The Stationers Guild

I remain perplexed at the misleading and self-serving advice that wedding invitation pundits so often prescribe in Blogs and other online forums.   I recently came across this amusing Blog post on discount wedding invitations that recently appeared on Wedding-Junction.com. 

Now I have no idea who Wedding-Junction is or why one would want to visit their website other than to revel in their inane “advice,” but I can say they do themselves or visitors to their website no great service.  This Wedding-Junction website is essentially an affiliate-based feeder sites that incorporates key words in the text of the Blog which then redirects the visitor to commercial online websites who promote those terms.

This particular article caught my attention because it reflects a growing tendency on the internet to shamelessly promote products and companies under the guise of providing readers with “news,” “advice,” “information,” or candid reviews.  In the article, the visitor seeking a discounted wedding invitation is advised to seek out a “not too popular printer” or a printer recommended by a “family member” or simply to “go online.”   Now, I know of very few commerical printers who would ever consider printing 100 invitations or less if the client is providing the paper stock.   In all fairness, this is an absolute waste of time, energy and money, particularly when one realizes that wedding stationery (reception invitations, reply card set and thank you notes) generally account for less than 5% of the total cost of the wedding.  If you plan to save “big” money on wedding invitations, look at other areas of your budget.

The real beneficiary of these misleading articles are PPC (Pay Per Click) publishers such as the author of this Blog.   A Blogger is either paid a fixed amount of money to publish an article using specific search terms (in this case “discount wedding invitations”), or the Blogger is publishing an article which includes linkable search terms for which they will be paid part of the PPC fee collected by Google, Yahoo or other link-bait providers.  In this case, it is InfoLinks which is providing the service.   I intend to subscribe to their service and place their script code in an experimental site to determine how effective this service is.  A future Blog will report on the outcome.

Sheila P. May
Therese Saint Clair