would work. Well, to my surprise it was a huge success, people lined up for hours to take their turn in this new phenomenon… Ok, I’m exaggerating, it was not a phenomenon, but it sure seemed like it. What was it?

It was a Photo Booth,

…the same concept as in the malls, but this was portable and was all digital. People lined up for hours to wait their turn at the picture booth.

So being the entrepreneur that I am, I thought, wow that would be a great thing to offer. Especially since this one photo booth came all the way from Dallas Texas to provide their service.

You can find my website by doing a search in Google.com for “Houston Photo Booth” and you will see the website listed as #6 on the first page of the search results.

This was possible for a few reasons.

First, the power of the webstie, FHP Entertainment.com is so strong that if I place a link on my website for any website and add the right content, I can get any page indexed by Google.com. So that’s what I did, I wrote a small launch post for the new Photo Booth Rental Service in Houston I had started.

Second, I decided to use a Wordpress blog and an existing free template. So the design time was NOTHING. It was already done for me. All I had to do was come up with the content and fill up the website with the content that I thought would compel people that visited the website to take an action.

Finally, because of the Blog Content that I added to capture as many keywords as I could think up. Using the same tip I gave out at the Related Search Engine Terms post, I took all the popular keywords for my DJ website and replaced them with photo booth.

What was the result?

The website was launched in February 11th, 2008, exactly 2 months today. I’ve had 23 people fill in the form for more information. A few other decided to call my phone number, and one other emailed me directly at my DJ website looking for pictures, pricing and availability.

A couple booked the service within the first phone call and a few wanted more pics of it being used. I will dare say that about 10 people out of those 23 will book the service. Not bad for 0 advertising.

As it stands, my form sends out one emial at this time. The pricing information.

Hope you can see how powerful bloggin’ is.

Happy Bloggin!

–

Francisco H. Perez
Wedding DJ Blogger

Tracking your visitors is essential to your website’s success. Not only do you want to know how many visitors your website is getting, you also want to know where they are going, or how they are leaving your website.

As a wedding vendor, you have only a small amount of time to capture your bride’s attention, offer them something they want or need, and get them to take some sort of action.

Once they are gone from your website, there is a good chance they are never coming back. If there is nothing compelling them to call you or email you, you’ve lost that bride or potential client for good.

If you know nothing about copy writing, now is the time to find out about it and use some copy writing techniques to compel your visitors to take action.

What is Copy Writing:

Copywriting is the process of writing the words that promote a person, business, opinion, or idea. It may be used as plain text, as a radio or television advertisement, or in a variety of other media. The main purpose of writing this marketing copy, or promotional text, is to persuade the listener or reader to act — to buy a product or subscribe to a certain viewpoint, for instance. Alternatively, copy might also be intended to dissuade a reader from a particular belief or action. Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting

In short, copywriting is a technique, or techniques, where by you, the website owner, arrange the words on your site to instill trust, inform about your product or service, and get your reader to want your product or service over your competition.

Quite simply put, if your visitors are leaving your website without taking action, it’s not because your website is ugly (well not entirely), or because you have bad information, or because you don’t differentiate yourself from the competition…

It’s because you don’t use a copywriting technique that does all that and then compels your reader to take an action; to call you, to email you, to subscribe to your newsletter, to subscribe to your blog, etc.

But you can’t know that if you don’t track your visitors and what pages they visit, what pages they exit your website from, what pages they land on, what search engine terms they use to arrive at your website etc…

By knowing all this, you can find out exactly where your website need improvement and thus you are able to maximize your time and efforts on improving only that portion of your site.

OK, already I’m convinced, but what are my options?

It’s a good thing you asked.

Visitor Tracking Options

I use a free software that I installed on my website. It’s called Trace Watch, and you can download it from their website at www.tracewatch.com. Installing it may be a job for someone more technically inclined, like your web guy.

Your other option is to use, Google.com’s analytic program. This one may be more convenient because all you have to do is add a few lines of code to your pages and they do all the tracking. There is no additional software to install. It’s free, it’s good, and it will do just about everything you need. The only thing it won’t do that Trace Watch does is that it will not give you every page that your visitor visits. Read more about it at Google Analytics.

In conclusion, if you are able to find the leaks, so to speak, of your website, then you will be able to plug them by filling them up with the content that your visitors are looking for or will compel them to take any form of action. By capturing those confused website visitors, you will in turn get more money from your website.

Happy Bloggin!

–
Francisco H. Perez
Wedding Blogger!

As I mentioned before, blogging is a great way to get in front of the bride that is looking for information related to your topic, niche, or business.

In my previous Post, How to Blog, I mentioned I am trying to attract the brides that are looking for a Wedding DJ in Houston, Houston Wedding DJ, Houston Bilingual DJ, Houston DJ, DJ in Houston, etc… and those are the terms that are booking my DJ services, however, there are terms that are less popular and may even be searched once a year but they still bring in Customers and there is really no way to know about them. Since the website, www.fhpentertainment.com, has a lot of content built up, it gets traffic for keywords that I have never imagined it would get traffic for. Here is a short list of keywords that people used just Yesterday, April 7th, 2008.

Google.com Search Terms

1. houston april 6 bridal show featured photographers
2. Houston Quinceanera photography
3. costs to rent ballrooms in Houston
4. dress sweet xv
5. good DJs in Houston
6. master of ceremonies duties
7. houston bridal extravaganza show January pictures
8. top requested songs of 2007
9. party halls in houston
10. Bridal Show At reliant

Yahoo.com Search Terms

1. weddings halls in houston
2. happymoments wedding website
3. top 2007 wedding songs
4. wedding exit songs
5. mascorro photography
6. latino bridal show and quinceanera in houston
7. latin songs weddings
8. father daughter quinceanera songs
9. quince dj in houston
10. Galveston yachts for affordable parties and Houston, TX

Some are related to my topic and some are related to the entire industry. They only reason they are arriving at my website is that I have a lot of content related to the search terms above. Also, one thing most people don’t realize is that the term, “DJ in Houston,” will get different results than “good DJs in Houston.”

Also, this is just for ONE DAY, a day which I received 142 unique visits, 162 sessions (some visitors came back to my website), 543 hits/page views, 42 Google.com visitors, and 22 Yahoo.com Visitors.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a lot of visitors. Of course not all of them book or request my information. Yesterday I received 3 NEW email inquiries and 2 NEW PHONE inquiries. Not bad for one source of Marketing. A month I am getting anywhere from 5-20 email inquiries. That is 20 people that liked what they read and wanted me to contact them via email.

I could go on, but you get the idea, bloggin’ is a great tool that very few wedding vendors tap into. The ones who do, do not understand the power or how to properly utilize a blog.

How to find your search engine terms

Here is a quick tip on how to find your search engine terms. Replace your business niche, category, or profession with the terms I am aiming for in my own blog. Example:Change “DJ in Houston” for “Photographer in Houston” and see where your website ranks in Google.com, Yahoo.com, or MSN.com. If you don’t see it anywhere, we’ve got some work to do.

Next, go to Google.com and use their free keyword tool. Type the keywords you think brides might use to find your website, and see how popular they are and how much money advertisers are spending on those keywords.

It may be a bit complicated for some people, but try it anyways, it’s free and you will gain a lot of knowledge just by typing in one word… Go Try it now… Click Here

^Here’s to Bloggin’

–

Francisco Perez
Owner of the Wedding DJ Blog at www.fhpentertainment.com