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Advertise With The First Dance
How do I sign up? Read below and then Submit your information here.
Modern Bride Trendsetter Award Winners in 2007
I am absolutely thrilled that I have signed on with your website. My practice is growing! More importantly, couples are heading into marriage with much stronger skills! Thank you so much.
Molly Witker, MS LMFT
Here’s your opportunity to link up with a new voice in the premarital education world: The First Dance. Our mission is to help engaged couples manage the people stress of wedding planning and have more wisdom to carry over to their marriage. We won a prestigious wedding award (see the June/July issue of Modern Bride Magazine) for tackling the interpersonal aspects of wedding planning. Too often premarital counseling has focused almost exclusively on the relationship between the two individuals (and perhaps past family of origin experiences to the exclusion of their current relationships with parents and future in-laws that manifest themselves in the stress of wedding planning. In fact, many premarital counselors avoid talking about wedding planning as a distraction from the “important” issues; our view is that the wedding brings out lots of important issues.
The First Dance is a fast-growing, trusted resource for help on the interpersonal dynamics of wedding planning. Most advice is about wedding etiquette (which is ever changing if it really exists at all anymore!) and most relationship advice is simplistic at best, harmful at worst because it doesn't come out of a marriage and family counseling perspective on how people ACTUALLY behave, not how we wish they would behave.
We are considering advertising for the following audiences (the theme is anything the couples do together in wedding planning or things around being married - financial planners, real estate, health, etc.):
- Premarital counselors ($125 for a year) See below then read more information here.
- Premarital classes you offer ($75 for a year) (Free listing of classes using The First Dance DVD.)
- Ask about rates on our various page categories, cities and state pages!
Our Brand is a new niche in a crowded wedding world. Within 1.5 years we’ve already won a top wedding award and the recognition of highly respected marriage educators.
- Our Modern Bride Trendsetter award gives us credibility in the bridal world. It is considered the Oscars of the wedding world.
- William J. Doherty is a highly regarded marriage therapist, writer, researcher, and very frequent media expert on topics around marriage and family (he has been on all national TV programs including Oprah twice, 20/20, The Today Show, Good Morning America, print media (Time, Newsweek, Readers Digest, on the advisory board of Parents Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, etc), and radio (National Public radio and countless other interviews across the country.)
- We have access to journalists! We will be featured in a local Today's Groom magazine (Minnesota), an article will feature us in the nationwide Elegant Bride magazine and we are also going to be featured in San Diego Bride magazine. We launched with a story in The Today Show.
- We are members of the Association of Bridal Consultants and are working on national advertising to help wedding coordinators send couples our way. It is estimated 12% of couples (roughly 180,000 couples a year) use a wedding coordinator and the ABC group is the largest, oldest wedding coordinator association in the nation.
- Nobody else brings the experience of Bill Doherty with the grounded experiences of the 20something generation through his daughter, Elizabeth Doherty Thomas. Together we bring a very grounded, principled vision on how couples and their families can have a wedding that reflects their uniqueness while reducing the stress along the way.
- Align with our mission and together we can help more couples than we can alone. Everyone who works with engaged couples knows the truth – the marriage is what is most important, the wedding is just the launching pad. Through education, ceremony planning with officiants and learning a new skill as a couple (for the first dance!) our goal is to help couples be more intentional about their wedding as the first task of married life.
Our Website Traffic:
- We rank high in search engines for The First Dance (#1), premarital counseling and wedding advice questions
- Once they find us we encourage them to take premarital counseling through articles on the website and a blog. We continually update our material to bring them back for more; future features include top question and answers on wedding stress and You Tube skits.
- We are listed as a resource on a well respected, high ranking national website just launched called foryourmarriage.org for couples seeking premarital help.
- We are listed on the Federal Healthy Marriage Initiative website for our program offering, which is a special niche in the broader category of premarital counseling.
- We are growing over 30% every month
What you get:
- An attractive banner that links to your website or to a page on our site that can introduce your product/services to our engaged couples.
- We do not require couples to register to see your information - guarenteeing that if they're going to find us, they will find YOU (and not keep web surfing because they don't want to give their personal information to see your information!)
- Access to all the couples we are in direct and indirect connection with through our associations on websites and with associations, as well as our direct web traffic.
Examples of our advertising capacity and will continue to do in other cities as we figure out the best ways to advertise:
- We have the only premarital ad in the Minnesota version of the national vendor magazine Perfect Wedding Guide for marriage counseling (40,000+ distribution)
- We had an advertisement on the local theknot.com for premarital counseling (but we rank very high and do more in one day than an entire month on their ads so we dropped our ad. Two others in our category have also dropped their ads due to lack of traffic.)
- We are blog moderators on a wedding website that serves Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Colorado
- We ran a state-wide TV commercial all summer to increase awareness
- We are members of the Association of Bridal Consultants and go to monthly networking meetings which helps wedding coordinators send couples our way. We have access to the list of 4,000+ members to advertise as corporate members.
- We go to an annual conference of over 2,500 marriage educators who have access to tens of thousands of couples. We have an ad in the national brochure that is sent to 100,000 people and a booth at the conference.
How do I sign up?
Submit your information here and we will invoice you and work with you to create your page .
Premarital counselors see more information here.
Some web redesign will go into effect as we build you into our existing listing.
- Elizabeth Doherty Thomas, is a co-founder of The First Dance, along with Marriage and Family therapist father Dr. William J. Doherty. The First Dance was a Modern Bride Trendsetter award winner in 2007 for taking on the complex family dynamics of wedding planning. Visit The First Dance for more advice on working through the people stresses of wedding planning as a couple, with your families, and how to strengthen your upcoming marriage through this enormous first task of married life.
