Blogging Inspiration: Wedding Blogging

I’ll start the new year off with a post inspired by an email from my personal life that should be a good read for those considering blogging professionally.

The New York Times ran an article several days ago on the opportunities and challenges of small business owners blogging, summing up blogging as a "low-cost, high return marketing tool" in the column headline.

I received a surprising, wonderful example of this from the photographer, Ileana Ravasio at Tropical Imaging, who shot my wedding last month. She wrote my wife and I a few weeks after the wedding to tell us that she wrote about our wedding on her blog, which describes the ceremony, talks about how she captured it, and provides a number of examples (I’ll add that for her examples, she didn’t just pick a highlight reel; all of the hundreds of images are just as amazing).

For a photographer, this is perfect marketing. It’s great for winning over potential clients, for starters. Additionally, while right now there’s not too much competition where she’s based in Turks & Caicos, the islands are bustling and developing rapidly, and others might try to aggressively compete down the road. Tropical Imaging already owns top rankings for (without quotes ‘turks caicos photography’ and ‘turks caicos photographer,’ and the blog can potentially expand that further to other phrases like ‘turks caicos weddings.’

Consider all the others who can follow Ileana’s lead – the hotels, other reception venues, caterers, bands, florists and centerpiece designers, and all the others who provide wedding services, especially those in more competitive areas.

It’s one of these gifts that keeps giving. My wife and I will share this blog with tons of people (posting the link here is just gravy for them), and perhaps someone who’s not getting married will see the blog category for portraits and consider professional family photo shoot during an upcoming vacation there. Even if the blog post took an hour for resizing images, editing the text, and other fine tuning, that odd hour every few days may be the most effective marketing Ileana does outside of building relationships with hotels’ wedding coordinators.

Happy New Year, and thanks for your readership, which has kept this blog here and growing for its third New Year’s celebration (it was born in November 05).