erin8u4l: Making Free Money Online

We used the University of Colorado, Denver. The rooms were free. We had three rooms, each could seat between 50 and 125 people depending on the room and each had speakers, projector, lights and so on. You can find similar venues very easily, just ask around. We had the rooms from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. or so on the quietest day of the week for this particular campus and they were booked something like two-three months in advance.

Food

We used Einstein Brothers for breakfast and lunch. We planned food for about 100 people and it worked out very well, with food taken to the after-party too. We simply booked online, chose a ton of food and it arrived at 8:15 for breakfast and 11 a.m. or so for lunch. Breakfast consisted of bagels with various schmears, coffees (remember decaf too) and some bagel poppers (think donut holes). Lunch was boxes of bagel sandwiches (remember vegetarian option), iced tea, lemonade, cookies (three kinds I think), chips (including chips that don't suck, like Sunchips) and gherkins.

Set up was very easy, there were a couple of fold out tables and a few people volunteered to set up the boxes, etc., along with the staff from EB. At the end of the day I asked everyone in the room to help clean up one item (we had boxes, empty cups, etc., etc.) and it was done very quickly.

Breakfast mingling took from 8:30-9 a.m. or so. Lunch was one hour: noon-1 p.m. It was a nice enough day that people wandered outside, chatted and so on.

Website

As a hangover from last year, I happily used Google Sites to host www.wherecamp5280.org for free. It has a super simple editing interface. I only built a couple of very simple pages listing the details upfront as you can see.

Tickets

Eventbrite was pretty awesome. You set up your event, add ticket types (with different prices), link to it and you're done. It's entirely free to use if your tickets are free. For wherecamp, the majority of the tickets were free. You can also use their iPhone app to scan peoples tickets if you like, but I didn't do this as it's free and it would have just been a hassle for very little benefit. Tip: tell the attendees this so they don't print out the paper ticket! Also see sponsorship next:

Sponsorship

I used Eventbrite again. This worked out fantastically. Usually people spend a ton of time setting out sponsor levels, making a brochure and all that stuff about what a sponsor gets for their money. What I did instead was set up Eventbrite "tickets" that were priced as powers of two. So $16, $32, $64... $1024. Sponsors could then simply go in to Eventbrite and buy a ticket. This was wonderful for me as I didn't have to screw around with checks and bank transfers.

It was wonderful for sponsors as they could buy a "ticket" and expense that, whereas sponsorship is sometimes a much harder thing to get and has to go through other channels. One big thing to learn from though is that powers of two is a cute way to get sponsorship, but it doesn't match very well to what can be expensed. Often people can expense things with some rule like "so long as it's less than $1,000." Next time I will price things like $190, $490, $950 and so on.

As for "what do the sponsors get," I didn't produce a brochure or have anything particularly in mind. I've run conferences before which do do this and that's fine but this was a volunteer event. If the sponsors didn't come through, all I had to do was not order food (the major cost) and instead point people at nearby cafes, etc. It helps that I've run conferences before and therefore have a level of trust from the people sponsoring to not fuck it all up. I was asked a couple of times, but simply said it was a volunteer conference therefore time was short and we couldn't really produce brochures, etc.

Next page: How about actually getting the sponsors?

In early February we wrote about Flavors.me, a simple, beautiful aggregator that lets you pull together all of your social media identities like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Posterous, Netflix, LinkedIn, Blogger, Goodreads, Foursquare, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr, Etsy, and RSS on a simple, personal splash page.

Just like Gmail replaced Hotmail and Facebook replaced MySpace, often times the second to the stage has the most talent. With an attitude that says, “I am your new virtual business card,” About.me is a service like Flavors.me but with more functionality, smarter options and it’s all free (for now).

Why it’s different

About.me focuses on personal branding and analytics, rather than just creating a simple online identity. With a free About.me account you can see how many people see your profile, where they’re coming from (your Twitter bio? your e-mail signature?) and what they are doing on your page.

About.me is FREE. “We don’t believe that people should pay money for a set of front end tools to set up a profile of themselves. We just dont think thats a long term business model nor do we think it’s interesting,” says About.me’s co-founder Tony Conrad.

The URL is better. It’s pretty clear that, particularly for professional cases, About.Me couldn’t be a better URL for its use. For example, let’s say you are making an e-tro. Instead of writing, “This is Courtney, the East Coast Editor of The Next Web who lives in Brooklyn and enjoys reading Russian literature….” You’d just say, “This is Courtney, and here’s her about.me.”

What’s cooking at About.me?

At first About.me limited the number of services you can connect to because “too many confuses users” but due to customer feedback, they’re adding YouTube, Vimeo, Pandora and Formspring soon. In the meantime, users can add any URL they wish to their About.me page.

They are planning to move towards a freemium model. “While we currently have a kickass free version, there’s a whole other class of users out there that will pay money for services that make sense,” says Conrad. For example, they may cater to small companies that need social media behavior analytics. Conrad also believes there’s money to be made in domain name management and providing people with About.me e-mail addresses.

Want a Beta invite? Go to the comments below and follow my instructions. Then please RT this story! :)

Co-founder Tony Conrad says, “Searching for people on Google is like dumpster diving, our site enables you to pull all of that information onto one page and that’s very powerful.”

The company was founded by Tony Conrad, Ryan Freitas and Tim Young in January 2010. Their investors include True Ventures, Radar Partners, Freestyle Capital, Scott Kurnit, AOL Ventures, David Mahoney, Founder Collective, & Ron Conway.

eric seiger do

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Making Free Money Online

Food

Website

Tickets

Sponsorship

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