We like to think of our tool set as a virtual event marketing department – so even if it’s just you working to sell out your event, now you have a whole team helping you achieve your goals. And if you already have an event marketing department, we’ve recruited some top notch players to turbo boost your efforts.

Meet the team members, they’re psyched to get working for you. And now, your personal event marketing team:

The Incredible Embeddable Ticket Form: Drop the ticket widget right into your website or blog like this and don’t worry about sending your traffic elsewhere to buy tickets. Learn more

Customizable Buttons and Links: Create custom links and buttons to match your event’s style. Embed these babies anywhere on the Web – in emails, web pages, blogs, etc. Learn more

If you really wanted to you could make a really long link and make it hot pink and post it to your site for people to click on and register for your event, but probably you would use something much shorter.

Wonderous Widgets: These little buggers will do wonders driving traffic to your event page. Display a countdown to your event or showcase a calendar with all your upcoming events. Learn more or check out a countdown widget in action here.

The Social Media Hulk: This team member packs a serious punch. We understand the power of social media for event marketing and provide a whole suite of tools to help you take advantage of viral marketing. Publish your event to Facebook or Twitter and when your attendees register, with one click they can post the event to their Facebook and Twitter feeds to let all their friends know they are attending.

Prime Time Email Invitations and Communications: Invite your network to your event through easy email invitations or schedule email reminders as the event approaches. If you want to send more personalized email, check out our integration with MailChimp for high-powered email marketing. Learn more

Macho Man Discount Codes: Select the number of discounts to give out, create unique codes and offer promotional discounts. Generate a buying frenzy when you tell people that the first 10 people to buy a ticket with the code will get a discount! Learn more

Thunder Promotion Across the Web: If you mark your event as Public in our directory (you can check in the “Additional Options” section of the event creation page), we blast your event out to all major search engines, event indexing sites, and our public search directory, making it easy for event seekers to find.

Wicked Smaat Analytics: Track conversions on registration pages using our analytics tools or with your Google Analytics account. Understand how sales are tracking and see the results of all your promotional efforts. Learn more

The team is pumped to get into the action. Ready to get started? We are too. Set up your event

No related posts.

In the past we enabled you to publish events to your profile wall, but now you have the option to publish to your Fan Page and promote your events directly to your Facebook fans. Here’s what it looks like:

Let your fans discover your event through Facebook, and then with our integration they can connect back to Eventbrite to register for the event. You can see the event that I created for these screenshots on our Facebook Fan Page – just look at the events tab.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Connect: Yes, you can!
2. facebook f8 on Eventbrite

Events are inherently social — people like to talk about them, tell their friends about them, and meet new people at them. In the past, event attendees could only connect at the event, but now Twitter allows them to connect and share opinions before, during, and after the event has long ended. A Twitter hashtag unifies all the discussion around an event, helps people find others who are tweeting about the event and when someone searches for that hashtag, they’ll see all the related messages. Check out as the tweets keep coming in for #pcb4.

This is what Michelle Wolverto from PodCamp had to say about using a Twitter hashtag:

“Twitter gave us a way to communicate fast and easy with each other on the day of the event, especially with the use of our hashtag.  Afterward, it was even easier to track the summary blog posts and photos if people tweeted using the hashtag #pcb4.”

So congrats to Podcamp for generating the most buzz and enjoy your new Eventbrite Flip Cam! Check out upcoming PodCamp events here.

Stay tuned for future Eventbrite Contests and if you want to learn more about using social media tools like Twitter to promote your event, attend our free Webinar: Tapping the Power of Social Media for Event Promotion. 

Related posts:

1. The Eventbrite Hashup!
2. How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter

If you really wanted to you could make a really long link and make it hot pink and post it to your site for people to click on and register for your event, but probably you would use something much shorter.

Related posts:

1. How to sell sponsor links on your event page
2. Introducing your personal event marketing team

Related posts:

1. How to promote your event online, part 2 — Facebook
2. Introducing your personal event marketing team

Happy 2009, eventholders!  This is the 4th installment in the “How to Promote your Events Online” series, though I am dropping that part from the titles from now on.  Too many words.

The goal of this article will be to share a number of simple tactics you can use to try to improve the performance of your Eventbrite event registration pages in search engine results.   These recommendations and tips derive from some of the things I’ve seen work for some of our eventholders.

1. The very first point is to be sure your event is public.  There’s a little check box at the bottom of your event creation form, under “Additional Options“, marked “List this event in the Eventbrite directory and on the Internet”.  The default is checked, but make sure, because an unchecked box means your event is dead in the water SEO-wise.  We place a “<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, nofollow” />” tag in the code of your page, which is a pretty effective way of preventing that page from being indexed by the search engines.  This means your page will not turn up in results.  When you uncheck the public box you also deprive yourself of exposure on Eventbrite.com, as we list only public events on our publicly-available event listing pages.  Same thing goes for blasting out your event to our network of partners.  No go.  So be sure the box is checked!

2. Name your event something that helps you.  This is something of a no-brainer, but it bears stressing that your choice of what to call your event can play a huge role in your SEO performance.  The name of your event is not only the HTML title of the event registration page, it is also the anchor text that links to your event page from all the places we link to it on Eventbrite.com.  Make the name of your event as close as you can to the term you’re hoping people will type to find you.

3. Leverage your event organizer page.  It’s one of the tenets of SEO that pages with more links to them are more important and therefore more deserving of visibility.  You can take advantage of that principle on Eventbrite by exploiting the fact that all your event registration pages link back to your organizer page, making it a kind of hub.  This imparts a small but meaningful amount of additional SEO merit to your organizer page which can make all the difference.  Be sure to give the event organizer a useful name that contains your target terms, as the organizer name will be used as the anchor text in links to that page from your registration pages.  A great example of this tactic being used to good effect is this organizer who is placing very high for “Adwords Seminars“.

4. Link to your registration page from every place you can, from your blog, from your company web site, from your friend’s blog.  Use the term you want to rank high for as the anchor text in the links.  This is pretty much the most effective of all the techniques, if you can only do one.  Here’s an example on behalf of an eventholder who wants to place high for “Stanford Burns supper“.  It really works.

5. The last pointer I want to leave you with is start early.  The effects of the tactics described above increase with the passage of time, so be sure to create your event now and get a jump on the competition.

Related posts:

1. You are the eventholder
2. Want to get word out about your event?

Giving our event holders the power to exploit email for the success of their events is an important part of the Eventbrite service pledge.  We continue to put a lot of thought and development work into our email features and capabilities.  So stay tuned for exciting new email-related product announcements very soon.  We’ve also been working hard to ensure that emails sent through Eventbrite enjoy world class deliverability, stay out spam filters and reach their intended recipients with a near-100% success rate.

Given so much email horsepower under the Eventbrite hood, for this month’s installment of How to Promote your Event Online, I thought I’d take a look at making the most of email.

As a general comment I will say that more is more.  We certainly make it easy to send lots of email to your invitees as well as to those who’ve already registered to your event.  And since use of Eventbrite email services is entirely free, we encourage you to take advantage as much as possible.  All we ask is that you send emails conscientiously and keep the quality of your emails high.  We live in an age of automated (form) emails, so a little creativity and personality can help your invitees become and stay interested in your messages.

To that end, here are some email content ideas and suggestions based on things I’ve seen work for some of our event holders.

But before we delve into content, first a question of timing.  How long before your event should you send your first invitation? is a question I hear all the time.  The best answer here is the least desirable for the thoughtless person — “It depends.”  So the trick here is to be thoughtful.  Some things are obvious.  For example, the bigger a deal an event is, generally the farther in advance you hear about it.  This is not necessarily a function of how difficult to pull together an event might be — although that can certainly be the case.  This is generally because the producers of big, expensive events like to milk the PR and build up buzz for a good long time prior to the event.  If you have a lot of buzz to build in advance or want to extend the exposure window for your sponsors, go ahead and start early.  I’ve seen annual events send out invitations as soon as the week after the event.  This can be masterfully done when you combine the first invitation with the after-event wrap-up in one email.  When people are still feeling good about the event they just attended might be a great time to hit them up for the next one.  Capitalizing on post-event goodwill in the form of a super-earlybird discount can be very effective.  The one caution about beginning your email promotion efforts very far in advance of your event is that you have to be prepared to sustain and even build activity as your event date gets closer.  It would be absurd to send out a single invitation a year in advance of the event and expect for anyone to show up.

Likewise, it is easy to annoy your invitees if you barrage them with invites and reminders too frequently. It is an art to be able to continuously talk about something without appearing to sell it.  Successful event promoters learn and master this art.

For starters, an invitation doesn’t have to look like an invitation.  It doesn’t have to say “Come” or “Register” anywhere.  Once you appreciate that the content of your “invitation” can be anything that makes people register when they get it, you can begin to see some of the possibilities.

One idea is to talk to your invitees like they’re already going. Don’t make the subject of the email the fact that the recipient has not yet registered for the event.  This makes people feel alienated and somewhat hostile.  Don’t browbeat your invitees with recriminations like “Why haven’t you registered yet?” or “There are only 3 days left before the event!”.  Those types of messages work against you.  Most people don’t like it when other people try to create urgency for them.  Most people prefer to create urgency for themselves.  So the trick is to make people feel anxious that they aren’t yet registered for your event.  You want to make them begin to worry that if they don’t go they’re going to miss something worthwhile.

Come up with ways to foster a feeling of inclusion among those who are already going to your event.  Think of the club effect.  It’s human to want to join something that others around you are joining. Use email to let people know that benefits are accruing to those who have already registered.

If you have sponsors, don’t forget to give them visibility in the invitations.  This sounds academic, but is overlooked surprisingly often.  And don’t just drop some logos here and there. Give your sponsors the opportunity to engage your invitees with their content.  I’m sure they all have recent blog posts they’d love to have people read.  These kinds of collaborations with event organizers can give sponsor sites a significant boost in readership from a targeted audience, not to mention just plain traffic.  They’ll reward you for that with great material, which, if chosen thoughtfully, can do a great deal to drive registration to your event.   A great recent example that comes to mind was the Apps for Democracy event, which brought an obscure government web resource to the attention of the Washington DC tech elite.  Win-win.

If the organizer of the event is itself a company, then link to your own blog posts and news areas when you send invitations and registration reminders.  Choose content that builds towards the event.  Even if your invitee audience is somewhat “captive”, as is the case with many company events, you can still take advantage of the attention-opportunity you create when you send somebody an email.  Use this space to highlight key ideas of a presentation you intend to make, to foster discussion around a topical area, or even to have people vote on things — like the speaker presentation order.  This latter is a quite powerful driver of registrations, as many people will sign up just for the opportunity to influence (even in some small way) what will happen during the event.

Event-related content that is available in advance of the event only to those who register is also very compelling.  For many seminars and classes, a big part of the draw may be the desire to obtain the class materials.  Reward people who register early with PowerPoints and things that will build expectation and make the recipient feel special and ahead of the game.  If you have expert speakers and presenters scheduled for your event, work with them to provide preview samples of their content in your email invitations.

Many of these ideas involve linking from the email invitation to an external resource — a blog post, a web page, etc.  While this is generally recommendable, since it offloads content from the body of the email and gives you more room to deliver your messages, don’t forget that the goal is to convert the recipient – to make them register.  So, make sure that these external pages have links back to your Eventbrite registration page.

For many noob event organizers, the question may yet remain “Yeah, but what makes for a ‘perfect’ email invitation to an event?”  As we’ve spent some time illuminating above, the successful email invitation can take many forms.  But if I were going to send just one invitation to my event, I would probably try to include a schedule.  More so than almost any other factor, I would say that giving your invitees a clear picture of what is going to happen during the event and at what time, drives registrations.  People like to know what to expect.

Related posts:

1. How to promote your event online, part 2 — Facebook
2. How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter

Welcome to the 2nd installment of a new series of articles I kicked-off last month on the subject of how to promote your events online.  Part One was all about Twitter.  Last month I laid-out what I hope were some easy to follow and execute techniques for using Twitter to market your event.  Check it out now, if you missed it the first time!

As a general disclaimer, I should say that the methods and ideas I’ll be writing about in this series are not my own.  I don’t organize events.  What I know about promoting events online is 100% based on what I see users of Eventbrite doing.  Y’all are the amazing ones.  I am ever-in-awe of how clever and inventive a group of users you are.  My position here at Eventbrite affords me the opportunity to “snoop” on what y’all are doing.  And it is only for that reason that I have any insight into event marketing on the Web.  So, thanks for that!

This month I want to share a few tips for using Facebook to good effect.  But first I want to talk a little bit about the idea of creating “multiple instances” of your event on the Web.  Eventbrite recommends posting your event on as many other sites as you can.  We believe so strongly in the idea that we actually publish your event for you on a whole network of publisher partner sites.  At a minimum, you give a prospective attendee, whom you might not have otherwise reached, a way to discover your event.

On Facebook,  you gain that, but you also gain the opportunity to take advantage of a host of wonderful socialization mechanisms that Facebook has created especially for events.

The first step is, of course, to create an event page on Facebook for your event.  You just have to provide the basic details — when, where, etc.  And be sure to include a link back to your Eventbrite page in the space provided for a URL.  Once you’ve done this, you can proceed to invite people from your network.  But, honestly, that’s kinda boring.  You can do that on Eventbrite.  What’s really fun to do on Facebook with your event is to ask people who can’t come to your event to say they are.  This can include people who live too far away to attend, are celebrities, or just wouldn’t be all that interested in attending.  Especially desirable are people with big personal networks or networks with a focus on your event’s target attendee demographic.  Ask yourself, who in my network is friends with the people I’d like to have attend?  When they say they’re going, all their friends can see your event! This technique can be extremely effective.  Suddenly that “weak link” with half of IBM’s EMEA sales force in his network is your new best friend —

Another very effective technique is what I call carpet-bombing.  This is when you ask a small number of people who all share a lot of common friends to RSVP at once.  This can create the impression that an event is hot and that you should be sure to get in on what’s happening.  Say for example, you wanted to target Goodby Silverstein, all you would have to do is get two or three account managers and that popular admin to RSVP and you’d start an avalanche.  Here again, it’s nice that your friends can do this for you without actually having to show up or even buy a ticket, lol.

But perhaps my favorite Facebook feature for events is the ability to have attendees’ photo uploads automatically tagged to your event.  I love it.  Facebook let’s you assume that people who said they were going to your event, and who upload any pictures during your event or for a short time after your event, are uploading pictures from your event.  Facebook informs the uploader that [insert your event name] is suggesting a tag for their image.  This is, of course, great if your event actually generated many photographs and people are actually uploading them to Facebook.  But it’s also kinda cool because it let’s you “hijack” all the photo upload activity of anybody who RSVPed to your event.  This is a great way to extend the visibility of your event after the fact and prime future invitees.

Thanks again to all the Eventbrite event organizers who teach me something new every day.  We’ll see you back here next month.

Related posts:

1. How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter
2. How to promote your event online, part 3 — email

Lots of folks will tell you to use Twitter to promote your events online.  But I haven’t yet seen too many offer specific ideas on how to do this.   I want to kick-off a new series of online event promotion how-to articles with some specific answers to the question “How, exactly, can I use Twitter to promote my event?”

It should go without saying that some Twitter tactics won’t be appropriate for all types of events.  There are also differences in what you can do that relate to whether or not you already have a Twitter following.

But one tactic that doesn’t require having an established Twitter following, that I’ve seen used by some of our savvier event holders, is to create a Twitter account named for your event.  One of the coolest things about Twitter is that the medium seems to be quite tolerant of brands and companies having their own Twitter voices.  One of my favorite examples of this is Zappos, where the voice of Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, blends with and dissolves into the voice of the company, to interesting effect.

So too can your event have its own life (and voice) on Twitter.  Here’s an instructive example from BarCampAfrica, an Eventbrite customer.  If you try this out for yourself, do try to be more imaginative than just posting “Attend [insert name of your event]” over and over again.  When the Twitter identity is the name of your event, it’s a foregone conclusion that what you are doing is self-promoting.  You can afford to be conversational.

The first step is to gain the attention of your intended audience by following them.  Each time you follow someone, you’re delivering a targeted ad into their email inbox that says “Hi”.  From there, you can easily increase visibility for your event among your network by posting updates as the event draws nearer, announcing speakers, etc. and engaging other Twitterers directly on topics of relevance to your event.  This is also a great way of expanding your visibility beyond your immediate network, by using Twitter search (or Tweetscan) to find other people who are talking about topics relevant to your event.  For example, if your event is about bio-diesel, you could find other people who are Twittering on the subject of bio-diesel, gain their attention, and by engaging with them via direct responses and getting them to follow you, you also gain the attention of all the people following them.  This works!

Also, don’t be shy about asking your friends who tweet to spam your event.  Thoughtful recommendations from people you know are a building block of the social web.  This technique is particularly effective in building a sense of urgency around your event, by having people just tweet that they are going to attend.  Very, very effective on the day of the event.

Twitter is a great way to aggregate the attention of like-minded individuals.  This lends itself well to cultivating an audience towards which you can promote your events over time.  More so even than e-mail, timely Twittering can keep your constituents connected to your messages.  In the persona of your next event, post links, share resources and call attention to any of the ideas you consider important.  Then, when you’re ready to promote your next event, you’ll have a ready audience of potential attendees right at your fingertips.

Follow Eventbrite on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. How to promote your event online, part 2 — Facebook
2. How to promote your event online, part 3 — email