You know what? One thing brides-to-be and recent brides love to pieces are wedding blogs. If you’ve ever been engaged you know you spent a lot of time surfing blogs, reading posts, looking at pictures and getting inspiration. And after the big day you’re still on the wedding high and continue to consume this media.
Why we love wedding blogs
There’s no denying wedding blogs are a great source of inspiration. You get ideas for dresses, hairstyles, decorations, venues, cakes, new photo angles. They tell us what’s trendy, what’s new, what’s different, what’s on vogue. And most of them feature real weddings, so you get inspiration from actual brides like you.
And they are so easy to follow! They’re right there, you just turn on your phone and see what’s new.
Your five minutes of glory
So, naturally, lots of brides would love a chance to be featured on their favorite blog, see your precious day posted for thousands of people to admire how great it all was -and give you one more kick out of your wedding, now that the day has passed, but you still want to enjoy the bride feeling.
It’s kind of a new trend: get married, select your best photos and submit to a blog to see if you are lucky enough to get picked among thousands of weddings.
Word of advice: don’t.
The blog trap
So how does it work? Each blog has its own guidelines for submitting. The rule of thumb is that you must submit a certain number of photos (50, 80, 100, etc), format them to a very specific size and resolution, fill out the application with all your details, write a short description of your wedding and your love story, credit all the vendors involved and cross your fingers.
This is what I did when I submitted my wedding to Green Wedding Shoes in 2015, shortly after my wedding.
I’m not going to say it was extenuating work, but formatting a few dozen pictures does take some time and effort even for a Photoshop expert like me. I couldn’t help but thinking how nice of them it would be to just let people submit their photos as they are and IF you get selected then you can do all that extra work of adjusting them to their specific technical needs.
Anyway, I did not get selected, but that’s the part I was sore about.
What bothered me was their reply. Basically they told me that they could not post my wedding because (QUOTE!) “We only publish weddings that are beautiful or interesting”
Now I’m asking you, was the insult really necessary?
Like, seriously, there was literally a million kinder ways to say that they’re not interested, without calling your wedding ugly and dull. If you run a wedding business, you should understand better than anyone the emotion and ethusiasm that every bride feels regarding her wedding. Like, who asnwers those e-mails? (Are they fired yet?)
So then it got me thinking: those blogs only exist because we, the brides, fuel them. Because we read them, follow them and love them. A blog is nothing without its audience, so isn’t a positive conection with your followers more important than anything?
They have endless wedding material, because we, the brides, supply it for free, even working hard to follow their format and guidelines, and we go through this effort without even knowing if we’re going to get featured at all -shouldn’t they at least be kind and grateful to their loyal followers for taking the time and trouble, rather than spitting the photos back on your face?
So, my advice to you: don’t bother submitting your photos to the giants of the industry. You don’t need a total (mean and bitter) stranger trashing your wedding. And, honestly, if you do get picked all you’ll get are five minutes of glory on a website that only cares about money but will never care about you.
A small business cares
ArteKys is a small business. I don’t have a million followers, but maybe one day I will. And I promise you, when that day comes, I will still treat each and every customer with respect and friendliness. Because it’s you, my audience, who make my business what it is, and I’m forever thankful.