- Focus your sales at first on any and all community “leaders” in your area including top school admin, town and county officials, prominent business owners, religious leaders and so on. You should be able to sell some tickets and more importantly get these folks to tell you which of their friends are “into” your raffle prize, like a Harley or an old car. Sort of like a referral deal…you’ll be able to approach these friends and say “Principle Bob from the high school said you are a Harley guy! Wanna buy a ticket?” or “The mayor told me I had to talk to you because you are a huge Mustang fan!” Sort of some friendly peer pressure - all’s fair in love and selling raffle tickets.

- Approach your local TV and radio stations and get on the air with your raffle. Either bring the car or bike to them or have them come to you. It’s a good story…”Local non-profit for farm education to raffle off a brand new harley Davidson!” You might be surprised who says “yes” to helping you promote the raffle.

- Raffling a bike? Is it from a local harley dealership? If so see if you can keep it there with a big “Win this Bike” sign on it. If not see if you can find a good central location in town with a good amount of foot traffic - maybe a big car dealer, in a mall, or something along those lines. Having the actual bike on display, where people can see/touch it seems to work out better than pictures on a flyer. If you can tell people where to go see it you’ve got a better chance of buying a ticket.

- Approach your local religious institutions and see if the priest, rabbi, etc. will mention your raffle before/after the ceremony, in their bulletin and so on. Take advantage of a captive audience.

- Offer something along with a raffle ticket purchase like a free car wash or a free meal from a local restaurant. Of course the local restaurant would donate you the meals in exchange for the free advertising. Some thing goes go offering other items that local business may donate to you to help out like a free pizza, move rentals, movie tickets and so on. You’d of course promote those businesses along with your raffle, “Thanks to John Doe’s Pizza House for donating pizza!” or whatever.

- Does your organization have a website? Drive customers to your website where your raffle is displayed as well.If you don’t yet have an online email list I highly suggest starting one. These can be a huge and very cheap method of promoting and selling raffle tickets. See a how to article here - Setting up an email list.

- See if you can “piggy back” on someone else’s mailing list, either email or snail mail. If you have a contact in Real Estate find an agent who regularly sends out a mailing. Sometimes agents will send out hundreds or thousands of mailings a month. I’ll bet you could find a real estate agent that would let you slip a raffle flyer, (or a blurb and picture in their email newsletter), into their mailing one month. Of course you’d praise that agent and give them some free advertising as well!

What other raffle selling tips do you use? Lemme know! Thanks

What I’d like you to think about is starting a separate email list for your car or motorcycle raffle, especially if you are holding, or plan to hold, an annual raffle. Even if you’ve got a mailing list sign up form on your organizations main page (which hopefully you do) it probably won’t do too much for online raffle ticket sales. There is a good chance that some, or a great many, of the people who are interested in your raffle really don’t care too much about your organization. At least they may not care enough about it to sign up for your newsletter. And that’s okay! There’s nothing wrong with that and it is by no means a slam or dig at those folks. It’s just the way it is. 

However! Since we know they are into your current raffle, and would probably like to know about your raffle next year, you’ve got a good chance to get them on a raffle mailing list. They don’t care to hear about your organization but they sure might want to know about your annual raffles! And it’s really easy. All you’ll need to do is put a simple email sign up form on the front page of your raffle website (or raffle page within your main organizations’ site). A few lines of code is all it takes and you’re off an running building a list of raffle afficianadoes. 

The best and easiest way to get this down is through a 3rd party list service like Aweber.com. These services make sure your emails comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and your organization does not get dinged for spam. Nobody likes spam. And even if your intentions are good (remember what the road to hell is paved with…) spam complaints cause all sorts of problems that nobody wants. I’ve tried other systems, free services and even tried to do it through my outlook for the email lists on some of my other sites. Don’t do it. Use a good service - it’ll save you headaches, your emails will get through and you’ll be pretty well protected from spam complaints. 

Whats the point? As you build up a list of active online raffle ticket buyers you can send them updates on the current raffle (”Only 23 tickets left!“) and once your raffle draws send out a Congrats email (”Congratulations to Jane Doe of Sryacuse, NY. on winning the raffle!“). Now the best part of this is after your current raffle is over you can keep the folks on your list primed for your next one! Not every week of course but every couple a months a little update email like “Next years raffle prize has been chosen and here it is!” or “With all the money we raised on our last raffle we did A, B, C and D. We look forward to your support on the next one.” or whatever. Then as your next raffle begins you’ve got all the people on your list ready to go!

Stop trying to get a whole new batch of ticket buyers every year. Start using a service like Aweber.com, get a list going and sell more tickets with a bit less effort! Thanks for reading and best of luck!

When I first got on the site I knew very little about it and really didn’t expect much. However within a few days I was finding, and getting found, by people I’d not spoken to in years..lots of people. It’s really pretty amazing. So as you quickly gain “friends” on the site you also are then exposed to friends of friends (example: Your friend Bob from Nevada has a friend Sally in New York) and you have the ability to make those people your friends as well. With in a very short period of time you can have a circle of friends numbering in the hundreds with very little effort. 

You may be saying, “Gee, that’s great..but so what? How’s that helping me sell tickets?” As you get comfortable with Facebook you’ll realize that it can quickly become something you check on a daily, or several times per day, basis. Everyone is able to post little updates that you can see (”Little Suzy took her first steps today!), pictures and videos, news clips, ask questions, trade jokes, send private emails and more. It becomes a little community. People post updates about their day..sometimes many times per day.

Think of it as your corner coffee shop where everyone stops in to trade gossip, show you the latest pictures of their kids, talk about politics, talk about business and so on. Your business is selling raffle tickets. Tell your new facebook friends about your trials and successes with the raffle. Tell them about your charity and the raffle prize. Facebook exists to network. Use it. Spread the word about your raffle and charity, meet some good people and expand your network as far as you wish.

Another benefit to Facebook: If you’ve got your raffle posted for free on OldCarRaffle.com or HarleyDavidsonRaffles.com you can post your raffle from those sites right to your facebook account with one click of the “Share This” button! Not bad, eh? As always if you’ve got any questions feel free to drop me an EMAIL. And if you want a “friend right off the back just Facebook me!

When you make the decision to jump into the world wide web world your very first consideration is choosing a domain name. This is simply going to be the name of your website and costs less than $10 a year. Not bad, eh? For the purpose of a raffle site picking a domain name is a pretty straight forward however there are things to consider.

No that you’ve realized the benefits of having a separate stand alone raffle site we can get down to the fun stuff. Choosing a domain name is the first step on your road to creating your own site. This is fun stuff! If this is all new and weird don’t worry. We’ll go in baby steps!

A few quick rules of domain names…

1) If at all possible go with a .com name. Avoid using .net, .org, .name or any of the others. The .com name is the staple, the most understood, the most recognized and overall the best way to go. Keep it mainstream.

I love the "Dummies" books...great place to start!

2) Make the name easy to remember and easy to relate. Choosing something like our-gr8-raffle-site.com” is hard to say, hard to tell people about and very easy to forget. Keep it short, keep it simple. You’ll be not only promoting this online but also on flyers, maybe in newspaper ads, maybe on the radio and for sure telling people about it. Keep it simple.

3) Avoid hyphens at all costs. This has to do with search engines and your placement in organic searches. It’s tempting sometimes to go for the hyphen, just don’t do it. There is almost always a better way to phrase your domain name without using a hyphen.

4) Get at least one keyword in the domain name, two if you can. You’re holding a raffle, right? Get the word raffle in the domain name. Keep in mind that, especially, if you’re holding an annual raffle, this domain name is going to be the site you send people to. If your organization is “Bob’s School” try “BobsSchoolRaffle.com.” If you are always going to be raffling a certain type of vehicle like a Harley-Davidson, year after year, then maybe try and reflect that in the domain name. Maybe “BobsBikeRaffle.com” or “BobsHarleyRaffle.com.”

5) Be patient. You may go into the process with a name or two in mind. It can be tough to find the .com domain name you want. Take your time. Look at a bunch of different options and feel it out. It’s been my experience that after I go into the process of getting what I think is the perfect domain name and it’s already taken I wind up with one that’s even better. Take your time and enjoy the process!

6) Avoid numbers, misspellings, “clever” spellings, or anything “funky.” Keep it simple. Simple is good. Simple is easy to relate, simple to say, simple to remember. See?

7) I use GoDaddy.com for all my domains. There are tons of places online to buy domains but I’ve mostly been let down in someway by most of the others. The GoDaddy.com site is simple to use, totally secure, can be trusted and their support staff is fantastic. The longest I’ve ever been on hold is three minutes. Usually I get a rep right away. They have a great domain name tool that suggests different and similar names as you go. Very helpful.

Use the above rules to get you rolling. When you’re looking for a domain name find a few you think are good and then ask your friends and coworkers. It’s amazing what you hear when you ask, “What do you think of this domain name for our raffle site?” Remember you’re shooting for a broad audience. Above all, have fun!

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.

Using a “shotgun” approach when choosing keywords can be a huge mistake. You’ve got to fight the urge to pick dozens of keywords for your ad. Unlike some other forms of advertising you want your raffle PPC ad’s to show up only to those people who are looking to buy a raffle ticket or are likely to buy, not to everyone.

The Pay Per Click Handbook

We’ll jump right in. Using the sample keywords from our last post lets take a look…car, corvette, raffle, car raffle, charity raffle, corvette car, corvette raffle, 1965 corvette raffle, free corvette, raffle tickets, fundraising, your organization name. This list is probably to broad for effectively selling raffle tickets. Let’s start with the keyword “car.”

When you put the word “car” into Google you’ll see that over 1,180,000,000 results are returned. What are people looking for when they search for the word “car”? Who knows? Parts or new or old or pictures or any number of things. Too generic, too broad. If you were to use this keyword and someone clicks it, they are probably just curious and not really a “hot” potential customer. You’re paying for each click. To get a good ROI (return on investment) you don’t want random folks and bored websurfers clicking on your ads. They might buy a ticket, but most likely not.

Look at “corvette” as a key word. This one’s a bit better. You know people who search for the word corvette are at least interested in corvettes. Good start. But just because they may like corvettes does not mean they are interested in buying a raffle ticket for a corvette. Maybe possible but not a good chance.

Now “1965 corvette” is a good keyword as it is a specific thing. The person searching for this is actively interested in specifically the 1965 corvette. They may already own one, want one or whatever but you are sure they have an interest in your specific raffle prize. Obviously the number of times your ad will show for this keyword is far less than that of “car” or “corvette” but that’s not the point. You want you ads to be seen by those folks actively looking for either car raffle tickets or your specific raffle prize.

Now “corvette raffle” is getting right to the point. Someone who types in corvette raffle is actively looking for a corvette raffle. Now we’re on to something. The chance that, when and if they click on your ad, they will buy a ticket is much higher than for the words “car” and “corvette.”

If I were to choose the actual keywords for our sample 1965 corvette raffle I’d do these, “car raffle, car raffles, corvette raffle, 1965 corvette, 1965 corvette raffle” and thats it, for the start. These are all specific, the person searching for these keywords are “hot” prospects and you will not get too many unnecessary ad impressions (showings).

Remember, your goal is that everyone who clicks your ad buys a ticket. Not going to happen of course but by controlling where and when your ad’s show up by keyword you are zeroing your marketing dollar in on those that are “warm” or “hot” to your ticket sales page.

Pay Per Click for Dummies

When choosing keywords for your PPC campaign you’ve got to keep in mind that you are, in some way, trying to read your potential customers (aka ticket buyers) minds. You are looking to choose those keywords that directly relate to what you are trying to accomplish. At the same time, determine how your target audience may search for what you are offering.

There are tons books written on the subject of keywords and for good reason. Companies like Google and Yahoo have made billions of dollars from keywords. Billions. Anyone looking to sell or promote anything on the internet will have to deal with keywords. The better keywords are handled, and understood, the more successful your online efforts will be.

Let’s jump into an example. You’re holding a car raffle to benefit your organization, for a 1965 Corvette, and you are looking to run a PPC campaign to promote your raffle. You’ve already made your Google Adwords Ad and you are ready to choose the keywords that go with that ad.

For our discussion a single word like “car” is a keyword, a phrase like “1965 corvette” is a keyword, and a long phrase like”1965 corvette raffle in new york” is also a keyword. When I say ‘keyword’ it applies to any single word or phrase that you’ll target your ad on. ‘Kay?

Now, in our 1965 corvette raffle example your first thought might be to use as many keywords as possible to get your ad to show to as many different people as possible, right? You may choose “car, corvette, raffle, car raffle, charity raffle, corvette car, corvette raffle, 1965 corvette raffle, free corvette, raffle tickets, fundraising, your organization name” and so on. This can be a huge mistake. In choosing a wide range of keywords you will be displaying your ad to a bunch of folks who may not really care about your raffle and, in turn, waste a ton of your organizations money.

The entire point of running a PPC campaign is to elicit a desired response from someone. You make an ad, you want someone interested in buying raffle tickets to find that ad, click on it and then buy a ticket. Every time someone clicks on the ad and does not buy a ticket you’re out the cost of that click. It’s going to happen, of course, but you want to keep those events as infrequent as possible. It seems obvious I know. But always keep in mind your desired result (ticket sale) as we go on. Let’s choose some keywords.

It’s free. It has a pretty simple name. A basic layout without fancy graphics, movies or pictures. When you visit the site for the first time and look at the home page you won’t be “blown away” in any sense. In fact you may just skip on to something else. But behind that simple home page is one of the most visited sites online.

Craigslist.org draws over 50 million people a month to the site. Those 50 million people produce over 12 billion pageviews per month. It ranks 8th worldwide in page views for English language sites. Long story short - it’s massive, it’s effective and it’s free.

The site is broken down to focus on different communities around the nation. Covering over 550 cities the chances are good that your town, or a small/medium/large city nearby has it’s own spot on Craigslist. There are some main posting sections for each city or town that include Jobs, Housing, Personals, For Sale, and Community.

It’s like a gigantic online version of your local classifieds. But online. And covers hundreds of cities. And millions of people read it.

Now, like anything Craigslist has it’s rules and regs and I encourage you to read them over. For example after reading the partial list of prohibited items you find “Gambling items, including but not limited to lottery tickets, sports trading card ‘grab bags’, raffle tickets, sweepstakes entries or slot machines.” I assume this applies for all areas. You can’t offer your raffle tickets for sale on the site. But that’s okay. You can’t have everything.

What you can do is let people in your area know about your charity or non-profit organization. Let them know what you do and who you help, let them know where you are and what your website is - for free. The more people in your community that know about your organization the better. It’s like getting a big free ad on main street.

Getting the word out on Craigslist is a great way to reach people in your area! Take a look. Read the rules and reg’s to make sure you’re doing the right thing. Overall it’s a great site. You may be pleasantly surprised at Craigslist.org. Thanks!

With everything going on in your organization your website is probably going through changes on a daily or weekly basis. New articles, projects, stories, personnel changes and so on get added or removed. With all those changes it is very easy to break links on the site and not realize it until later. Sometimes much later.

I know this happens because I do it all the time, however it’s pretty easy to remedy. Even if you are not the one that maintains the site make sure you do a check of all your raffle related links at least once a week. Normally you’ll only have a couple. Just follow the normal flow anyone would follow to find out information about your raffle, to download a Word Document or PDF flyer, and to purchase tickets online. If you find a broken link get ahold of your webmaster and get it fixed up! Or you can check this neat little site, 2Bone.com, which has on online lick checker. Put in your website address and they’ll run a check on all your internal links. If one’s broken it’ll show up!

This sounds simple and even trivial but it does happen and it can and will effect your ticket sales. Keep in mind that your average web surfer has a very short attention span …measured in seconds. If they run across a broken link when looking for raffle info chances are they’ll be off to somewhere else.

On top of that think of the “trust” issue. If you’re asking someone to spend $5, $20 or $50 on a raffle ticket they want to fell good about you, your organization and the raffle in general. A simple stupid thing like a busted link can really have an adverse effect on that persons trust of the whole thing. They may think, “They can’t even keep their website together…how can they run a raffle?”

When you realize you need a seperate raffle site from your main organization site this comes into play as well. Keep on it! Thanks!

The biggest “secret” to pay per click marketing is stunningly simple yet, until I learned about it, for some reason it never occurred to me. By using this very simple method I’ve been able to significantly improve the results and conversions from my PPC marketing campaigns .

So you know what PPC is, you have created a campaign and an ad, and you’re ready to pick keywords for that ad. (If you missed the beginning of this little mini-PPC lesson you can catch the first part here.) However, before you choose your keywords you’re going to make a second ad. Yup. Another one. And we’re going to test them. As I mentioned before I highly recommend reading Adwords for Dummies and/or Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords. These books go over Adwords in full and many more strategies for it’s use as well as this method in much greater detail. Both are less than 20 bucks each. They have totally changed the way I work PPC. Well worth it.

Understand that in Pay Per Click advertising with Adwords you only pay for the “click” and not for the number of times that ad is shown. If your ad appears a thousand times and nobody clicks on it then you don’t pay anything. So we’re going to make two ads that run at the same time. Always, always, always make two ads. And here’s why.

Google Adwords is going to keep track of all kinds of information for your ads including how many times they are displayed and how many times they are clicked on. From these numbers you get a “Click Through Rate” or CTR in the lingo. If your ad is shown a hundred times in a day and 10 people click on it your CTR is 10%. Got it?

In the example with our pretend charity, Bills Charity, I’ve made two pretend ads here. I’d run both ad’s at the same time. After a day or two I’d see which ad was preforming better as far as the CTR. I’d then rewrite the other, less effective, ad version. Then give it another day or two, find which of those two ad’s was most effective and had the highest CTR and rewrite the lesser of the two. It’s pretty amazing if you think about it. You can write something that hundreds, or thousands or millions of people will see and have a very quick “review” of your ad writing skills. This simple idea is often referred to as “split testing.”

I’ve started ad campaigns where the starting CTR was horrible - basically my ad’s stunk. No one clicked on them. Through the above process, which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty simple, I was able to improve my CTR by several hundred percent which of course drove more people to my target site and so on.

You may be thinking, “Okay, great. I got it. But how does this save me money?”

Like I said before when I first started playing around with PPC my ad’s stunk, my CTR stunk, my target website stunk and I thought the whole thing was a total bust. In desperation I started raising the amount of money I would spend per click…thinking that was the answer. All this did was get my ad’s into a little better position so when they did get clicked on I’d spend more. And because my ad’s stunk, I was making people dig for the information they wanted, and my website stunk so, naturally the conversion rate was horrible. (Conversion rate, for our example, is the number of people who visit your site against the number of sales they produce. Assume 250 people visit your site in a day and say 25 of those people buy a raffle ticket. Your Conversion Rate (CR) is 10% of site visitors.)

So always make two versions of an ad. Always check the CTR of those ads. Always rewrite the less effective ad. You can also expand this idea. Start with two ads for one “focus” and write another two ad’s for a different “focus.” The focus of one set of ads may be on the prize car (1970 Gremlin!) and the second focus could be on your charity cause (We help kids!).

Coming up next. Keywords. What they are and how to use them in your Raffle Pay Per Click Advertising.