From the Experts, General Tips, Your Event Career
Getting Your Work Published
QC tutor Regina Osgood is the owner and creative director of Meant2Be events, a top Arizona wedding planning firm that manages over 250 weddings a year.
One of the best and most cost effective ways to spread the word about your business and services is through online publications. In this day and age, people search digitally for their wedding vendors, so the more exposure you get, the more likely you are to grab their attention and win their business!
While it’s certainly effective for the seasoned pro, there are two reasons why it’s even more critical for a planner in the infancy stage of growing their business. First, it’s cheap! Seriously, of all forms of marketing, the incredible value you can get from a blog post from a recognized source is amazing!
The second is the technical side. Publication helps grow the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site in a Google search. Google is making it harder and harder to “cheat” the system (which can be good and bad for a new business). So getting your work published is a great way to grow your organic search capabilities (for those new to the SEO game, an organic search is a search result that doesn’t come from paid advertising).
The Secrets to Getting Published
First, think of this as a job interview. If you were interviewing at Apple, would your resume include your cooking skills? Of course not. It would include your tech abilities! So do your research before submitting to any old blog.
If you want to submit a baby shower you planned, make sure the blog has a similar style and posts lifestyle shoots. It sounds like standard stuff, right? But you’d be surprised! The number one reason for rejection you will get from the editor is it doesn’t fit our content or direction.
Next, fill out their submission forms COMPLETELY. Your submission can be automatically thrown out if you leave parts blank. Publications get so many random submissions that they’ll take any reason they can get to skip looking at yours.
Plus, it’s all about the details. Blogs want to tell a story, so make sure that at least 70% of your pictures are of details. They should be both horizontal and vertical, as some blogs will only feature a certain orientation.
Lastly, it’s a numbers game. If you submit once, you have terrible odds of getting published. If you submit everything—and I mean everything—something will most likely get picked up!
My final tip (worth its weight in gold, I might add), is that when you get that acceptance notification, chances are you’re getting it from the source: the decision maker, usually the editor.
Now you have the direct line! Instead of using the general submission form next time, you can send a personalized email to the head honcho for consideration. It was a game changer for us, and now about 80% of our submissions get published on the first try! It’s not just what you know, but who you know.
Cheers, and happy planning!
Check out some more of Regina’s work below!
