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Whether you’re a media company, membership association, school, or non-profit, you can turn your online events calendar into a profit generator.

Event content on an easy-to-use online calendar is an effective way to attract visitors to your website and keep them coming back for more. If you’re savvy, that website traffic can equal profit.

At Localist, we’ve seen calendars become a big part of some of our customers’ online revenue. Here are some ways they monetized their calendars that you can mimic:

1. Sell sponsored widgets. These days, it’s hard to grab a user’s attention. With a sponsored events widget, you’re still delivering content the user is looking for, “provided by” the sponsor.
2. Affiliate revenue. Through partnerships with ticketing sites like Ticketmaster, LiveNation, Eventbrite, and more, you can gather affiliate revenue from anyone who clicks the “Buy Tickets” link through your calendar.
3. Content distribution. You’re spending a lot of time gathering great event content. Why not get more return on the time invested by syndicating it to partners who don’t have the resources to do it themselves?
4. Ask promoters to pay to have their events featured. This is an attractive yet simple product you can offer event promoters. They pay to have their event prominently displayed on your online calendar. With Localist, you can do this with our built-in display options. Either feature their event prominently at the top of the screen, or display it on the home page via a widget.
5. Offer special promotions on event emails. Give event promoters or advertisers the option to pay for space on event emails that go to calendar users and event attendees. You’re granting them exclusive access to an advertising target population, which they’ll be willing to pay for.
6. Traditional ads. This method works on all web content, including calendars. You can keep it simple by selling space at a flat price, or you can charge per click or impression. Of course, if you sell per click or impression, you have to drive significant traffic to your calendar. Need some help increasing traffic? Check out this post.
7. If you can’t sell out ad space, fill the gaps with Google Adsense. Google’s automated service will place ads alongside your calendar that are relevant to the page’s content, thereby upping the chance that visitors will be interested and click on them. You’ll have to split the profit with Google, but it’s a better option than letting that space go to waste. Plus, Google will deal with billing advertisers and tracking impressions and clicks.

Add capitalizing on events to your website, and you can more than pay for the cost of keeping the calendar live and updating events. Having a great online calendar isn’t just a service you provide for your community—it can make you money.

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