I really like how the LookBook is viewed as a way of "increasing customer happiness." You're essentially helping the customer validate how great they feel about themselves for doing business with you, which I would expect goes a long way to keep them around as a customer.
Yes, exactly. It's one of the best ways we've found to differentiate ourselves in the wedding space — I'm really dedicated to being personal and real with our vendors, and promoting them as much as possible (like the lookbook, the blog is also primarily a promote-good-feelings-for-vendors tool). It just makes sense, since it more than pays off for our company and our bottom line in the long run.
What other solutions did you look at for printing and distribution for your print product, besides MagCloud?
I've been looking at different printing options and always seemed to get weighed down by the trade-off between lower cost (e.g printing myself or finding a large volume printer with low costs) or something more on-demand like MagCloud, which costs a bit more but gives you greater flexibility.
Since we're bootstrapping, we've pretty much only looked at MagCloud for the past three editions, but for the Spring edition coming out next year, I'm definitely looking into printing it ourselves. If I went that route, I'd probably look into a local printer so I could ensure press quality rather than another online solution.
I liked going with MagCloud to start too because it allows us to not worry at all about the printing aspect to start — I feel a lot more comfortable with the production of the lookbook so now we can branch out into printing solutions which'll cost less but take more of our time.
Keep in mind that the cost through MagCloud is only when someone buys — free to upload and distribute, and you can just tack on a "profit" to their base cost per issue.
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.
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).
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.
This is refreshing. The value of print gets lost too often, but here it finds a very nice home. I'm impressed with the process to create the actual print book with so many vendors in it. I expect there is a market for auto-generating magazine-like publications from a database of some sort. Very cool.
It's too bad EasyCatalog costs so much, but I expect that's they're targeting big name, high-budget publishers. I was very pleased to see the trial, and would love to buy if I could — it does what it says it does very well. That said, I'm still on the lookout for better, cheaper solutions for next time.
It's not crazy expensive compared to the value of the labor you're automating; but yes, it's steep for an individual if you're not yet producing revenue.
For something similar (and priced differently), we use software from http://emsoftware.com/ to import data into InDesign to automate some of the production of Kirkus Reviews' print magazine.
I'm more interested in what lazyloading plugin you are using for jQuery -- is there an out-of-the-box one that works in Nov 2012, or did you make your own?
Out of the entire article, that's the question? ;) I kid... it's a Wordpress plugin - Lazy Load v0.5. We haven't had any issues with it, would definitely recommend.
Well this is fun - thanks for sharing. Have you found anything that's similar to MagCloud but operates on a push-button API basis? I didn't see an API link on MagCloud when I clicked around for a bit.
