Your information page serves as the center point of your process. It’s where all those with at least a passing interest in your event will go to learn more and it’s also the directional for where you want people to go next. Since charity live streams are time sensitive events, without an information page of some sort it’s difficult to have effective outreach and almost impossible to coordinate outreach between large groups. Since you’ve already created your info page it allows you to focus on the other two key elements of promoting a charity live stream: an integrated user flow and multi-channel outreach.
One of the key issues that face charity live streams today is that there’s no way to locate when they’re happening unless you’re already a part of the community. The result of this until now has been that charity stream potential to raise money has been limited to the size and scope of one’s own network. However, by having a dedicated web page that’s specific to your event you allow it to be indexed by major search engines. Additionally, having a central information page for your event makes the promotion much easier by yourself and your fans. This is because your information page serves as the permanent hub of information, regardless of whether your event is in 2 weeks or 2 hours.
Benefits Of The CharityLiveStream Website
When you search for current charity live streams going on today using any of the popular search engines, the number of useful results have been next to none, despite the fact that there are always, at minimum, 3-4 streams per weekend. As an information platform CLS was initially built to solve 3 problems on this front: lack of centralized event pages, lack of optimization of those pages for search engines, and lack of a central place to find events going on in the future. These problems are solved within the Promotion core of CLS’s benefits.
—Free Event Info Pages
After creating an account on www.charitylivestream.com you have the option of immediately submitting an event to the calendar. The submission form is an extensive, though largely optional, series of inputs to add the details of your event. The more information you provide about your event, the more easily it can be searched within the community calendar, (more on that below), and more importantly the more information you can provide to potential viewers. Do you have specific sponsors that need you to mention them? Covered. Need to make sure you add links for more details on the awesome charity your fundraising for? Got that too. Need a section to confirm your donations were recieved by the non-profit? Well, you get the point.
You can then use this page as the main link in all your promotional activities so you only need to update one page with all your information instead of changing things in multiple locations for updates. Social sharing buttons are already integrated into the event page so your community can help promote the event to their circles of friends. Finally, if you do need to make any last minute changes it’s a simple process to go in and modify the details.
—Optimizing For Search Engines
Another benefit of a CLS page is that it’s indexed for search engines to find. Additionally the Charity Live Stream domain name allows events to easily convey the type of fundraiser and boost it’s rank in search results, regardless of the name you choose for your event.
—Charity Stream Community Calendar
The biggest benefit by far of using CLS, though, is the Community Calendar. Although having your page indexed in search engines is definitely a good thing, it doesn’t solve the problem of not being able to find events unless you’re already a part of the community. Every event page created on Charity Live Stream is added into the master calendar which can be browsed by anyone visiting the site. Additionally, the calendar can be filtered by a wide variety of parameters based on the details submitted with the event.
This means that as the community grows everyone will be able to easily find upcoming events since CLS is the first site of it’s kind to implement an charity stream database, regardless of the platform used for broadcasting or donation collection.
Creating A Page With Your Own Site
Although I’ve built Charity Live Stream to allow anyone to create an event page that’s added to the community calendar, you can, and should, also create an information page for your event on your own website if you have one. The key issue is that many broadcasters don’t, but it’s easy enough to build one using free tools if you have time and dedication to figure things out. Although there are whole blogs just on website building, there are several key factors you’ll need to look into if you are creating a site of your own. If anyone’s interested in me covering this particular topic in more detail than below than let me know. I’m a marketer, not a technician, but I’m able to throw together a quick website, at low cost to free, and I might do as series of blog posts covering what I know.
There are several aspects to creating your own website for yourself or your charity group that you’ll need to take care of:
- Domain Name
One of the first things you need to do is snag a domain name for your site, the name you type in to the address bar when you want to go to a web site. The most obvious would be to make it the name of your group or organization. Ideally the best domain names are 12 characters or less with fewer being better. The shorter a name, the better since it’s easier for people to remember. (I break this rule for charitylivestream.com, but I’m going after SEO & recognition as THE place to find charity live streams of all types.)
You purchase the registration of domain names on a yearly basis. Most often you’ll want to register your domain name through the same company that you’re using for hosting (see below) since they’ll give you a package deal by throwing the registration for a year with your hosting package. Expect to pay between $10-$15 USD per year to keep your name and, as a personal recommendation, don’t let it go after you have it unless your dead positive you don’t want it anymore. Now that names are becoming more and more scarce, as you’ll find in your own search, there’s a moderate likelihood someone else will register it if you let it go. - What Is Website Hosting
Before I go into how to get hosting for your site, here’s a brief lesson on what hosting is.
To those who don’t already know, the internet is made up of trillions (quadrillions?) of pages being hosted on computers all over the world called servers. These servers “host” the individual pages in file folders, just like you store documents, images, and anything else on your own computer, and make it publicly available for others to access. While it’s entirely possible to host the pages and files of a website off you’re own server, if you have the hardware, most people use Hosting Services to store the web files that make up their websites because it’s faster and easier to pay someone else to manage the hardware & software maintenance while freeing up time to focus on other things. The domain that you register “directs” the person who types in that name on a web browser to a particular file, in a folder, that is being hosted in a server, that is owned by a hosting company. Simple, right? But wait, there’s more.
After you resister your domain and have your hosting set up you’ll also be able to also create “sub-domains” which changes the www before a domain name with the text/number string of your choice. Since this sub-domain is treated as an entirely different address, you’re able to direct it to a completely different folder in your server. This is important because if you want to use different site systems (see below) for different functions (forums, test websites, etc) then you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the way that sub-domains and file management works with your hosting service. There’s just one final aspect to all this
The final component of our three part overview of website hosting are databases. Where hosted files determine the base content for web pages, databases store information that has been input into the website and that the website uses to pull information from. Virtually all of websites have databases tied to them since that’s where all the data from a site is stored for use. Whether it’s the content of a blog post, a comment on a forum, or the details of a profile that information is stored in the equivalent of multiple, integrated Excel spreadsheets. If anyone’s ever had the need to use Microsoft Access, then you’ve seen and witnesses a database structure before. These databases are hosted by a hosting company just like the folders and files. - Getting Hosting For Your Website
Lets talk about where you get hosting for your website. There are dozens of hosting services to choose from and the pricing can vary based on the features you want and the quality of the hosting. (Many hosting providers will set “shared servers”, where multiple websites are hosted on one server, as their lowest tier offering. You can then pay to upgrade for better performance.) The sky’s the limit in terms of pricing with all the different bells and whistles, isn’t it always, but for a basic series of info pages you can usually find promo hosting offers with no extra features for as little as $1-2 USD per month with purchasing durations for up to 2-3 years with the domain name added in. That can give you, potentially, a website for three years for $36 to $72 USD, but once that time limit runs out prices can go up to a rough average of $8 USD per month.
If you’re really strapped for cash then there are webpage builders & hosting services which will let you create a sub-domain off of their site and add their branding, like Square Space, Weebly or WordPress, but allow the basic hosting for free. Depending on the size of your group and what you want to do, this may be good enough for what you need. As always, if all you’re looking for is a simple webpage for your event then you can create one for free with charitylivestream.com. - Site System
Speaking of site builders, unless you’re knowledgeable on building websites from scratch, I’d recommend using a system like Square Space, Weebly, WordPress, Joomla, or another content management system to quickly build out the basic site for yourself or charity group. There are dozens of website builders and thousands of templates and plugins to make the look and feel of your site fit your tastes, but the key recommendation I’d give everyone is to ensure your site is mobile enabled. Outside of a work environment society is quickly approaching a point where people are spending more time on mobile phones, tablets, and other devices than laptops and PCs. CLS is mobile enabled and you should make sure that your site is also. - Site Content
So you have your name, hosting provider, and website system. Now what do you put on the darn thing? The sky’s the limit depending on what your objective with the site is, but at minimum you should have a homepage that clearly explains who you are, what you do, why you do it, and what you want people to do on your site before they leave. You should also have a contact page with either contact information or a form for others to fill out to send you an e-mail. Finally, and obviously, you should have a page solely dedicated to the event you’re doing.
In terms of formating the pages themselves using visual elements like images and video helps to keep the a page interesting and breaking the format of the visuals into patterns that don’t repeat keep things visually dynamic. What I mean by this is to vary the number of columns used in different sections of the page as you scroll down it as well as mixing the positioning of text and images. Ex: if you have an image with text to the right for 2 sections (divs) in that row, then make sure your next section either has the text to the left with a different image on the right or you have your information in a different visual format like 3 columns of information. Do whatever you can to prevent visual repetition, and keep the user moving down the page.
Although I’ve tried to keep CLS as flexible as I can, having your own site gives you infinitely more freedom with look, feel, and features. Tech savvy individuals can achieve some amazing results that show off their creativity as well as describing what they to in the way that fits their personality. However, whether or not you use the CLS platform you should be sure to add all the details of your event to your specific site page. Using your own site as the core information page means that you’ll need to keep all the above details in mind, although if you have both then you’ll only boost the outreach for your event all the more.