Why you need a seperate Raffle Site

Even if your organization has its own website the benefits of creating and maintaining a separate stand alone site just for your fund raising raffle are huge. The cost is minimal, learning to put up a simple site is pretty easy and fun to learn and it can dramatically increase your ticket sales year after year.

Building a Website for Dummies...great starting point.

Many organizations that hold raffles have an existing website for the organization as a whole. On this site they will promote their raffle with photos, rules and regs and often online ticket sales. This is a fantastic way to capture online ticket seekers. As long as a few simple guidelines are followed this can be an effective ticket selling option. In fact a seperate site is something to so in addition to your existing online promotion, not in place of it. So why would you, and your organization, want another site?

Several reasons. A) It’s pretty cheap to do. B) Search engine optimization. C) You may very well save money.

A) Creating a simple website won’t break the bank! To create and maintain a website you only really need a few things…1) a Domain Name for about $10 a year 2) a small hosting account for about $5 a month 3) a Paypal account, to process online ticket sales if you choose, which is free to join 4) possibly a File Transfer Program to transfer files between your home computer and your hosting server. There are several very good free FTP programs 5) possibly a website builder program for a small fee…however there are many, many free website builder programs capable of producing a good site online. So we’re looking at less than $100 a year. If your new raffle website produces an extra 100 or 200 or 400 tickets sales for your fund raiser you’ve got a very good return on investment there!

B) Search engine optimization, according to Wikipedia.com, can be defined as “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks,” the more searchers will visit that site.” In short, search engines such as Google and Yahoo look at your site, decide what it’s all about and determine where and when it will appear in “organic” search results for different search phrases or keywords. Working your website to appear on the first page of search results for a given keyword (for example: car raffle) has a huge impact on the traffic that website will receive. Do a quick test for the keyword “car raffles” on Google or Yahoo. You’ll find one of my sites, “OldCarRaffle.com” up there near the top on the first page. This costs me nothing as it is an organic search as opposed to a say a Pay Per Click Campaign. By creating a simple separate website just for your raffle you can reap the rewards of higher organic search engine placement. If your site is all about car raffles then folks looking for car raffles have a darn good chance of finding it via an organic search.

c) How can creating a website for about $80 a year save you money? Tons of different ways!

Example 1: Say you create a website and the total for the year comes to $80 (or about $6.75 a month). By employing some simple and easy to use SEO techniques you are able to get your site to appear on the first page of search results for a few different keyword searches. The traffic to your new raffle site will most likely be chock full of folks looking for raffle tickets leading to more sales. Say you get 50 people a day looking at your new site and let’s assume that just two of those people end up buying a ticket a day over the run of your raffle…say 5 months. 2 a day for 150 days is 300 ticket sales. With the monthly cost of your site it works out to about 11 cents to sell each raffle ticket. Compare that to the cost of a newspaper ad for one week!

Example 2: With a well placed stand alone website you may be able to dramatically reduce or eliminate your pay per click advertising. At a cost of less than $7 a month, and with increased traffic from free organic search results, your return on investment can really get good. Even at 25 cents a click for a PPC ad you can imagine how quickly you can get to $7 or $10 or more a day!

Examples 3,4,5,6,7…. There are many reasons why a stand alone raffle site is a benefit to your raffle and your organization. I’ll be hitting on more of these as I take you through the process of building a simple website. First things first…you’ve gotta choose the right domain name.