Advertise With The First Dance and support our social mission to help strengthen marriages.
How do I sign up? Read below and then Contact Us .
Modern Bride Trendsetter Award Winners in 2007
Here's your chance to affordably reach a broad group of engaged couples. We are not a wedding directory where you are listed among countless others, stuck in a local city and state page on one of the 30+ wedding directories out there.
- List yourself locally or nationally - affordably! Our local pages are the high ranking premarital state pages and profile pages of premarital counselors. Our "national pages" are simply our unique, high quality articles, tips and advice pages.
- Only ONE banner per page to "pop out" to couples without distracting them with a lot of advertising
- Rates are for traffic on YOUR AD PAGES, not total visitors to our website. We freeze the rates based on the prior months traffic. Our growth rate is 35% in just the last two months, 750% since last June.
- Tell us what you want to spend! We have rates as low as $5/month on up. The more money you want to spend means MORE PAGES you get to advertise on.
- We offer maximum flexibility (while banner ads are still open!) You can use all the banner ads to show off different products, you can link your banner to your website or to another page on our website to "engage" your audience with what you offer before they go to your website.)
- Check out the template page for banner sizes. The "language" is jibberish, the template is meant to give you the visual for banners so this is not a real page.
- NEW: as we build sponsors (advertisers), we will add a SPONSORS link from every page to list all of our sponsors.
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 Modern Bride Magazine Trendsetter wedding award (see the June/July2007 issue of Modern Bride Magazine) for tackling the interpersonal aspects of wedding planning.
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.
Three types of advertising:
- Premarital counselors 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 2 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 launched with a story in The Today Show. We have been in a 40,000+ distributed La Bella Bride Magazine, Todays Groom (local) magazine, San Diego Bride, will have mention in Elegant Bride magazine as a featured article, we've been on radio stations and were blasted all around the nation in a wedding stress feature.
- 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. Our goal is to help couples be more intentional about their wedding as the first task of married life.
How do I sign up?
Premarital counselors see more information here.
- 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. Read Take Back Your Wedding: Managing the People Stress of Wedding Planning
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.
Featured in:
William J. Doherty, Ph.D.
Elizabeth Doherty Thomas
