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 2000s, 2000, I can't remember, 7, 8, 9 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 46 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 that is in their calendar. They're ranking for in Google for, you know, local movie times in Salem or you know, 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 fin. 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 has 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 30,000 extra eyeballs a month.

What is there a percentage, rough percentage in there somewhere?

Like how much of that their traffic is now just calendar related?

Do you even have that, have that piece of data?

I mean I would, I, I haven't checked in a while, but there was a time I checked and it was like close to 5 to 7, 10% 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.com, 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, 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 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, it's a benefit to your readers. There's, there's free submissions that, that help populate the calendar, which Google, of course likes. And readers like, that's moderated. Paid submissions are, are coming very soon. And if you're interested, just reach out. I'll give you my email address. Pete101.com Pete n101.com or find us another way we can, we can talk about it. And it's. 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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