I ask because I have had some american phoning me up giving the speel about how brilliant they are, how massive they are in the USA and they are now moving into GB.

Usual stuff about a rival of mine using the service ( I checked and its true) and he got 10 weddings last year out of it.

Now it looks to me they have searched throough every UK directory and listed all the videographers, and are now cold calling them all. Needless to say the guy got nowhere with me as i make my own mnd up about things.

He said they were big in the USA. Has anyone else heard of them/used them for advertising?

We maintain a free listing with them but have found that it has driven "0" traffic to us. There are some 20 or more videographers listed in our area on their site and I didn't find the return stats to be worth upgrading to the paid listings with them.

if you have a free listing from them, then you will get 0 referrals (if you are lookign at your web site logs that is) because they do not provide web links to free accounts.

I would say they are useless, but it could be that I've not looked into their paid listings.

if their paid listing is less than $50/yr then it might be worth it. anything more than that is not worth it.

Same here, I have the free listing with them, but get 0 traffic to my sight from them.

It doesn't hurt though to sign up for a free listing.

Ryan

I've listed with Party Pop for years (the free listing), and decided to go ahead and spend the $180 per year for an upgrade. If I don't see an improvement in leads, I can cancel with 30 days notice and be refunded balance not used (got it in writing).

Prior to this adjustment I can honestly say I have never received any lead from the free listing. In any case $180/year is a lot better than the Knot's $120/ month for the exact same services. If, by April 30, the leads are underwhelming, I'm out.

I like producing wedding videos, but they are not my primary source of income. All I need is one referral turned into contract to more than compensate me for my expense. If so, the risk will have been worth it. If not, I'll know soon enough.

if you have a free listing from them, then you will get 0 referrals (if you are lookign at your web site logs that is) because they do not provide web links to free accounts.

Yes and no, the free listings do not drive web traffic because they only list your company and phone number. We have not generated any leads from this listing and find that for our area, the google hits from this site are ranked pretty low (3 or 4 pages down the hits list.) There are many others that rank higher and will give us link exchanges and better listings. I find their site to be unnecessarily cluttered and difficult to navigate (compared to other wedding vendor hub sites) and unattractive. That is my reason for not paying to advertise with them. I also found the sales pitch they gave me when they called to be a little shady. The only companies (in my area) advertising with them are not really my competition so i also took that as a sign. Waldemar raises a good point about recouping the annual fee with few bookings but for me, i would rather pay advertising with other venues.

Were also in the UK and had Party Pop give me the same pitch. I would say its pointless though. Ive tried all sorts of wedding searches, including the ultra important "wedding Video" and there not even on the first 100 results. Infact cant find them anywhere.

There are better places to be spending our money.

i gave it a try and spent the money.
I did not book any job from there yet but i got 1.5 leads average a month.

You got 1.5 leads per month or website hits per month from them? If it was leads, why did they not convert into sales? I ask because I advertised with a different lead generation site and found most of the leads they sent to be fictitious. The company that ran the site wanted users to think they were getting their monies worth...

Hi Steve,

I have a niche type business and thought partypop would help generate some revenue by advertising with them. I have to say I was getting 12 visits a month from their site for 2 years to mine, and not 1, not 1 turned into a sale. I went from MD/DE listing one year to MD/DC/DE/VA listing the next and still no leads turned into sales. For me it was not worth it at all. Then again with my business targeting a specific market that could make all the difference. You'd be better off optimizing your site then spending the money getting listed on Party Pop. That is my opinion based from Maryland. Could be a different experience for you in the UK. Take Care

Monday

1.5 leads per month.
Why I did not turn it to a sale? i am not sure.
Maybe because i get only price shoppers.

Hello,

Monday's comment made sense are there any SEO Company that is affordable? I have googled them and find $ 500 a month to be really expensive.

I signed up for the free listing at partypop but Im not crossing my finger. Better alternative would be the Bridal Network or Facebook.

Thanks,

Noel

Monday's comment made sense are there any SEO Company that is affordable? I have googled them and find $ 500 a month to be really expensive.

If you know HTML, do the SEO yourself. The hardest part of SEO is defining your keywords that you want to market towards (Pick three keywords per page - any more than that and you'll be killing yourself).

In my experience, here is what helps your search engine ranking the most:

1) Links to your website by respected sites (such as this one).
2) The name of your URL/file name of your page - i.e. if your keyword is Wedding Videos in Paris than a good name for that page would be Wedding_Videos_In_France.html
3) Page titles are very important (Wedding Videos in France by My Company Name).
4) Use of your keyword in "TEXT" on your website - H1 and H2 tags have more weight assigned to them in Search Engine Rankings, but don't over do them. You can get blacklisted if you have too many instances of your keyword on your site.
5) The amount of visitors you typically get into your site helps your site get higher in rankings (it's a catch-22, the better your site does, the more traffic you get, the better your site does in the SEO rankings).

If you do go with an SEO Firm, be Very CAREFUL, there are a lot of bad "Black Hat" ones out there that can promise to make you #1, but in actuality they will hurt your site if the do tricks that Google doesn't like (Such as spamming, invisible text, etc).

Hope that helps.

Ryan

I've...decided to go ahead and spend the $180 per year for an upgrade. If I don't see an improvement in leads, I can cancel with 30 days notice and be refunded balance not used (got it in writing)...

Waldemar,
I have been getting hit pretty hard by the sales team at PartyPop asking for me to upgrade to the paid listing. It has been over a year and I am wondering what conclusions you have about listing with them. How did it perform? Did you continue past the 30 days? Would you recommend the paid listing?

Thanks for any updates!

Monday's comment made sense are there any SEO Company that is affordable? I have googled them and find $ 500 a month to be really expensive.

Buy a book like Search Engine Optimization For Dummies and do it yourself.

BTW, keywords have been devalued so much to the point of being almost useless. Content is king, baby!

I can only say that I signed up for the free trial and then got hounded mercislessly by the sales team. Enough to turn me off completely.

I had a PartyPop sales rep call me and actually hang up on me when I told him that it wasn't in the budget for me at this time. No goodbye, no "thank you for your time", just click. I was furious. I will never, ever do business with them. Period.

Waldemar,
I have been getting hit pretty hard by the sales team at PartyPop asking for me to upgrade to the paid listing. It has been over a year and I am wondering what conclusions you have about listing with them. How did it perform? Did you continue past the 30 days? Would you recommend the paid listing?

Thanks for any updates!

I went ahead and stayed with Party Pop throughout last year. I did in fact see a slight increase in the number of visits to my website, but I don't feel Party Pop contributed to that increase any more than other sites where I have free listings.

I can say I did not receive a single inquiry for wedding video services that came from Party Pop. Not one. I flat refused to engage in any additional advertising on their site.

I went ahead and stayed with Party Pop throughout last year. I did in fact see a slight increase in the number of visits to my website, but I don't feel Party Pop contributed to that increase any more than other sites where I have free listings.

I can say I did not receive a single inquiry for wedding video services that came from Party Pop. Not one. I flat refused to engage in any additional advertising on their site.

Thank you so much for your follow-up. Just out of curiosity, do you use Google analytics or any other software to track how people get to your site? If not, you might want to check it out. It is free and gives you loads of great info about your visitors...

Unless the lead provider is working in a field that's closed to you why spend money getting someone else biigger rather than getting your own site better positioned? It's all about comfort and perceived work.

A relative of mine is launching a website I've helped her design promoting a holiday cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon - the Shakespeare one. She's mesmerised by the desirability of getting on every "visit" site featuring holiday accommodation in that area and is concentrating on appearing on them "along with the competitors" and is unmoved by my urging to get her own site to No1 position on the relevant pages.

The other disadvantage is that she knows the town very well having been brought up there, rather than looking at the property from the point of view of the potential visitor eg it is 40 minutes drive from Oxford which I bet most people visiting Oxford and not finding suitable accommodation would know.

By all means link but my best reward is our site appearing on the first page of our chosen keywords. Sometimnes it feels as if people like Partypop, bride magazines and wedding fair organisers are the only people making money in our business and I'm loathe to make them more.

Excellent point Philip, but once you have exhausted every bit of SEO you can do, then it is time for SEM and these sites, unfortunately, tend to have very high rankings across the keywords we love to use. Sometimes it is worth investing in a site like this to get more leads sometimes it is not. In the attachment you can see that using the first 4 keywords from your site, Partypop ends up as the number one result. That is not to say I recommend Party pop, because I don't. It is to say that SEO will only get you so far... I think advertising on Facebook (see http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/wedding-event-videography-techniques/144540-facebook-marketing.html for a good thread on this subject), AdWords, Bridal Fairs, etc are much better but it is worthwhile to consider these other sites if you have the money to burn....

...By all means link but my best reward is our site appearing on the first page of our chosen keywords. Sometimnes it feels as if people like Partypop, bride magazines and wedding fair organisers are the only people making money in our business and I'm loathe to make them more.

I also want to add to say that I agree with you 100% on loathing making them money. These pay for use "hubs" eat up everyone's rankings and feel there should be someway of filtering them out and in my experience they override good SEO to the point where it is not enough....

Just had someone call me. I offered them a deal, I said, I'll take a paid listing if I can pay at the end of the year term, only if I make money off the listing. I'm not sure if they'll go for it. lol.