How To Start a Wedding Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your wedding blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

The fact that you are reading this article means you have a pretty good idea of what you want your blog to be about - you are creating a wedding blog! But there is a lot of room in the subject of weddings to get more specific, which is what you need to do to attract an audience. Are you writing a wedding blog for people with children? A destination wedding blog? A wedding blog for those on a budget?

Decide specifically what you want your blog to be about to ensure you get off to a strong start.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on Wedding Blogs 100 all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

You need the right sized subject, one that is not as broad as “weddings” - because you can’t stand out in such a broad category. But you want something less narrow than “wedding shoes from 1989” because going too narrow risks running out of things to write about. Finding something in the middle is ideal.

Some examples of niche wedding blogs are:

• Budget Weddings Blog - Wedding for $1000
• Wedding Photography Blog - Chrisman Studios
• Wedding Dress Blog - Bride Chic

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

sThe strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

Are you writing to recent college grads who are looking to tie the knot, or are you writing to older couples who have already been married and want to make the next one last? Regardless of what your content is going to cover, knowing your audience is important because it helps you speak to that audience and come up with topics they will love.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect wedding blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your wedding blog may include:

• StyleMePretty.com
• ArtfullyWed.com
• RuffledBlog.com
• BrideAppeal.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like-minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your wedding blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

A great option for evergreen articles on a wedding blog is wedding basics - the things that do not change significantly from year to year. While styles and approaches to weddings definitely shift over time, some things remain fairly consistent. The bride needs to pick a dress in most weddings, which means that articles about choosing a dress will be evergreen. Once you know your niche you can build out your evergreen content from there.

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

Compelling videos that teach your audience how to do things tend to serve your audience well, which makes them a strong choice for video content. If you teach couples how to plan their own wedding, you could make videos showing how to go through each stage of the process. Your videos may not look amazing to start with, but they will improve if you keep making them and keep learning. You can take courses on making videos, or just learn from free resources online. Keep at it so that you can gain the skills you need to produce videos you are proud of.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

Depending on your niche, you are probably going to come across news topics on a regular basis. You might write about wedding styles, or celebrity weddings, both of which will give you endless topics for news-type content. Keep your eyes peeled for news as you go about your regular research and write posts when it seems appropriate. Just don’t forget that news is only usually interesting when it is new, so avoid waiting too long to write about a topic.

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

There are many good options for image-heavy content on wedding blogs. While your niche may vary, chances are your audience will look forward to seeing beautiful photos of weddings and wedding-related photos. You can take your own photos, use photos you find or purchase online, or both. 

For how-to articles, you can take photos that demonstrate how to do what you are explaining, such as how to make a wedding dress. Your photos will make the process easier to understand for your readers and will fulfill their desire for more images. You do not have to be a professional photographer to please your audience, just do your best to take photos that are of reasonable quality. Of course, if you can up your photo skills, you can often attract even more readers.

Mix and Match

You do not have to stick to one particular content delivery style with your blog, nor should you. The fact is, you can attract a bigger audience with a variety of content types than you can with one or two. You may feel more comfortable writing or taking photos, for example, but it is worth your time to try your hand at other types of content for the long-term success of your blog. Stretch yourself and tackle new content types regularly to gain skills and appeal to the biggest possible audience with your wedding blog.

How To Make Money From A Wedding Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a wedding blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

There is no shortage of affiliate programs for wedding bloggers. While your choice of affiliate programs will vary based on your niche and your personal preferences, there are some that you should definitely consider due to their popularity. 

My Wedding Favors is one such program. It is quite popular with wedding bloggers, offering a 100% low price guarantee to customers and a 12-14% commission rate for bloggers. They sell a wide variety of wedding favors and have excellent customer service, so your readers are likely to have a good shopping experience. 

Fifty Flowers is another big name in wedding blog affiliate programs. They have been the go-to choice for wholesale flowers for events and DIY weddings for some time now, and are likely to remain popular for the foreseeable future. They offer a 10% commission for any sales that you facilitate, and their average order is $300 - which means the commissions can really add up.

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

If your wedding blog focuses on teaching your audience how to do wedding-related things, such as plan their own wedding, you could create an online course that goes in-depth on the subject. You could even ask your audience about the specific struggles they have and address those challenges in your course. It may take some time and effort to produce a high-quality online course, but the financial rewards can be significant. You could sell such a course for $200 or more, depending on the subject.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

A wedding blog can be a great place to sell products, depending on your niche and your audience. You can test your audience’s interest in products offered by you without too heavy an investment. Purchase branded products that are inexpensive, such as stationary, buttons, stickers, and other similar products. You can then mark these up significantly before you sell them to your readers. If they love your inexpensive products, you can try to come up with higher-priced items to offer. a few dollars per copy and sell for a significant markup.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

If your wedding blog focuses on wedding planning, you can offer wedding planning services. If your blog focuses on wedding photography, you could offer to photograph weddings or to teach others how to do it. Just base your services on your niche and your personal skill set. 

You have positioned yourself as an expert through your blog, which means you can charge a good price for your services. However, try to avoid overcommitting - it can be easy to do when demand is high and the price is right. Your blog is what drivers your business and you need to maintain it diligently to keep your brand strong and your audience happy. Learn to balance your services and your blog for maximum profitability and longevity.

Next Steps To Get Your Wedding Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

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