Why advertise
Quite simply, this could be the best money you ever spent.
For just £50 a year for wedding services and £115 for venues, you get your own webpage on our award-winning site, with a full description of your venue or service, three photos and a link to your website and email.
Venues can also include key information such as minimum prices and room sizes so that visitors can see immediately which venues suit them best.
The Government estimated that at least 22,000 people would have a civil partnership in the next four years.
However, in the first twelve months 18,059 couples - over 36,000 people entered into civil partnerships. For more on the government statistics, click on this link
Join our website and you can make sure gay men and lesbians planning their wedding, see you and know you are gay-friendly. If people don't know about you they can't choose you!
Click here to see a wedding service ad
Here's what other people say about the site, click here
If you are already convinced - and who wouldn't be? - click here to fill in the form. If you want more facts and figures, read on.
The potential market for your business
There are 3 million gay people in the UK. A recent survey suggests that 47 per cent of gays and lesbians said they were interested in getting married.
Four out of five gay men and lesbians make a positive point of buying from a company that promotes itself as gay-friendly. There are reports that 30-35% of venues refuse gay custom. Therefore it is important to find out which ones are gay-friendly.
By advertising on this site you will be showing gay men and lesbians that you care about their business.
Gay men and lesbians also have more money to spend. The average income of lesbians in a recent survey is £24,783 per annum for those working full-time and for gay men it is £34,168.
These figures are considerably higher than the UK national averages for men and women in general. Most recently published UK national average wage is £18,531 for women in full-time work and £24,236 for men in full-time work.
Gay people are also web savvy - 87% of Gay Times readers have internet access.
If you want more facts and figures about the gay market,see a recent survey about trends and spending habits of gay people
Why www.gay-friendly-wedding-venues.com?
We offer you a full page entry with three photos and your own web address (url). This makes it easier for search engines to find your venue or service by name and boosts your search engine ranking.
You also get a link to your own website and email address. When people send you an email, you will know it came via this site, so you can monitor responses.
For every venue, we list key criteria such as maximum capacity and room hire costs. This makes it easier for visitors to the site to find out information about your venue quickly.
It also means you don't have to send out loads of brochures! Visitors can also search using these criteria, which is a great tool to help them find their ideal venue.
When visitors search for venues by county, the search also shows venues in surrounding counties, to give them a wider choice and help you to be seen by more potential customers.
Services
You can advertise your service, such as a photographer or caterer, in your own county and up to two others. You get a primary listing in the county where you are based and links on the other county pages to your entry on this site.
You can also opt for a national listing, which means your advertisement will appear at the top of your services page, linked from the home page.
If your category of wedding service is not listed we may be able to add it. Please contact us about this.
We also run a search facility for visitors to the site who are too busy to do it themselves. We will email you any suitable enquiries and pass them on to the client at no cost to you.
Top ranking on google
The site currently comes up as number one when you type 'gay friendly weddings' in google and appears on the first page if you type in 'gay wedding'. It also appears on the first page if you type in 'gay weddings photography' or 'gay weddings' plus the name of a county.
This doesn't happen overnight - we've worked really hard to build up reciprocal links with hundreds of sites. We've also had good publicity on BBC websites, regional and national press.
To show you how many other sites mention us, if you type the exact phrase gay-friendly-wedding-venues in inverted commas, you'll see that it appears over 1500 times. We are also paying for sponsored appearances down the right hand side of google searches under a wide range of phrases.
How this site is being marketed
The site is promoted at gay events and venues throughout the year. We distribute leaflets at Pride events and to gay venues across the UK. The site is linked to over 50 websites and is advertised in the Pink Press.
We write a monthly feature in G3, the free nationwide magazine for lesbians, and regular articles for local papers and other websites.
We have also won a grant from Hackney Enterprise Network to support our advertising and web development. The grant was awarded by a panel which included senior members of two high street banks. In November, we also won the Mayor's Enterprise Award for the Best Start-Up Business in Hackney.
We have appeared on the lunchtime news on ITV and Channel Four. We also took part in a Radio Five Live phone-in. Articles about us have appeared in The Times, The Evening Standard, The Independent on Sunday, Time Out, Bloomberg News, G3, Hotel Magazine, Catering in Scotland and a wide range of regional newspapers.
We were also interviewed for the Independent Radio Network, which supplies stories to commercial radio stations across the country reaching 26 million listeners.
There are articles about us or written by us on various key websites, including BBC regional sites and gay websites.
All this promotional effort is geared towards raising the profile of gay weddings in general, and www.gay-friendly-wedding-venues.com in particular, to provide a service for gay customers to choose the venues and services that suit them best.
Co-founder of this site, Nicola Hill has also written a book, A Very Pink Wedding, about how to organise your gay wedding, published by HarperCollins in August 2007. The book has many references to this website as a good resource for people planning their gay wedding.
Click here to find out more about the coverage the site has received
