TUMBLR for our vendors, IT IS EASY!  Blogging is an imperative part of any business these days.  Our prospective clients want to see what you have been working on lately and get a glimpse of your personality and your blog is the easiest way to keep things current.  TUMBLR is the easiest format to create a blog that I know of.  Follow these simple steps and you will have your blog set up in less than 30 minutes, I promise.

Before you start gather some photos that you would like to post.  If you don’t have any of your own, contact some of the photographers that have worked on weddings with you and ask them, typically they are more than happy to share as long as you give credit.

Second, decide what you want your blog to say about you.  Right now you have a clean slate to work with, decide the impression you want to make and start working on it.  (How often in life does this opportunity happen???)

Go to https://www.tumblr.com/login
Sign up with your email, a password and your url.  I strongly suggest you use your company’s name for your url.  For the Montana Wedding Guide it is montanaweddingguide.tumblr.com

One of the many great things about Tumblr is that you can create many blogs and manage it from one account.  For example, I have my one account under my name and from a drop down menu I can blog about Montana Wedding Guide, Nashan Photographers, and my husband’s businesses as well.

Now you can create as many blogs as you want and a theme to go along with each.  If you want to get really fancy you can have someone design a page for you that matches your web site, otherwise you can keep it easy and choose one of the ready mades.

Call your web designer, tell them your TUMBLR url and ask them to link it to your web site and voila you are officially in the 21st century!

Once that is set up, you are ready to start blogging.  If you have created more than one blog choose the one you want to write an entry for.  On the top bar you will see a set of buttons giving you the option to add text, photo, quote, link, etc.  I almost always like to blog with photos, so I usually click on the Photo button.  Upload the photo I want, write a little blurb about it and hit the publish button.

If you have questions the Help center at TUMBLR is easy and smart.  Look up your idea and questions.  In our next newsletter we will post some ideas on what to blog about and how to make a blog campaign easy to create and execute.

If you are looking for a fun weekend of photography learning and a lot of other fun things check out the details of Larry’s photo workshop.

http://www.montana-photo-workshops.com/2011/820/

Dear Vendors,

After much thought and consideration we have decided to dedicate our energy to making the Montana Wedding Guide have an even stronger web presence and following.  Instead of printing a guide we will be distributing postcards throughout the state directing people to our site for more traffic on our web page.  At a time when we have to save our natural resources and as our client base relies more on the internet for information it makes more sense to work on our internet marketing rather than in printed material.

With that in mind we will be sending out a newsletter that will detail some of the new ideas we are implementing.  If you have ideas that you would like to share please speak now as we are always open to hearing what you think would be helpful.

Thank you all for your continued support.  Check back with us in a few days to see our new PR piece for the 2012 year.

Melanie

Have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend.

While shopping at The Drawing Room in Livingston, the perfect place to get yourself or someone you love a great gift or some delicious tea, Trish introduced me to another woman in the shop named Mary who owns The Handbag Tailor.

She has created a store that is the mddle man for handmade bags of upcoming designers.  You can even have them design and make a bag specifically for you.  You can search their wide variety of products online and get a very practical and beautiful carry on garment bag made of linen and yellow cowhide to use on your way out to Montana for your wedding.

Or this great purse that Mary had over her shoulder, which I absolutely loved, a large tote handbag in rich Varese Argentine leather.  Unfortunately I tried to download some photos of the bags that I loved and could not, so you will have to visit her site and go through her selection yourself.

Most of the time when you hire a photographer the options come with an engagement portrait session.  Engagement photos are a great opportunity for you and your photographer to get to know each other.  If your photographer offers that as an option say yes and have a fun time with each other.  You can get some wonderful shots that capture how much you love each other.

Wedding vendors, this advice for you.  Some of you may know about Google Analytics and others may not.  If you are not familiar with the tool you should google it right now.  It is free tracking software that can be an invaluable tool for your business.  If you don’t have it set up you can ask your web designer to do the work and after about an hour or so you should be able to start tracking your visitors preferences on your site.  The program will allow you to find out how your clients find your site, where they come from on the web, and what they do once they are on your site.  This is turn can help you fine tune your web site to make the most of the way your prospective clients navigate your site.

Over the next few weeks we will look at the various tools within Analytics that are the most useful.  Once you have been tracking your site for about a month or so you can start analyzing your content.  My favorite aspect of the program is under the content tab and then select In-Page Analytics.  This is a Beta program which basically means they are test driving this option.  Once you click on the option your web site will come up in a window.  Within that window you will see percentage notes.  These denote where your visitors go on each page.  While looking at it yesterday for my husbands site we were able to see the parts of his site that were being neglected by his visitors because of the way it was designed.  Yesterday afternoon I called his designer and we will be making changes to the design to make it a bit more user friendly.

Check back with us in a couple of days to learn more tools within Google Analytics that can help you run a more successful business.