How to make your event listing stand out from the crowd

With the lead up to New Year’s Eve on us we thought we’d ad a series of blog posts giving you some handy hints and tips. The first is how to make your event listing stand out from the crowd.

So you’ve decided to add your event to Skiddle.com – that’s a fairly good start and with tens of thousands of event promoters from around the UK doing the same thing you’re in very good company! The thing is, how do you make you listing stand out from the crowd?

Submitting Event Listings – Don’t just copy and paste

Most event promoters using Skiddle use a number of listing services and one of the most common mistake is simply laziness – that is, they just copy and paste their content from one site to the next. That’s fine and with Skiddle being one of the most highly ranking events listings websites out there your event page will likely outrank other services in Google, however you’re committing the first sin of marketing, not tailoring your content to the audience.

Making your event listing unique

The key to making your event listing stand out is to make it unique. This helps in a number of ways: first of all it means you can directly speak to the audience as Skiddle users – your content will  therefore be naturally more engaging than another event promoter’s copy, where that promoter has just copied and pasted.

Another way in which this helps is because the event goers will often search around before deciding to make a purchase – if you’re just copying and pasting your event’s listings from site to site the users may have already read what you’ve got to say, by mixing it up a bit you’ll make sure they read more of your content and not just switch off when they come to read about an event they’ve previously read about (even if you’re saying virtually the same thing in different words).

How to write your events title and short description

Choose your title and short description wisely. Your event’s title and short description feature all over the website and are generally the main place you’re going to grab someone’s interest when they’re browsing around Skiddle. If you’ve got a well known artist, make sure they’re prominent, if you’re targeting New Year’s Eve make sure you’ve included variants of NYE keywords there too. Bear in mind that Skiddle’s site search functionality mainly uses these two areas when returning events in the search results – so have a think about how you would search for events and include those kind of words in there.

Link up your event listing

One of the key ways you can promote your event is to tag artists that are performing. This has a number of benefits in that it allows the listing to be featured on the artists’ profiles. Also as you’ve selected a venue when you added your event you’ll enable event goers to find your event by reviewing the venue page.

Choose the right image to promote your event

Many event promoters choose to use their flyer artwork when promoting their event, and whilst this is fine for many, it doesn’t necessarily follow that a good flyer makes a good image online. For one thing (and it seems obvious!), the thumbnail image on Skiddle is a relatively small square image rather than an A6 or A5 flyer – the detail you can get into a flyer just doesn’t work in the space. There again, if it’s all you’ve got, use that until you can get a better clearer one sourced!

Get Listing / Improving your listing now!

Hopefully you’ve already got your New Year’s Eve event listed on Skiddle and this is just a case of making sure it’s as good as it can be (if you’ve not listed it – do it now!). Visit the Promotion Centre by visiting: http://www.skiddle.com/promotion to keep working on your listing!

Tomorrow we’ll be looking at how to better use the Event Feature facilities.