March 11, 2007

Promote Dance Performances with Google Calendar

The free Google Calendar offers many ways to promote your upcoming dance performances.

To illustrate its features, I created a Google Calendar for dance performances in Washington, DC. To add upcoming performances, I went back to Eventful and clicked the Google Calendar link next to DC area dance performances. Once I clicked on this link, performances were automatically added to my calendar. (I wrote about Eventful over the last few days - both here and here.)

On each event page within Eventful, you'll see the following links that allow you to save and share events:

Once I added these upcoming performances in my Google Calendar, there are a number of ways that I can now promote my calendar.

- With a link to my public calendar with upcoming dance performances. I made my calendar public so I could do this.

- With a link to the RSS feed for my calendar so that users can subscribe to it using their favorite news reader.

- A button that my blog or website readers can click on that allows them to important all of the listed dance performances into their own Google calendar. You'll have to sign-up to use Google Calendar for this feature to work:

- By adding a Google Calendar widget to my blog or website that lets me display my Google calendar. Google uses the word "gadget" instead of "widget." But it means the same thing: Taking data from one source (in this case Google Calendar) and embedding it in another source (in this case my blog). Click on dates with red boxes to see description of performances for that day:

You can create your own customized Google Calendar Gadget.

There are a number of ways to use Google Calendar for marketing purposes. Overall, the best reason to use this calendar tool - as well as other popular calendar applications - is because you get your performances in the calendars of potential audience members. And once your event is listed, calendar owners are not going to forget about your performance. Plus they can send themselves event reminders in many different ways. Google Calendar can be configured, for example, so that reminders are sent via SMS (text messaging) to your mobile phone.

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