Your Event Calendar challenge and our take on the solution

That sound about right yep yep a lot of the publishers spend a lot of time going out and getting the event information and on my side i work with a lot of print publishers and most of them are publishing that info in the paper but not.

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Happy winter morning tyler good to see you again.

Yep good to see.

You we're going to jump into the event calendar your event calendar this is putting together a local or regional events calendar has been a challenge since the dawn of the internet ask me how i know so what we're going to talk about is the challenge of putting together an event calendar for your audience and our take on the solution which involves ai and automation so you don't have to do it as a publisher how's that for a topic let's go to reporting excellent so we talk to a lot of publishers and we get feedback on their challenges and one of the challenges that we have jumped into is the event calendar so for local news if you're listening to this and you're a local news publisher this is probably for you if maybe you're a magazine publisher because we have some magazine publishers that have local regional calendars for their for their niche this is for you if you're not in the calendar space this might not be for you so what we're seeing what we have seen is that publishers and correct me if i'm wrong but they're spending a lot of time manually hacking calendar event information into their current calendars and essentially not doing anything else with them that.

Sound about right yep yep a lot of the publishers spend a lot of time going out and getting the event information and on my side i work with a lot of print publishers and most of them are publishing that info in the paper but not not all of them are publishing that data on their websites as you can imagine the snarl that would be to to get all of that data collect all of that information and then repost it on your website and keep it up to date and yeah yeah it's a it's.

A pain yeah it's it's you're just it's kind of wasted effort isn't it you're just you're just copying and pasting yeah you're not even complete yeah right.

And that's the key so i spoke with a publisher who told me that one of the biggest complaints that they got was that their event list was not complete or you missed my event or what about the swimming pool event at the local park like you didn't list that like what about they would constantly get feedback like that missing events because there's just a lot of events that happen in the town even stuff that the publisher you know isn't aware.

Of yeah for sure the events are crazy my friend rob at daybreak here runs daybreak news you know he curates events he does a really good job with it but his his sources you know he's got he's got dozens and dozens of sources just for events you know you're talking you're talking listservs and i mean reddit you're talking about all kinds of local groups they are the events are happening everywhere and and to.

Add yeah and to add another layer of complexity to that let's say you do have a pretty complete events list they're constantly evolving so an event might update the location might change the phone number contact person might change the image might change for the you know to promote there's so many variables that go into a complete events calendar solution yeah.

The last thing i'll hammer on the event calendars i've seen is the ui is not great it's not really mobile first it's hard to scan and scroll through events and it only gets worse if there are a lot of events that you're assembling into a calendar you need a good clean scannable ui okay so what we're going to talk about is taking this workload of updating events completely off your plate so that you can literally turn on our new local calendar system that we have built it's running on a few sites we're having an incredible we're having some pretty incredible results we want to share with you so what is it and what is our take on what makes for a good events calendar one of the things that and i'll tell you just a quick story in the late two thousands two thousand i can't remember seven eight nine or something like that we actually built an events calendar for our local area here the upper valley of new hampshire and it was a drupal calendar it was scraping events from different calendars and it was using some logic to categorize the events on the calendar what the response was amazing we actually the website actually went down one day and i got emails saying hey where's the events calendar like i need to see what's going on for the weekend and we had we had local like king arthur flower is a pretty well known brand that's that's here right across the border in vermont they were publishing their events a lot of other bigger event producers were publishing their events and it became pretty quickly the centralized source of events unfortunately that project wound down for several reasons and now with the advent of ai the game has changed so we've been able to recreate the magic and go quite a bit further than what we had back in the day and here's the solution that we actually have running and we're looking at it right here if you're on youtube we have our salem reporter up and we have the events calendar and you can take a quick look at it so what does it do there's a daily pool of events so we have a secret sauce of sources and every single day new events come in the new events come in they get assigned automatically to categories so that someone can come in and say hey i want my kids to do something this weekend great go to the family category and see what's going on we have the events come in automatically by location as well and you can do super discreet searches so if you're looking on this calendar here you see that there's a wildcard for keyword search super powerful search the location if you have lots of small towns like we do we have forty six small towns that comprise the upper valley so you can actually target by town you can say hey i want to just see what's going on for the weekend and just check off the weekend and i think probably the most popular use case is just picking a category and then loading up those events and that's it this by the way this is a wordpress native solution all the events are actually pulled into wordpress creates a post type and we have additional magic where folks can actually subscribe by category to the events and get an email notification okay i said a lot of stuff here i'm just going to kind of scroll down here and say hey i want to get and so you know i got i just got an email from salem about some sort of a game night in my email box and it was great so your readers are going to love it i think it's an added value to a paid subscription like i just was thinking about even though it's free like there's nothing really paid here but you're adding to the value of even a paid subscriber so if i were a paid subscriber and all of a sudden i got this kick ass events calendar and i could drop in and check off the categories of events that i want to make sure that every single day i know about just focus on those events that's really big value for me as a local resident right for.

Sure yeah for sure yeah and on the publisher side like we obviously we haven't talked much about monetizing this and the revenue aspect of this but forget that just for a minute and focus on the seo aspect of this so we turn this on for publishers i'd say we've got about a dozen or so that are running this in multiple different markets in the us and within a few days they'll start to rank for specific events in the community so for example salem has a lot of government related meetings that flow into their calendar and if you're searching for salem's you know city council meetings local government meetings official meetings whatever they're outranking some of the sources that we're pulling from in google and they're seeing traffic just organically from all of these sources not just the government meetings but everything that is in their calendar they're ranking for in google for local movie times in salem or things to do this weekend in salem things like that they're starting to rank for that in google organically without having to lift a finger and so you're getting all of that traffic you're getting more eyeballs people who maybe aren't even subscribers they're coming in the side door and they're getting a taste of what you offer and this is just another thing that could eventually lead them into that free registration universe that we talk about all the time right.

Right email capture yeah so let me ask you the question i know it hasn't been very long as far as the amount of time that the calendar's been live but it's been a bit how much more traffic would you say salem we're looking at salem is getting right now solely because of the calendar.

I would say it's thirty thousand extra.

Eyeballs a month what is there a percentage rough percentage in there somewhere like.

How much of that of their traffic is now just calendar related do you.

Even have that have that piece of data i mean i would i would.

I i haven't checked in a while but there was a time i checked and it was like close to five to seven ten percent of like overall like traffic was coming in through the side door on this calendar alone that's so which leads us into the next part of this which is the monetization side of it so if you're getting eyeballs from from from google and i'll mention i'll just say this really quick over the holidays i experimented with a website called hello morgantown dot com comma which is morgantown west virginia here it's a university town home of west virginia university a lot of events a lot of stuff going on your town my town yeah and now we've got this calendar system running we were testing things and it's now ranking on the first page of google for event calendar because there is a thirst for a consolidated events calendar system whether you're a publisher or not this system has value in the google sphere in the general public sphere so anyway the site's ranking and people are coming into this site that's only been live for a few months and they're publishing events they're commenting on events they're the traffic is organically growing this is not even a publication this is just a random thrown together site to test how this is operating so if you're doing this as a publisher you're already trusted by google it's much faster to rank you know salem has been around for a while google has a very high trust authority with with this site so it's a lot faster to rank but a little side note on how much value there is for event data in general for the general you know public and search sounds like.

Magic sounds like magic you don't have to lift a finger events calendar comes into your into your website your traffic goes up so if you're if you have ad revenue you got extra ad revenue you got email capture built in sounds like magic but so far so great right like these are these are.

Kicking ass yeah and this is all possible because of ai we're able to categorize we're able to sort we're able to take the worst formatted data you've ever seen and turn it into what you're seeing on salem round reporter you're able to you know digest it in a way that's not a complete mess because as someone who manages calendars you probably know that every single source has a different way of handling it and so that was part of the challenge in building this product for wordpress yeah.

Training ai is part of the secret sauce for sure a couple other random things i'll just mention there's a link on here it's not like hugely promoted but submit event tell me about that.

Yeah so anyone who lands on your events calendar has the option to host their own event so let's say that your event isn't publicly online somewhere for whatever reason you could publish it here and then salem gets the option to approve or deny the event and this maybe you could explain about you know the paid side of this how this could turn into a revenue generation thing but but yeah people do this people post daily on on this i was.

Going to ask you is this are people actually posting for sure and that.

Link is so discreet right now because we're still sort of testing to see how how things are going right and people are finding it and they're submitting events especially like local schools that maybe don't have complete online calendars they're posting stuff to salem reporter because they see it as i think as time has gone on they're seeing it as the complete calendar in their community yeah it's.

Amazing so people are posting i'd say just as a sidebar you could add submit an event right to the events menu here that would jump out at folks sure for free submit event your event for free like that would be huge okay so you have the free events coming in the moderated one thing i will share with with if you're listening is that we do have a premium events module coming for this so if somebody wants to fork over a credit card and you set the amount that that featured event costs that they can post the event right away and just get it featured on the events calendar so that is coming the second thing i will also mention is that if there's a event producer in your area that absolutely wants their events to always be in your calendar we can handle that as well for you we can pipe their events straight in and you just charge them a recurring monthly fee for doing that off you go.

And those events can be sticky and kind of stick out for for people and make that a premium offering that.

Yes yeah and just if you're if you're watching this i'm going to click into an event if you this one needs a bit of an image but you can see that they're getting traffic there's there's folks that have viewed that this is the category they're in and you can actually click this and then the location is always linked to a google map so you know if somebody like hey how do i get there well boom just click it and get there we're not at this on mobile but i will say that if you do it's pretty sweet pretty sweet you know this is this is the mobile view everything is super scannable absolutely scannable and if i grab you know business and professional boom there it is and even the email subscribe comes up nice and quick all right this is amazing so let's see i'm just reviewing my notes here we talked about that we got categories we talked about traffic to the website ad revenue no time i think we covered it tyler that's it this is a crazy awesome product that we're having an awful lot of fun with and is reaping benefits immediately turn it on and boom instantly you get email subscribers you get traffic to your site google is ranking it it's a benefit to your readers there's free submissions that help populate the calendar which google of course likes and readers like that's moderated paid submissions are coming very soon and if you're interested just reach out i'll give you my email address pete one zero one dot com pete n one zero one dot com or find us another way we can talk about it and it doesn't cost a lot i'll just say that anything else tyler that's it all right cool thanks for listening and please let us know what you think.

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