[limedaring]

It started as a bunch of cold-emailing — that's probably how we get the first 100 or so vendors on our directories. The rest comes from things like the Lookbook (vendors sharing with their vendor friends), and our blog (we run a long of vendor-promotional posts, then new vendors sign up with us so they can participate). I try to keep vendor acquisition as easy as possible on our side since again, we're only two people. We're also launching new features on the directory side to further promote vendors encouraging other vendors to join.

WeddingWire does a LOT of vendor profile scraping — vendors can search for their name and find that WeddingWire created a profile for them, which encourages them to sign up and "claim" the profile. I won't deny it's a working tactic for them, but it leaves a bad taste in vendor's mouths and I'm not comfortable with it personally.

Another interesting thing they do is have a "WeddingWire Award" — which gets sent out to every vendor, practically. These vendors display the award on their websites, which gets more couples and vendors to sign up with WW. That's a good vendor acquisition tactic that I'm looking forward to improving on soon with WeddingLovely.

[arbuge]

Interesting, thanks. Could you post an example of one of the vendor-promotional posts that you mentioned? And how did you get the blog itself going? - did you have to do plenty of SEO work there to get it off the ground?

Also, how many vendors sign up for free vs. paid accounts in your experience?

(We're thinking of doing something like this involving local merchants (not wedding-related) - hence all the questions).

[limedaring]

Pretty much every post on http://weddinglovely.com/blog/ is by one of our vendors, uses our vendor's content, or promotes a vendor. :)

Blog just has been blogging at least 1x daily, getting the vendors who we promote to promote the posts about them, and making sure the SEO is semi-right (there is a big SEO issue I've yet to fix, but it's not disastrous).

Vendors almost always signup under a free account, and through these promotion opportunities, we eventually encourage about 10% to upgrade.

Hope that helps!

[arbuge]

Sure does... thank you.