When my wife and I started out I got a website printed a few 11x14’s and did my first wedding show. I was not sure how to market myself. That was the fall of 05.

I have found at least in my area the best way of advertising or getting my name out is wedding shows. I do some web advertising but I don’t get a lot of work from it.

This is the start of our second year and we are starting to get some referrals but I think it takes a few years to build up a referral base so that you don’t have to do the wedding show’s. So tell me how you are doing it? I understand that every area is going to be different but it seems that at least in west Michigan it’s all about the wedding show.

Also for the people who don’t so wedding shows why? Do you think that wedding shows don’t attract the kind of brides that will spend 5K on a wedding? Or do you just not like doing wedding shows.

I think that right now we book about 70% of our weddings form the shows so for us it’s working?
sf

We do an occasional wedding show. It seems to be about every two years. This year we decided to skip it.

We don't do paid internet advertising.

Most of our weddings come through people doing internet searches and finding our website. It helps that we rank really high.

We also get a lot of referrals from Angie's List which is a thing you can join to check out ratings of all kinds of services. The only way you can be rated on the list is to have one of your clients add you. We have the most Angie's List evaluations for this area and all of them are great.

We also advertise in Columbus Bride magazine. It comes out twice a year and we used to advertise in both issues. We cut back to one this year, we'll see how that goes, it comes out next week.

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