Wedding Blogs & Directories: Still Relevant for Photographers in 2025?

I’ve seen it come up in photography groups time and time again. Many photographers have grown tired of wedding blogs and are questioning whether they are still a worthwhile marketing tool in a time where so many people are planning their weddings via Pinterest and social media sites such as TikTok or Instagram.

When you’re just starting out, getting your work featured on a blog is exciting. Slowly you start to collect a number of “Featured On” badges to display on your website. But after the dopamine of those initial features wears off, or you face a few rejections, many people stop submitting. And I get it. Submitting work to wedding blogs can be a time consuming process, and to go through it all, only to have your submission declined, can be quite demotivating.

I have a unique position when it comes to weddings blogs. I founded the wedding blog European Elopement Guide and also another blog that I sold back in 2020. Maybe that makes me biased, but I strongly believe that wedding blogs still have a very important role to play in the wedding industry, and should still be considered by photographers as a way of marketing their business. And in this post I want to explain why.

Different Ways To Work With Wedding Blogs

There are two main components to wedding blogs that are relevant to photographers: features and advertising. So I want to break them down and talk about the differences between them, and reasons why they may or may not be helpful to you for marketing your business.

Editorial Features

When I say Editorial Features, I’m referring to blog posts. These are features on the publication’s blog, such as a real wedding, elopement, styled shoot, or some other sort of client session. These types of features are often about showcasing an individual shoot and telling a bit of a background story to go alongside the photos.

Guest Posts are another form of editorial feature, but rather than focusing on the images, the post is designed more around sharing a particular point of view or advice on a specific topic that is relevant to the readers of the blog. These can be great for highlighting your expertise and strengthening your brand by being a voice of authority in your niche.

In the majority of cases, editorial features and guest posts are free (although in 2025 some publications are now only accepting submissions from paid members). That leads me neatly to the other way to work with wedding blogs, and that’s through paid advertising.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising on wedding blogs may cover a range of options, but these are the most common ones:

Directory listings – This is where you pay a fee to be listed in a directory of vendors, often by location. Most directories will allow you to have a vendor profile page, which allows you to share more information about you and your business, and this will appear in the search results when people are searching for the location associated with your membership. Some directories may allow you to be in multiple locations for an additional fee, or even the option to upgrade so that you appear higher on the list.

Sponsored Posts – Sponsored posts can often be similar to guest posts, but they usually have a more promotional angle than simply creating an informative post that paints you as an expert (without overtly selling yourself or your services). While sponsored posts are more common from vendors like venues or designers, some publications may offer them for any vendor category.

Banners or Sidebar Adverts – If you’ve ever been on any blog (not just wedding blogs), you’ve probably seen adverts within the blog content, or perhaps in the sidebar of the blog that advertise a particular business. These are usually a simple image with some text laid over that advertises a business, and when clicked on, takes you through to their site.

While these are the most common ways of paid advertising on wedding blogs, you may also find other options, such as social shares as blogs look to find additional ways to generate income. We’ll talk about whether these forms of paid advertising are worth it or not later in this post.

How can working with wedding blogs benefit your business?

The statistics are clear that many couples are using social media to plan their weddings more today than ever before. And Instagram and Pinterest are right at the top of those lists. So should you just concentrate your marketing efforts on those platforms and forget about blogs?

For anyone who has ever studied marketing, there is a thing called the “Rule of 7”. In other words, a potential client would need to come in to contact with you/your work an average of 7 times before they are ready to buy from you (or enquire about your services). But statistics are now showing that in the digital world that we live in today, this number is closer to 20 (and maybe even higher). That means we need to be getting out work out there even more if we want to get in front of our target clients.

This post isn’t about all the different ways that you can get in front of your target clients. I’ll do a future blog post on that. But I 100% believe that blogs are still one of the best ways to get your work seen. But it’s more than just publicity. Having your work featured on a blog has many benefits, but these are the main ones:

Backlinks

Social media might be powerful, but Google is still a huge influence in how people search for things. And getting yourself seen in the top ranking sites on Google can be a challenge. Getting your work published on a blog means a link from an external website back to your blog, which helps boost your Google ranking. Most wedding blogs tend to have a higher domain authority, so getting a backlink from them is a great boost to your SEO ranking.

If you want to learn more about why backlinks are super important for SEO, read this article.

Increased Brand Authority

Perhaps your brand is based around being a local expert, having a unique niche or an unusual approach. Being featured on a blog can help strengthen your brand identity, especially if the feature highlights that thing that makes you stand out from the crowd. This is where guest posts can be especially beneficial – as you get to speak directly to a new audience but in your voice and with your unique perspective. It helps to platform you and give you a name as an expert in your field, and that can strengthen the authority of your brand.

Social Proof

You already know you are awesome, and perhaps you don’t need to get your work featured on a blog to re-affirm that. But a potential client who is looking through your website might be impressed with your “Featured On” badge. Showcasing that you’ve been featured in other publications can an extra level of credibility to you and your brand. Especially now that there are also so many scammers out there, it helps to show your legitimacy. And while it may not be what seals the deal for many clients, I’ve definitely had conversations with past clients who have told me that they were impressed with all of my features and it was just another thing that made them feel confident that I was who they wanted to work with (plus they were excited with the idea that their own weddings might get published).

Wider Reach

When you’re featured on a blog, it increases the chance of someone coming across it than if it’s only shared on your own website and socials. The more times your work is featured on other platforms, the more possibility there is to get more eyes on your work.

Most blogs will also share the content across their social media platforms and Pinterest too. And every share, every pin, every re-tweet is more publicity (and free publicity) for you. And it helps get you those vital points of contact that may help to bring you those new enquiries.

Check out this related post: How To Submit To A Blog

Are Paid Directory Listings Worth The Money?

I honestly find this one hard to answer (and I run a blog with a directory). The reason that I find it difficult to answer is that a lot depends on what you are hoping to get from it. While the end-goal for most people is to get bookings, tracking whether someone books you from a directory listing can be tricky if they don’t click through or fill out the contact form so you can track the source of the enquiry.

When Joining A Directory Might Benefit You

There are a numbers of reasons that joining a directory might benefit you. Here are just a few:

• To cement your position as one of the recommended vendors in your area
• For the backlinks
• In order to be able to submit features
• To reach a wider audience (if the target audience of the blog aligns with your target audience)
• Your business values align with those of the publication and you want to publicly support them

In the past I have paid to join directories for all of these reasons. I joined Junebug because I wanted a backlink from them (as hadn’t had any success getting a free feature). I joined Wandering Weddings because I was the first vendor to join for Austria and I wanted to make sure that if people were looking for a photographer in Austria, I appeared everywhere that they looked. And I joined Dancing With Her because I wanted to be publicly aligned with a publication that was supporting the LGBTQ+ community and bringing more diversity to the wedding industry.

When Joining A Directory Might Not Benefit You

• If you’re already fully booked
• If the directory is already really full with other vendors
• If you need to pay more to appear near the top of the directory

Some of the biggest complaints I hear from other photographers about directories are that they are often overflowing with vendors, overwhelming for anyone searching, and that unless you’re one of the ones listed at the top (which some blogs charge more for), you’re unlikely to be seen.

What About Other Forms of Paid Advertising on Blogs?

I don’t have enough personal experience to say whether these can offer a ROI or not. I’ve personally never paid for anything other than a directory listing, simply because I don’t ever click on adverts. But I’m sure that for some people they can work, because I see people doing them.

While I no longer pay for any form of directory listing or advertising (I’m grateful that the last years I’ve been fully booked), I do still regularly submit my work to blogs and write guest posts for a number of wedding blogs and other publications. I still see the value this brings to my business in terms of the boost to my own site’s SEO (thanks to the backlink), so I’ll continue to do it for the foreseeable future.

I’d love to know what you think. Do you still submit to blogs, or do you think they have had their day? Leave me a comment below.