Long gone are the days when wedding photographers used to capture beautiful images, turn them into albums or prints, and eventually forget them. With the advancement of technology, photographers have so many ways of storing and seeing their work over and over. They can share their amazing work at different platforms and attract potential clients. This has helped them build a name and earn recognition in the wedding photography industry.
Although most photographers these days share their work on social media, a good number out of them ignore the benefits of blogging. Blogging is one of the most beneficial tools for your business.
You can start your own blog and also make submissions to other popular wedding blogs, which have a mass appeal and reach out to a larger audience. You send them your images with some description and voila! They beautifully craft a well-worded blog featuring you and showcasing your images.
Here’s how getting published on popular wedding blogs can help your photography career:
Get Published on Wedding Blogs! The Advantages
1. Add Value To Images
Sharing the images you captured recently at a wedding with a gracefully knitted love story of your bride and groom adds tremendous value to those photographs.
2. Be Personable When You Try to Get Published
Sharing your experience while shooting the wedding, your emotions while photographing some intimate moments, the feel of the venue— your past, present as well as potential clients love to read it all.
3. Attract Past & Future Clients
Your clients may not be interested in the technicalities of your gear but would love to hear how you enjoyed playing with light and greenery in the background. How great the decorations were and how amazing the bridal party was.
4. Ideas For Future Brides & Clients
Future brides love to read stories of real weddings to get ideas to plan their own. When you impress them with your blogs, you ensure you stay top of their minds and are much more likely to be chosen as their wedding photographer when they decide to look for one.
5. Create Strong Referrals
Your past brides and grooms would love to refer you to their family and friends once you blog their wedding and make a place for yourself into their good books.
6. Build Relationships With Vendors When Your Try to Get Published
Past vendors, you worked with can bring in a lot of bookings for you if you establish a warm relationship with them by tagging them in your posts. It’s a win-win situation for you both. People see their great work through your images and book them. In return, they refer you to their clients.
7. Gain Attention Of Creatives
Creatives love them! I’ve heard from a lot of art buyers and photo editors that they like looking at photographers’ blogs. Blogs offer RSS feeds, which automatically allows for syndication of your entries to a wide audience.
8. Look Professional
Running a blog makes you look much more professional than the ones who do not have it. It makes you look genuine, trustworthy, and human.
9. Market Your Brand When You Try to Get Published
You get to market your uniqueness and set up a brand in the market through blogging. You can market a fun logo and your quirky style.
10. Be Easily Accessible Through SEO
Search engines love them! While your website may have little to no copy on it, blogs can be filled with keyword-heavy copy and tags, making it easier for search engines and creatives to find you online (increasing your SEO).
Now you know it is important and also beneficial for your wedding photography business to have a blog, But you are not very sure about how you can make submissions to some of the top wedding blogs.
Further Read: SEO For Photographers: Boosting Photography Websites & Blogs
Read the basic rules of making a submission here:
10 Steps to Get Published on a Wedding Blog
- Please check with the couple before submitting their wedding.
- Consider the publication’s style. One of the most important factors that will increase your chance of being featured is to make sure that your submission is a good fit with the wedding blog’s editorial style.
- Always check the submission guidelines on the submit page. One might be a little different from the other. Follow the recommended submission process. Each publication will have its own preferred method of receiving submissions.
- Check exclusivity requirements. Exclusive wedding blogs will in most cases want exclusive content that has not been featured anywhere else online. Alternatively, an exclusive blog might just require first publishing rights with a specific window period of exclusivity, after which the wedding/shoot can be submitted elsewhere.
- Be straight-up about previous features.
- Follow up before resubmitting elsewhere. Sometimes the wedding blog you submitted to might be dealing with a backlog. Perhaps your email was not received. Maybe the publication emailed you for more information, but their email ended up in your spam folder.
- Address the editor personally. Addressing the editor as Hey you! or Hi there? It is unprofessional and your submission might end up being ignored.
- Format the images properly in terms of size. Do not include 3500 images in your submission. An initial real wedding submission should ideally consist of 50 – 150 images. Do not include collaged images or duos.
- Name the file or folder using your name, not the blog’s name.
- For styled shoots, always include all vendor credits and a write up about the shoot. Include all of your social media handles.
Once you are aware of the basic rules and have your heart set at getting published, the question arises as to where can you get published. Check out Two Bright Lights to find a great resource for where to get published! You can submit your images to and see the magic it does to your brand and recognition. Here is a blog post we wrote with Two Bright Lights on how to submit weddings for publication.
Top 5 Wedding Blogs to Get Published On
What we are looking for here are the wedding blogs that have had the most influence on the industry as a whole and the most influence on wedding trends and styling as of late. Some wedding blogs have very niche aesthetics, while others, such as Borrowed and Blue, have a very broad scope.
1. Style Me Pretty
Style Me Pretty has become the most recognized name in wedding blogs, and has become a household brand by actually being very niche in their aesthetic. They receive 500 to 600 submissions a week and accept less than three percent. Submitting to Style Me Pretty can be done directly through their online submission dashboard. You can submit to them here.
2. Martha Stewart Weddings
Martha Stewart Weddings is a mega-brand and in the world of weddings is known for upscale and celebrity weddings. Submitting to the site is a bit unique as well. They request an email with specific information and three to five images attached. You can read about their submission rules here.
3. Wedding Chicks
The images surrounding Wedding Chicks include the standard editorial cake and invitation suite photos, but seem to center around people and the emotional connections of the wedding day more so than many of the other blogs that have found high-profile success. The site has its own online form and they ask that you upload the images directly, but also link to a larger Dropbox gallery.
4. Green Wedding Shoes
Green Wedding Shoes is all about the abnormal and unexpected. More specifically, the blog aims to feature weddings that are styled uniquely to the couple and feature different and personalized details. If you are interested in getting published on the blog, the submission application is on the site; you simply fill it out and link it to your Dropbox.
5. 100 Layer Cake
100 Layer Cake is all about real, usable wedding inspiration. Fun, airy images fill the blog and bring brides and grooms inspiration and concepts that they can bring right into their own wedding experience. Their submission process is a bit flexible: you can either send them a Dropbox gallery from your event or upload 15 to 20 low-resolution JPEGs in an email, and you don’t have to send all of your vendor credits in the initial email; if accepted, they will send you a form to fill in for all of the needed info.
Some other popular wedding blogs you can consider are- The Knot, Ruffled, Once Wed, Junebug Weddings, Rock My Wedding, and Offbeat Bride
PROTIP: We suggest using a platform like Two Bright Lights to submit your weddings. It’s easy. You can organize your weddings into albums, enter all relevant information pertaining to that wedding, and have access to hundreds of publications all in one place! Trust us, it saves a lot of time.
Conclusion on How to Get Published
We hope this was helpful to anyone trying to get published on wedding blogs or thinking of submitting to them. Having your work shared on blogs can do so much for your business, so if you aren’t submitting, we would highly encourage you to do so.
Here’s some more great blogs we wrote on getting published! Check this one out on 4 SIMPLE TRICKS TO GETTING YOUR IMAGES PUBLISHED and this one on TOP 5 TIPS FOR GETTING YOUR IMAGES PUBLISHED.
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