The bride and groom have circled the date on the calendar and decided on a wedding venue. After interviewing countless vendors, you have been selected as their wedding photographer. This is an exciting time for everyone. Typically you will meet with the couple or the bride several times prior to the wedding. At your first meeting, it is important to discuss the venue for the wedding ceremony and reception.

Guess what other ‘power tool’ a wedding photographer should have aside from his camera bag? It’s none other than this thing on the web which has turned from a craze into a permanent fixture: blogs.

With a wedding photography blog, you will be able to keep track of what is happening with your past and prospective clients – and they can do the same with you. It’s a veritably free tool where you can showcase your best work and inform your clients of which wedding you will be covering next.

If you're a wedding photographer who would like to run an environmentally-friendly business,

here are the top tips that you need to keep in mind:

1. Be a member of Greener Photography. This way, you can get in touch with other photographers who are running an eco-friendly business and get practical tips.

2. Use 'green' photo albums such as the ones provided by GP Albums which are made of 100% recycled content.

When my website was still on its planning stages, I literally panicked because I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. How can a wedding photographer like me know anything about search engine optimization, hosting, keywords and things like that which make a website work?

Fortunately, a geeky friend was good enough to help me out and I was able to build a website for my wedding photography business from the ground up.

If this is something that you are still working on, here are a few tips to help you get started:

Gone are the days when the wedding photography business is just that: a business. Today, there's the creative process involved because of the artistry and skill that photographers use in capturing the precious moments on their clients' big day.

It's almost similar to an artist creating a masterpiece of a painting. Now, after you have finished creating your masterpieces in the form of the wedding pictures that you took, what's the next step? Show casing your work in a gallery, of course.

Visit any wedding photography site and you will see videos which are actually collections of photos from a wedding, with some lovely music in the background. For a wedding photographer, these videos will be extremely helpful not just in promoting your business, but in pleasing your clients as well.

One of the best tools which allow you to easily create a wedding photography video for marketing your business is Animoto.com. You can sign up for a free account, but there are also packages available for business users.

Small to medium-scale entrepreneurs usually do not have much to spend on marketing when they initially launch their business. Fortunately for us wedding photographers, word of mouth and setting up free accounts on social networking sites are the best advertisement, so you can practically launch your business and market it for free.

But aside from these two techniques, what other ways can you use for direct marketing your wedding photography business?

Here are a few suggestions that I have:

Let's say that you are just starting out in the wedding photography business and you already booked your first client? Whether you're a failure at organizing or you are quite the control freak – there are some items that you absolutely cannot do without if you want to succeed as a professional wedding photographer.

Here's a quick list of the items that you need to have.

If there's one thing that I learned in all the years that I have been in the wedding photography business, it is the power that word of mouth yields. Before delving deeper into that, let me go a step back to the formula which I think works best for anyone who's trying to start a build a wedding photography business from the ground up.

Basically, these are the ingredients that I used to make my wedding photography business take off despite having a shaky start: