What’s that saying for the month of March, “In like a lamb, out like a lion”? While this usually applies only to the weather, March was a great month at Zvents, and a more appropriate saying for our March is “In like a lion, out like a pack of lions”!

In addition to the six partners we launched a couple weeks ago, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of four more media partners:

The Charlotte Observer: Serving Charlotte, North Carolina

Greenwich Time: Serving Greenwich, Connecticut

Santa Cruz Sentinel: Serving Santa Cruz, California

Stamford Advocate: Serving Stamford, Connecticut

Cute lion cub photo courtesy of Arno & Louise.

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Last week we wrote about Eventbrite as an inexpensive and easy-to-use event registration and ticketing service. Yesterday, they announced the beta launch of the Eventbrite Partner Affiliate Network, which enables affiliates to earn money by referring event publishers and promoters to use the Eventbrite service.

While ticketing affiliate programs have been around since about, oh, Day 2 of the Internet, Eventbrite’s program puts a new twist on the model - an affiliate receives a cut of the revenue on every ticket sold by an event publisher who signs up for the Eventbrite service through the affiliate’s web site

If you become an affiliate partner, here’s how it works:

1. Run Eventbrite ads on your site.

2. An event promoter or publisher sees the ad, is intrigued by its promise of easy and cheap event registration and ticketing, and goes to the Eventbrite site.

3. The same event promoter learns more, says “Hey! This makes my life easier and helps me sell more tickets to my event”, and signs up to manage one of their upcoming events through Eventbrite.

4. Let’s say the event is a music festival, and 3,000 tickets are sold at $50 each through Eventbrite. The service fee for each ticket is $1.25. As the referring affiliate partner, you receive 35% of all the service fees collected (3,000 x $1.25 x 0.35), so you earn $1,312.50.

Eventbrite also offers a traditional ticketing affiliate program: if you sell tickets to their events, you earn a commission for every ticket sold through your site.

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It has been an exciting week here at Zvents! Zvents turned 3 on March 19th, and six new media partners launched the Zvents Media Platform and joined the Zvents Media Network, including:

Chico Enterprise Record – Chico, CA
Chico is home to California State University, Chico and Bidwell Mansion State Park, one of the 25 largest municipal parks in the country. Interested in learning what’s going on in downtown Chico? How about where to the country’s largest collection of yo-yo artifacts? You’ll find it all now on ChicoER.com.

Daily Democrat – Woodland, CA (who wrote a great article about how Zvents helps the Woodland community find “Things To Do”
Also called “the City of Trees”, Woodland is known for its architectural treasure of Tudor, Victorian, and and Mission Revival homes, some of which are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Planning a visit? Make sure to visit the world-famous Hays Antique Truck Museum, recognized for being the largest museum of its kind in the world.

Monterey County Herald – Monterey, CA
One of the top tourist destinations in California, Monterey is home to the world-class Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Naval Postgraduate School, and hosts one of the most popular jazz festivals in the country, the Monterey Jazz Festival.

Ukiah Daily Journal - Ukiah, CA
Located in southern Mendocino County, Ukiah is a charming small town known for its grape vineyards, pear orchards and hot springs. Don’t miss the Ukiah Country Pumpkin Fest, where you can see some HUGE pumpkins!

Ruidoso News - Ruidoso, NM
Ruidoso is the largest community in Lincoln County, and the economic hub for the region. There are several art galleries exhibiting work by local artists, and learn more about the Wild West’s more infamous characters at the Billy the Kid National Scenic Byway Center.

Lubbock Online – Lubbock, TX
Cowboys, music and Buddy Holly - just a few things that make Lubbock famous. Make sure to visit the Buddy Holly Center, a tribute to the Lubbock native who made rock n’ roll history, and to other notable West Texas musicians.

Welcome new partners!

And event promoters, that’s six more channels where your event and business listings are automatically promoted!

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Let’s face it, promoting events can be a lot of fun, but managing the event registration, ticketing, and attendee lists can be a real pain without the right tools. Today, more and more event participants expect to be able to register online for events, which means you may need an easy and inexpensive way to facilitate registrations, collect payment information, and manage your attendee list.

If you host small, infrequent events or large events (where there are few types of attendees), all you may need is an event registration tool that allows you to:

• Collect credit card and registration information
• Process credit card charges
• Set up a basic registration form that you can link to from your Web site
• View/export a list of people who registered for your event

Two services to check out are Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets.

Eventbrite

With Eventbrite, there are no set up or monthly fees, or ticket fees for free tickets or events. All major credit cards are accepted, and final payment processing is done through Google Checkout or Paypal. Some nice functionality Eventbrite provides is the ability to send email invitations, customize and brand your event registration page, offer discount codes and group discounts, track affiliate/partner ticket sales, and track RSVPs from invites.

Eventbrite also goes a step further and offers to publish your event in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and…Zvents!

Fees: 2.5% of the ticket price, with a minimum fee/ticket of $0.99 and maximum fee/ticket of $9.95.

Brown Paper Tickets

As the “fair-trade ticketing service”, Brown Paper Tickets is here to change the ticketing industry, as stated in their Bill of Rights. BPT offers similar functionality to Eventbrite, and also includes 24-hour phone orders, assigned seating, password-protected prices, comp ticket and media pool ticket distribution, festival-style ticketing, and the option to print paper tickets (for a nominal fee).

Unfortunately, Brown Paper Tickets does not publish their event information to any of the event sites or search engines (Hey BPT, we’d love to hear from you if you want to give your clients this option).

Fees: 2.5% of the ticket price, plus a fee per ticket of $0.99.

Event Registration Services For More Complicated Events
Planning a more complex event, such as a conference, trade show, or series of events? Idealware wrote a fantastic in-depth post about the features and benefits of several event registration and ticketing tools, including Acteva, 123SignUp, Cvent, and RegOnline.

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