Local Events Challenge - Give Them What They Want

Who wouldn't want a free piece of advertising at your next local event?

Your blog gives you the chance to do this!

In looking through our Google analytics, as I do quite often, I came across an interesting trend. It seems that consumers are hungry for information about local events taking place in your markets. This time of year is ripe with events around Halloween, Thanksgiving and the Holiday seasons. Now is the time to provide this sort of information for the people in your area in need of it.

Maybe some of you have heard of Fall Fest in Lancaster PA? No? I hadn't either......until I found that 542 have landed on this post in the last 30 days after doing a search for: fall fest lancaster pa on Google.

Brian's post is a pictorial recap of the 2009 Fall Fest event. Things get a little more interesting when I looked a little further in the analytics. It seems that an additional 319 people have searched: fall fest lancaster pa 2010 in the last 30 days as well. Guess which post they landed on? Yep.....his post about the 2009 event.

There also happens to be another 109 visitors that used all three words, fall, fest and Lancaster in their search queries that landed them on Brian's post. I was expecting more, but this appears to be a case where the long tail was flipped around and most of the searches were done with the two primary keyword phrases.......that's alright, if we rank for the big ones, we'll take it!

The point is, in the last 30 days, that post has had 969 visitors.

How about the Greek Festival in Tuscon? 269 visitors for one phrase on that event
(With an average time on the page of 25 seconds......which means Cara got 269, 25 second commercials, exposing her to people that most likely are in or around Tuscon)

Hungry? If you live in Roswell GA you might be interested in the Taste of Roswell. I know that 267 people who landed on ActiveRain in the last 30 days were. Good thing David was there to help give them the information they were after.

Need a pumpkin patch in San Antonio? Kristin knows where to find them, and 261 people spent an average of 35 seconds absorbing her knowledge on the topic.

Is the Hood River Harvest Festival in Hood River Oregon on your agenda? 234 people were able to make their plans for the event based on Amy's information.

None of these last four examples are even looking at long tail keywords and the multiple different ways someone may have landed on their posts by doing a search that wasn't the most popular. Each of these is one search phrase, garnering between 234-269 visitors in a 30 day period. And I'm pretty certain that someone looking for a pumpkin patch in San Antonio lives in Kristen's market. It also doesn't take into account the fact that these posts can be sent out to your contacts. Does your database break down which of your past clients have children? They would probably be interested in knowing where to find the nearest corn maze, haunted house or pumpkin patch.

I could keep going for quite some time with additional examples......

Temecula corn maze
Caldwell Street Fair
Arkansas State Fair
haunted houses in Chattanooga

Pumpkin patch, corn maze and haunted house are really popular right now. There are thousands of searches from the last 30 days for these terms with thousands of different geographies attached to those keywords.

The Challenge

So if you haven't figured it out by now.....we are going to have a challenge. You are going to write about events happening in your area that people want to attend in the coming months.

Please do your post on an event happening before the end of 2010. This allows you to cover things all the way into the holiday season (which is fast approaching....can you believe it?)

Let's shoot for 200 words per post. We want to give the consumer landing there some solid information. I would encourage you to have the date, times, location, possibly a link to an official website for more information. Pictures would be great if you can get out and take some. Hopefully you've attended yourself and can give some personal insight on what you liked or didn't like. Maybe you can give them some idea of where to park, or let them know that if they go, they can't miss the fresh cider and pumpkin donuts.

You can do four posts for 1000 points each. Each post must cover a different event.

1000 points of extra credit will be given if you get off your butt and speak to the organizer of the event and provide a discount coupon on your post for visitors to your post to take advantage of (this is going to be tough......if only a few of you can pull it off, I may make that bonus even higher)

Posts are due by October 31st at 11:59pm Eastern Time. The sooner the better.

As in past challenges, please don't half-ass the post just to get the points. These posts will be seen by people you hope to one day do business with. Put your best foot forward as always.

Once you have completed all four posts, please leave a link to each post in one comment on this blog. You don't have to piece meal the links to me like we've done in the past. Just get all four posts done, then leave one comment, with a link to each post in that one comment.

If you need a refresher on how to write a post that ranks well in the search engines, please visit Brad's post. I will expect that your posts follow this format with the most important aspect being that you have a strong title on your post. The title should include a geography of some sort.

If you have already written about local events can you use a previously written post? No. That means that you are ahead of the game as it is and you're going to have to dig down deep to get these extra 4000 (8000 if you can get some discount coupons) points.

 

 

 

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