Building a brand..

It has been 3 to 4 weeks since I published the website and tickets have gone on sale. So far tickets are slow; which I am not too concerned about at this stage as there is a good few weeks before the event date. After a session with my mentor as well as research, I realised that I had to ‘build the live sport talks’ brand to attract ticket sales. Naturally I believe in the product and know others will to, but how will people know if it isn’t marketed correctly?

Stage one – Getting British Swimming on board with the event

Our first talker is former Olympian swimmer Joanne Jackson. Joanne, who is now retired and has a wealth of experience from competing at the age of 17 as well as competing at London 2012. Let’s not forget the world record she held too!

I decided to contact British swimming to see if they could run a story on the event with Joanne on their website as well as on their various social media outlets. We decided that we would run a competition for 5 free tickets for their followers. Their media person, who is very helpful forecasted some tweets and Facebook posts to encourage people to retweet and like etc. to get the word out there. It was great to see such god feedback, with people genuinely showing an interest in the event. So we have a few more posts scheduled in until the event in September!

Stage two – Working with a charity

Another regular practice for organising events is pairing up with a charity. So the plan is, the charity helps promote the event via their website and social media and in exchange have an opportunity to fundraise at the event or acts as good PR for them to be supporting this type of event. Joanne Jackson is an ambassador for the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust, so I decided it would be a good idea to contact them.  Like British Swimming, they were also very helpful and are keen to work with live sport talks, which was great news. We are scheduled to appear on their website next week, which is very exciting!

We have also had another opportunity to work with ‘Delete Blood Cancer’ for the first set of events.

Stage three – More social media presence

Social media is a great tool to use to build brand awareness. Gaining new followers is a long and hard process. It can be quite disheartening when you spend time posting and sharing, to all 25 followers, with the majority of them being suspect accounts. So I was encouraged to follow more accounts, who I feel would be interested in the events. This included swimming clubs and well known athletes. I did the same on the Facebook, adding more friends and sharing the page to encourage likers and engagement. I found that increasing my activity on social media, naturally the account will get more followers which it has.

So that’s it for this blog post. If you are also starting a business, I hope that you find these posts useful. 

Check out the other posts too if you haven’t already. Finally also check out our website www.livesporttalks.com and let me know what you think! 

Website building and selling tickets tips as well as finding a sponsor tip!

So it took a few days for the start up loan to hit my account. When I checked my account and saw it, that's when the real work started. So many things to do: build a website, book the talkers, find the venue, do a marketing plan, set up a business account and extra bits just keep being added to the list. Building the website was the first thing I had to start. A tip for other start ups, don't waste your start up money on a fancy website designer just yet. I opened a 'WIX' account to build www.livesporttalks.com. It gives you tons of templates, and then you replace their text with your text and photos etc. You can move bits around to suit you and what you feel looks good. I am pretty limited when it comes to that sort of thing, so if I can then I am sure you all can! You can add links in, a blog, a contact form and also you can design a newsletter to send to subscribers ( very similar to MailChimp). You can also link up google analytics as well, which is a nice extra. It is worth having a go, before committing to a designer.

TIP on bounce rate - So I was shocked by my very high bounce rate after a few days. I realised what didn't help, was that my mobile website was all over the place. On Wix, you can amend the mobile site separately, I spent some time on the site, moving bits around and making sure all links worked. They say that you should give your website a check every few days to make sure all buttons go to the right section etc. According to reports, visitors will only wait 6 SECONDS before clicking off your page if it hasn't loaded up, so make sure it works by checking.

For selling tickets, I decided to use the popular 'EVENTBRITE' website, which for those who don't know is a dedicated events site where you can browse different events. Naturally they charge for processing payments ( 6.5%) I believe. They do cool widgets too, so you could sell tickets on your website using their software. If you are running free events, then Eventbrite don't charge anything. They also offer stats too, such as what source are most of your visitors are coming from ( website widget, Eventbrite search directory etc.), which is also useful. I would recommend having the widgets on your website for buying tickets and not just linking people straight to the Eventbrite page, as it increases the time people spend on your website.

I also thought that sponsorship would be a great income stream for the event. There are some great websites now where you can list your event, and potential sponsors can find it. It is worth sending a well written email pitching your idea if you event is quite a niche to a compnay, but these websites are worth using too. I currently have my event on www.sponsormyevent.com and the UK sponsorship website. You have to pay £15 to £30 for the latter site, or pay sponsor my event 10% of the monies if you do get a sponsor.

So as you know, I am also a start up so I am trying out all these tools. If you have any golden nuggets of information, feel free to pass these on to me! Also happy to share any further details about these tools I have come across.

Thanks for reading my 3rd blog post, and if you haven't yet then check out my first 2!

And lastly, of course make sure you check out my events website www.livesporttalks.com!

#LiveSportTalks #Inspiringsportstories

The leap of faith...

So the idea is in place and I have spent many evenings working out the break even points, marketing plans, cash flow and how much capital I will need to get this venture off the ground. I decided to use 'startup.com' to apply for a small start up loan. It is a good package, you get a low APR, discounts on several products and several hours of free mentoring. So the application was sent off and I was left to wait to see if my 'plan' was deemed good enough. I got booked in for a face to face panel meeting to get the final green tick. The meeting was set up quickly, naturally the provider are keen to turnover the applications. It all became very real in the panel meeting, with the lady being very honest about my plan and how the business would work. Overall the meeting went well, I must have made a good impression as my loan got approved!

I was under no illusions that the application was going to be the 'hard bit' of starting this business. All the companies that I got my quotes off, ( agencies, venues and t-shirt printers) took me a bit more seriously when I came back to them with capital behind me. So it officially started, Live Sport Talks was launched. I have gone from having a full time job, to running my own business and becoming an accountant, web designer, t shirt designer ( they came out pretty well!), a marketeer, date administrator, still having my full time job and much more.

Thank you for reading my blog post. Stay tuned for more posts about my venture and feel free to offer advice or ask me for advice to! One last thing, check out www.livesporttalks.com for see what great events we have on offer!

Starting out...

So I thought I would create a blog to document my daunting journey of starting a business. So my 'business idea' is called Live Sport Talks. Basically from the start, I was looking to conquer the highly competitive world of sport journalism. So my current job is OK, at times quite interesting but generally I find myself yearning for 5pm. I decided to take action and research how to be a sport journalist. So works out I don't have £9,000.00 knocking around for a masters degree (typical), so I took the cheaper route of taking a questionable freelance journalism course online. From my research, it was clear that experience was key for this industry, which made sense. I started writing for a few different online newspapers, which was basically covering games of Basketball and Hockey which their writers I imagine weren't keen to attend themselves for free.It was ok though, I enjoyed the buzz of having a media pass and rushing over to get soundbites from the players. I finished the course and got my media pass, ( still not sure if it holds any real value), and continued to write for these publications. I wanted to learn more about sport writers and these sport professionals. I attended a few events to hear from these people, such as the sport writing festival in London which was a highlight. I found that there wasn't as many of these talks out there as I hoped. That's when I got my idea of Live Sport Talks. So why don't I host these events myself? Work with different agencies to provide these athletes, and charge people to hear them talk about how they became a professional sports star or broke that world record in Beijing. So that was decided, I had the idea and now I just had to think HOW I was going to make it happen!

Follow my journey of trying to make 'Live Sport Talks' work as a profit making business ( wish me luck!)