Local event calendars; are you utilizing them?
September 14, 2011 Category :Fundraising Ideas| Online Marketing 0
So I am sitting here inputting all of our upcoming events for our partnered non-profits into all the major online event calendars available for Orange County events, and I saw that there aren’t a lot of fundraising events posted on these calendars.
Or maybe Orange County doesn’t have a lot of fundraising events, period?
No, that cannot be true.
So why are there not many nonprofits utilizing this tool?
Maybe for the most part a lot of these groups just simply do not know that this tool exists. Here are some of the major event calendars for OC where you can submit your own event for their calendar, for free:
OC Register
OC Weekly
OC Metro
OC Standard
Easy OC
OC Craigslist
Do people even look through these calendars?
That was definitely a question I received from one of our clients. They think that just because they don’t actively find events to attend on the online calendars, that no one else does. Well, I can’t say that is entirely untrue, but I can tell you that these things probably would not exist if no one used them to find things to do locally.
So even if you maybe gathered a few extra strangers to your fundraising events, is the cost of my time submitting these events worth it, even if the tool is free?
There is definitely a different benefit to submitting events
source: sachyn
For the most part, these calendars offer the ability for you to insert the website link to the event. That’s major! Why? SEO! Search engine optimization. Don’t know what that is? You can read about it here from SEOmoz.
In short, SEO is the art of making your website and content more visible online. Although it sounds easy, it actually kind of is, but it’s back-breaking work. But you submitting your event to these calendars definitely help with this process.
A big portion of your site ranking well on search engines includes how many links you have coming into your website. Meaning, how many websites that aren’t yours out there link to your website? In a way, it’s a vote of confidence online, saying “Yeah, Google. I trust this is a real site with real information.”
Another important factor is how important the site containing your link is. Obviously, sites like OC Register and OC Metro are huge news sites for us here in OC, and obviously they are pretty important.
Wait, so the more links to my site that are out there, the better it is?
Yep! And like I said, fortunately, these event calendars let you input your web link in them. Once they are published, that’s more “link juice” (lingo) for you.
Now keep in mind that these are posts that will perish after your event, so you will lose those links again. But that doesn’t matter, because you have more events coming up anyway, right?
