help me out guys, please?

[djpeteb]

Hello my fellow freinds :-),

I am in need of some help here. I have just started promoting my own club night in my home town (sunderland - uk) and finding it very hard :-(, although we are making progress.

The thing is, i've just set up a website for my club www.clubvoodoo.cjb.net and i've got loadsa ideas for the site (any you peeps have would be most grateful). The main part of the site so far is the forum, and boy am i having a hard time getting it off the ground. Could maybe some of you nice peeps have a look round my site and maybe post some threads / replies? :-}

The site is deadicated to music, clubbing, djs, and of course my night.

Many thanks,

DJ Pete B :-) :-) :-)

[BumbleBee]

Being a resident of your fair city (ahem) where is your clubnight and what kind of music do you play?
Who are you hoping to attract?

[Turtle]

Fork out for a proper URL, none of this .cjb crap, make it sounds like it's advertising tractors.

The main part of your site should be advertising and information. For a young site, you're way ahead of yourself. You don't have enough regular visitors. Why does TheSite forum work so well? Cos it's dynamic, constantly updating. You need to attract a regular clientele, people who want to know about your club, and you need to get them interested in talking to each other as well.

And I'd suggest you wait for Justin Credible's voice on this, he's TheSite's resident DJ. :)

[BumbleBee]

Another point, you need to say where your club actually is!

Is it just a clubnight held once a week at another club or is it a club in its own standing?

[djpeteb]

thanks for you feedback BumbleBee,

it is early days yet, i know what we have to do with the site, i only got it setup the other. I just wanna get some interest going before we start promoting the event.

I cannot reveal where the club will be held just yet although it is gonna be in the top end of the town, near Priviledge etc...

the date has just be confirmed for 5th October, so expect to see some action sortly and stay tuned...

Thanks again

DJ Pete B

[hurrahbro]

Do yourself a favour

Put a 'whats on' button and page on there.

The page should tell people whats on which night, and gives them an idea of what music to expect.

At the moment its a tad tooo mysterious ;)

May be a button and page for special events.

As the events rack up, you may want to ad a photo page of people having fun at previous events, Guest DJs and PAs etc.

Let people who visit your club you will be out there snapping piccies.

They WILL want to visit the site to see if you got em in their pixelated glory.:cool:

Love the idea of having a board for your regulars (most clubs do have em, regulars that is)!

[Mr_Wobble]

Definitely register a domain name rather than the .cjb thing. There are cheap options which give you URL forwarding to a site of your choice (the .cjb) one in this case.
The links page doesn't have any active hyperlinks.
Loose the "welcome to" part of the title because it sounds cheesy.
For some reason every page threw up an error on my browser, and it kept asking me if I wanted to debug it (am I the only one this happened to?).
The main page took ages to load for no apparent reason, except the images may have been too large (filesize, not dimensions).
Have a page that tells us more about it. There's no real info there, and it wouldn't encourage me to bother visiting again. OK, I understand it's not something you've got up and running yet, and my never if your website is an example of your organisation.

Mr_Wobble ;)

[Justin Sane]

Right, seeing as I've been thick in actually doing this myself I'll happily talk you through the ways I've been doing this with retrospect to the event as a whole and the website and maybe you'll find something new or interesting.

My night then, I've assisted in doing some club nights over in blackpool and have had a fair idea of the technical side as well as being well traveled in the clubbing circuit for the actual punter side picking up my inspiration from such clubs as Home, Fabric, Raindance, The Tunnel, Slammin Vinyl and Gatecrasher.

I've never done a clubbing event in NZ since being out here, but I've been keen as nails to do one. On walking back with a friend I stopped in a bar for a drink which I'd been eyeing up for a few weeks called 'Luminaire' (http://www.vodkabar.co.nz) and started talking with the owner about the potential this place had (as it was pretty new) we discussed hold in private party and later decided to meet again and discuss this further but for more of a pre-party event.

I drafted up a business plan highlighting what I was proposing to do along with what benefits his place would recieve from this and he agreed to give me the venue for free. I decided to name the venue 'N2O' which I got from two influences, one being the name H2O (or chemical equation for water) and the other being Nitrus Oxide a popular legal drug used out here in clubbing (also known as laughing gas which makes people happy - go figure)

After all this was agreed it came to getting the night underway, firstly we needed the DJs as I wasn't intending on doing it all myself completely for the night, so with my friend who was helping with the financial side (she'd never run events before so I was going to be guiding her through, however she knew people better than I did so we used the combined energy to put our plan to work) we managed to secure two other DJs Cookie (from dance radio station UPFM and the famous Potato Rave Parties) and Misnoma (from the large nz dance music website - twisted.co.nz - have a think about why) and set about working on the fliers.

We had subsiquent meetings with the Luminaire manager discussing how we wanted the venue to look, I discussed turning one of the wall mouted speakers backward into the cove area causing the sound to reverb and giving a better effect to the punter. We talked about equipment and what was required, what seating arrangements we made and the launch date official (Friday 27th September 2002) and decided to make the initial event free entry to attract more people as well as to show to potential sponsors that we mean't business as well as be possible clients for the future - I'll get more onto that later.

We next started work on the flyers, we gathered a collection of all subequent flyers out at the time from other clubs and compaired notes and looks, we discussed how we could make our flyers stand out as well keep with the theme of our event and the venue, our venue holds a very blue neon lighting look and we came up with the final product:

http://www.n2o.co.nz/n2o_complete.jpg

... and sent over 400 double sized DL sized gloss card flyers to be printed and have since distributed these in various record shops and clothing stores as well as actually go to events and hang them out outside afterwards. I also thought it would be important to produce our club t-shirts as we could use them in effect for advertising as all NZ events always get photographed so if you wore your own club t-shirt to other events and then later appeared on all the dance websites in photos - free advertising isn't it? I made sure our t-shirts were of a professional screen-print and followed the theme of the night as well as being simple but effective.

As you've noticed we bought a domain for our event, sweet in name and short so easy to remember. The domain side of the advertising is simple, you want event news, event photos (is this is a key feature to the website, people can look at both themselves the following day as well as you showing people just what happens at your event) and news about the promotors which I thought would be important cause knowing just who your promotors are is valuable.

http://www.n2o.co.nz

Having one of the DJs being a writer of one of the main NZ dance websites (Twisted), as well as knowing the people who write the others (Biggie/NZRave) has been invaluable as we've been able to get front page promotion and mentions as well as listings in the clubbing calender online...

On the money front, yes the initial event is free for attracting the punters and to avoid having to make our n2o organisation a company, when you start doing events particually if your wanting to charge on the door and make money you need to have it registered as a GST (or VAT if we're talking the UK) company with a IRD number. You need to keep copies of all invoices from advertisements, dj fares and the like and declaire yourself for any earnings, if you make a loss then you can claim some of the money back and don't actually get taxed as much.. its a tricky system which I'm currently undergoing for the next event as we've suddenly gained the possibility of sponsorship and so things have taken the next step - so until then me and Andrea are footing the cost with the view to make our event a promotions company for the future.

Sponsorship then, no-one in the right frame of mind can afford to keep running an event for everyone for free (especially) off thier own back, so we called up Colt Energy drinks and spoke with the Australisian Managing Director who's now very keen on sponsoring us for an alnighter event.

So event is free entry, we've also set it up so we'll have a large glass bowl of wrappered Mint Imperials for people to eat on the way in and out of our event, at our alnighter we will be handing out lolly pops to keep the crowd kool. Our other tactics for the night (whilst not overseeing it) will be walking around talking to people and making sure everyone is having a good time. We've invited all the main dance website photographers to come along to take photos to publish on their websites as well as discussed the possibility of making some $25 drinks vouchers and then getting our mate Flynny (who works on ZM Radio) to give them out when hes on the road to the public in competitions.

[Pugwash]

Also avoid posting the same thing in all of the forums - I came here via Net and Entertainment and now I'm bored of reading about this club :rolleyes:

[J]

The best promotion tool I've ever used has been word of mouth. If your night has something different, the Dj's are good and the price is right, the word will spread.
A launch night is a good idea to get some awareness:
On the launch night you should hire in a well known DJ (B list), run a special drinks promo, and keep entrance fee's to a minimum allowing you to cover costs but keep the numbers up.
A couple of nice looking girls handing out flyers on the night is always a winner.
Another trick is to keep the que fairly long by getting the bouncers to just let people in slowly. The long que gives people the impression that the club is busy and is therefore going to be a good place to go.

Hope this helps. Good luck ;)

[rockerchick]

i have a simple question
why did u register twice?:confused:

[J]

If I hadn't sold my record collection a few years back I'd be doing the same as you. What a mare it is trying to build it up again though :(

[BARTONIOUS]

Originally posted by Mr_Wobble

For some reason every page threw up an error on my browser, and it kept asking me if I wanted to debug it (am I the only one this happened to?).

This won't be djpeteb's fault. It is the site host that is responsilbe. It is to do with the pop-ups. This error only occurs if you have Visual Basic installed on your computer. You can stop these debugging requests if you disable script debugging in your browser. The you won't get anymore errors and the page will work fine! :)

[BARTONIOUS]

Justin Credible and J> Good advice there! This is also quite helpful to me because my mate is also running his own night and these ideas would help him improve it. I'm going to see him DJ tomorrow night in a DJ competition. He's against 4 other people and the winner gets some prize money (dunno how much) and also gets to warm up for Paul Van Dyk (dunno where PVD is playing though).

[dsico wilky]

thanks for supporting my little bro......he didn't register twice i am the other one....now pleeeeeese make his day....go and register at his site and just post any old crap even if its slagging dico wilky's cheesy piece off.

[dsico wilky]

yey did it that time.....also forgot to post the link (duh)

http://clubvoodoo.proboards7.com/index.cgi

[djpeteb]

Thanks everyone for the support and feedback although it would have been nice if you could have discussed half this stuff on my forum just to get the ball rolling a bit.

In relation to another thread on the forum about commecrial dance music, I totally agree with what your all saying about this shitey trance stuff... Honestly, it stinks, what ever happend to the respected commercial trance like Rank 1, DJ Tiesto and Yomanda?

This is actually one reason why I started this Voodoo night in Sunderland, i have run clubnights before but this is gonna be sheer underground simply because my hometown's club scene is shite... It is so commercial and poppy - when i say pop i mean S Club 7 and britney, it wouldn't be too bad if we could just hear Ian Van Dahl in the clubs but nooooooo, Sunderland has turned into a real commercial pile of shite. Didn't used to be.... i mean we never had a Shindig or Gatecrasher but the club scene was still ok...

My opinion is that this poppy trance stuff will die and we will have a very good underground trance scene again a bit like what is happening with techno at the moment - it blew up a fews years back and is now back to it's roots in the underground.......

Right, thats my rant over, thanks again and keeping checking www.clubvoodoo.cjb.net for the latest info.

DJ Pete B :naughty: