Wedding+Blog+Mania

Hello all. I am creating a wedding blog, primarily because I recently got engaged but also because there is an alarmingly active community of wedding-obsessed bridezilla DIYers out there who lose their minds over cupcake towers and letterpress invites. I will attempt to create a successful wedding blog, but also a unique one. I will actively comment and participate in conversations that are happening out there in the blog industry.
 * Shelby Falk Section 302 Identity and Social Networking: Blogging

Here is a link to my wedding blog, [|'MidWEDst'] **

02/24/2010- Steady Readership, but lower number of hits
My blog peaked on 2/19 with 599 hits, and since then has been slowly declining. I seem to be averaging around 150 hits a day now, which triples my average pre-video explosion. Total hits on the video is 5,600 and counting. One other funny thing is Joe got spotted today by a stranger who recognized him from my blog! Oh, funny internet fame.

02/19/2010- Internet still Exploding
Up to 420 hits at 4:00 PM today. I got reposted on Broke Ass Bride and have been getting lots of traffic from Offbeat still.

02/18/2010- Blog Blow UP
Offbeat Bride featured my proposal video as their Wedding Trends post today. I watched gleefully as people started getting bounced to my blog. Wordpress was down for a few hours today, which is disappointing because I could have gotten wayyy more hits, I think.... but I got 257 hits today, which doubles my record hit of 90 the day before. My Vimeo, on the other had has gone from 5 views to something like 1,180. Geez. Let's see if the traffic sustains.





02/17/2010- Accepted!
My video was accepted by Offbeat, and will run tomorrow! Posts to come! I'm also having an unusual amount of hits today... I wonder if all the Shopboppers who read my blog are sharing it with friends today. Just a theory.

02/12/2010- Submitting to the Big Blogs
I submitted a video to Offbeat Bride and Oncewed today... let's see what happens. Traffic is slowing down on the blog, so hopefully this would revive it a bit.

02/07/2010- Losing steam
I skipped my first day. No new post. I just kind of burned out.... I think I should started lining up some more content so I can just publish it without having to sit down and write the new content on the spot. No wonder bloggers want sponsorship, it is really quite a job.

02/05/2010- A comment a day...
Trying to build an audience by commenting on one big blog a day, hoping people will click back to my page from the comments. I checked my stats and the comment clicks have been really helping. I have NOT advertised my blog on my facebook... so any friends that are reading found it on their own, or through my other blog... which no one really reads so it doesn't count. I have also been tagging the hell out of my posts to attract all kinds of people: tags like 'free stuff' and 'diy' are buzz words people like when talking about weddings. I am still waiting to unleash my secret weapon upon the internet community when I have more content generated. Look out, brides.

02/05/2010- My blog is looking good
Lots of traffic, and my first feature about a local artist!

02/04/2010- 51 views in one day!


=02/03/2010- OMG my first comment... and a pretty big one!= So, I totally got a comment from Rebecca, the editor from [|Clover and Bee] ! What I learned from this: name drop a lot more often in order to get noticed! And have more original material to keep them looking!

02/02/2010- A Contributer
I just had a woman email me about contributing to my blog! That would be a great way to get fresh material up without having to do it all myself.


 * Strategies:** So, as I started perusing existing wedding blogs, I had to analyze what kind of content made a blog successful. The mother of all wedding blogs, OnceWed seemed like a good place to start. I read OnceWed's creedo: "Emily Newman, 24, launched Once Wed in March 2008 as the only free listing service for wedding dresses after selling her own wedding dress online and realizing how few resources there are for women looking to do the same. The site now offers brides everything from real weddings and inspiration galleries to modern DIY wedding projects. Her widely read blog is updated daily with real weddings, DIY projects, and so much more. With over 2.3 million pageviews a month, Once Wed has grown into one of the top wedding resources on the internet today. "

Newman's strategy is to be very selective about the aesthetic of her blog: paying especially close attention to images. She will not run collections that have been submitted to other blogs, she only includes exclusive content. I imagine this is to keep people coming back for more of her meticulously selected diy/cute brand of wedding imagery.

So what's a start up blogger to do? Write original content? Feature local vendors? Interview brides or artists? Put up tons of images? I realized this can only be answered when I come up with my blog's mission statement. Right now I am currently just organizing things I've found... but I think in order to earn readers I will have to be more strategic. I need to write original content that is unique to the midwest, that subscribes to a certain aesthetic and that is useful to brides. I need to post frequently to keep people coming back.

It seems that consistency and originality is what will win readers to your side. I must post daily in order to have a wealth of info for readers. I call this phase one; generating content. Phase two will be aggressivly getting fans to my site. I plan on doing this with some aggressive marketing using some original content/secret weapon. Let's see if it works.

01/29/2010- RSS confusion
I'm beginning to wonder if I should have hosted my site on Blogger... it kind of seems like nothing is going on on Wordpress. How the heck to you get subscribers anyways? I added an RSS feed via Feedburner in the hopes of people checking in that way. I also put up a way for people to subscribe via email. I must admit, I've never read RSS feeds before, I've always just navigated to the site. So I decided to start subscribing to rss feeds and actually check my Google reader daily. I've also decided I need to be way more active on commenting on other blogs/recruiting where existing communities exist. I still don't have much content, so there is not much incentive to go to my blog. I need to become more emerged in this community in order to attract more readers.

Article Commissions
I don't know very much about the content I am supposedly blogging about, so I think I need to get some guest writers. My approach so far has been to just write about what I know (which is free stuff that is out there), but now it's time to get some original content assembled that is aesthetically pleasing. Right now I am going to email 2 florists, a graphic designer and a photographer to do little writeups for me.