How to Fill your Timely Online Calendar with Events

Creating and managing a good looking, functional and easy to use online calendar of events can be challenging. However, making your own event calendar stand out from the crowd you will need more than just a pretty images.

Introduction

Timely’s Online Event Calendar Software can help you maximize the success of your online event calendar. By creating an online fill-in calendar with quality and interesting events, you can give your audience a diversified source of events. Consequently, you can keep them engaged and active, boosting your page views and time spent on your website. 

The ideal number of events on your calendar depends on the size of you target audience. For instance, if you are a local event promoter or a community entrepreneur, you should try to expose 5 to 10 events per day, depending how big your community is. Small towns should aim for 10 to 25 events happening per day. In contrast, cities should try to showcase 50 to 100 events a day.

To achieve that, we came up with some ideas to help you improve your online event listing. 

1. Create Your Own Events

The first step to get more users clicking and navigating through your online calendar is to create your own events. With Timely's software, you can create them individually, in groups or even set them up as recurring events. 

Event Information

The key to having an online fill-in calendar that really works is to include as much information as possible, all in one place. Therefore, when creating events you should add as much detail as possible, including date, time, location and price. Also, you should add an interesting title to catch your audience's attention.

Obviously, there will be the need to include links to certain events to provide more information, but if compare these two calendar entries:

• Greek Event: August 18, visit www.event.com to learn more.
• First Vancouver Greek Festival: In Promontory Park across from the Greek Orthodox Church. August 18 from 10am to 8pm. Authentic food, fun activities for all ages, cultural traditions including dancing and singing. Visit www.event.com to learn more.

In the second calendar entry, you’re going to get a lot more interest. Even though you’re giving more information, you’re also more likely to get people to click on the link - you’ve piqued their interest and they’re ready to learn more about the Greek Festival. 

Media

If you want to make your event stick out, you should add eye-catching images and exciting videos to your event post. This will certainly help you improve event awareness and interest. As a consequence, it may help you get more event registrations, sell more event tickets, and increase event attendance.

Filters

Another idea is to use categories and tags to make it easier for your audience to search your events. Making your events more rich and user friendly will attract more people and returning public. 

In the example above, you can make the event easier to find by marking the Greek Festival with categories, such as “Family Events”, “Cultural Events”, “Ethnic Food,” etc. Then someone who is looking just for family events, or ethnic food, can filter through the calendar and be shown this item, among other similar items. 

2. Import Events from ICS and CSV Files

When making your own online calendar, another way of filling up the events spaces on your online fill-in calendar is importing a ICS or a CSV file, like an excel document and other files. Using Timely online event calendar, you can transfer that lengthy list of contacts, venues, events, and much more, with ease. 

All the information from the ICS or CSV file will be automatically added to your event calendar, without the need to manually input the entire list. 

3. Import Events from ICS and iCal Feed URLs

To get a steady stream of reliable, relevant and updated event content when making your own event calendar, you can import events directly from other calendars. You can import existing events from any calendar with ICS or iCal Feed URL, such as Apple, Outlook and Google Calendars.

Importing events allows you to receive an automated event flow from the web, from different sources. This feature is very useful if you want to populate your web calendar, and promote events created by others. It also saves you time by scheduling automated imports.

For example, if you are a Destination Marketing Organization, you can gather events happening around town and project them through your website. People looking for what to do in and around your city will see everything happening there. They will keep navigating your website to explore and discover even more events. 

4. Import Events using Timely Google Chrome Extension

Adding external events to your event calendar enables you to broaden your website's offerings, cross-promote events, form partnerships, build credibility, and expand your audience.

Using Timely Calendar Chrome extension, you can instantly import selected events from Eventbrite, All Events in, and other online sources to your Timely account. You can save and automatically publish these events in your own calendar.

5. Import Events from other Timely Calendars with Event Finder™

Timely clients are part of Timely Online Calendars Network. As such, their public events can be found and imported to other Timely calendars through our Event Finder™ feature. Our event database has hundreds of thousands of events and activities happening worldwide that you can add to your online fill-in calendar.

With this feature, you can search events by typing a location (either physical or online) or a keyword. Alternatively, you can search events on a map if they have event markers. Events found on Event Finder™ can be added to another Timely calendar with just one click.

Imported events through Timely Event Finder™ are synced with the original calendar. Thus, any changes in the original event will appear on the imported event.

Nevertheless, the importing calendar can edit any imported event. For example, you can change Event Title, Event Custom URL, Event Description and Featured Image. Importantly, any changes on the imported event by the importing calendar will not affect the original event on the original calendar.

6. Let your Public Submit Events to your Online Fill-in Calendar

A great way to get events added to your online fill-in calendar while engaging with your audience is to allow them to submit events. You can do so by adding an automated event submission form to your events calendar.

By allowing your public to post and share their events, you fill up your calendar and bring relevant traffic to your page. You can easily become a reference and the go-to place when looking for an event in your community. In addition, you can also generate automatic advertising revenue by charging an event promotion fee. 

Timely Event Submission Form feature is relevant for several types of clients, including but not limited to media and event promoters, schools, colleges and universities, and nonprofits and charities.

Whether your goal is to fill your calendar full of every event that is happening, or if you want to restrict it to those who are wanting to pay a small fee to have their event featured is up to you. It will depend on your situation. Often, when first starting a calendar you’re just happy for any information you can get, but as time goes on you can afford to be a little more picky.

We hope our tips help you fill your online calendar with events. If you still need help, please contact us.

Plan a better event with Timely today!