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Author: Chris Giminez

  • 5 Tips for Hosting a Successful Citywide Yard Sale

    5 Tips for Hosting a Successful Citywide Yard Sale

    Yard Sale SignA citywide yard sale designates a specific weekend where everyone from the community is encouraged to have a yard/garage sale. This creates a large and concentrated group of yard sales, which will attract a lot of buyers. Shoppers don’t have to waste their time only finding a couple of “dud” sales on a normal weekend. A citywide yard sale means they have a lot to choose from in a smaller area. It also encourages recycling and reuse, diverting material from local landfills.

    If you are in charge of managing your city’s yard sale or garage sale, a new service exists that helps make the process of managing a citywide yard sale very simple and efficient. See all of the features and try the online demo at mycitywideyardsale.com.

    If you will be managing your community sale on your own, check out these tips to help make it a success!

    1. Placing an ad should be simple and secure.

    Sellers should be able to place their ad online rather than emailing or calling. This is easier for them and you. You don’t want to have to process an email or answer/return a phone call for every ad. The form should include their name, phone, email address, (for your use only, not for public display) sale address, sale categories, i.e. toys, clothing, furniture, sale description. If your sale is more than one day, allow the seller to specify the day(s) they will be open.

    Got Pictures? If you allow your sellers to upload pictures with their ad, it helps show off what they have available and makes a much more engaging post when their ad is shared to social media.

    Keep it secure. Restrict ads from public display until the user clicks a confirmation link sent to their email. This prevents most spammers from abusing your site by posting unrelated and possibly offensive content.

    2. Make your ads searchable

    Make it easy for shoppers to find the sales they want. A search should be available that searches the address, sale description, sale categories, and image descriptions. Your shoppers should also be able to filter their results by date. This would be useful if your sale is held on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but a seller is only having their sale on Friday and Saturday.

    3. Map your ads

    A crucial component to any citywide yard sale is mapping the sale addresses. Google offers a variety of ways to map multiple addresses. Each map marker should contain some basic information about the sale along with a link to the ad details and to view directions. If you want to embed custom Google Maps in your site, you will need a google map API key to get started. Sellers will occasionally mistype their address, so ideally your system would check that a valid address has been added and warn the seller so they may edit it.

    4. Have a dedicated domain name or url

    Many communities set up a new “events” page on Facebook or a new page in WordPress for each new sale. It is much better to have a website or url dedicated to the event each year (or as often as you have a community sale). This makes it easier to find in social media and search engines. It allows other community sites (chamber of commerce, city website, parks and rec site, local event calendars) to link to a consistent url each year. It also provides a place for you to promote other recycling/reuse events in your community as well as keeping your citizens well informed of upcoming sale dates so they can plan. If you have sponsors, a dedicated site provides year-round advertising exposure for them. See the citywide garage sale site for Pleasant Hill, California, as an example.

    5. Encourage sharing to social media with metadata

    Most sites will display little more than a list of addresses. It is much better to show a list of addresses where each address is a link to a page dedicated for that ad. The page that shows the ad can then have metadata added to the code to instruct Facebook to properly show the ad title, description, and images (if available) when shared. This is called Open Graph (OG) markup.

    Additionally, you should add event metadata for the entire sale so Google can properly index and promote your sale as a local event. You can do this with Structured Data. To test your site, use the Structured Data Testing Tool.

    Managing a citywide yard saleDoing it right can get complicated. MyCitywideYardSale is a turnkey solution that provides a secure, dedicated website address and deals with all of the issues listed above and much more! It takes the hassle out of the online aspect of your sale, freeing up your time to work on other components of your community sale.

    Learn more and check out the online demo at mycitywideyardsale.com.

  • Hosting a Citywide Yard Sale

    Hosting a Citywide Yard Sale

    Administering a Citywide Yard SaleCitywide yard sales provide a great way to join forces in a community to create a large sale that attracts a lot of shoppers. These sales have gained more and more in popularity, but most cities struggle with the nuts and bolts of a sale – allowing sellers to post ads, making it easy for buyers to find sales and making easy to organize it all as the sale host. To address these problems, Cyber Scriber has created a service, mycitywideyardsale.com, that makes hosting a citywide garage sale or yard sale a simple and efficient process.

    The sale host can create a sale at any time. The sale can be from one to three days and you can set the start and end dates of when ads can be placed. From the administration section you can view all ads placed and manually approve ads as needed. You can also export the sale ad data to excel to include in your other sale marketing.

    Sellers can place a yard sale ad that includes category selection, a custom description, and image upload. Ads are live only after a confirmation email link has confirmed the ad to keep out unwanted spam. Sale addresses are automatically mapped, and the seller sees a warning if the address can’t be mapped. Images are displayed in a responsive gallery. The sale details page contain facebook meta data to enhance and encourage social media sharing.

    Buyers can search by keyword, or filter by date or sale category. Saving sale ads to a favorite list can be done after creating a free website account. They can get directions to any sale and view all sales nearby.

    The service is turnkey. We provide a custom domain name with security certificate and email service. We customize the site header and footer to match your color scheme, add your city logo and the links and logos of your sale sponsors. This is a great opportunity for sponsors to support your local community and encourage responsible reuse and recycling.

    To learn more and try the online demo, visit mycitywideyardsale.com.

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  • Blocking Referral Spam in Google Analytics

    Blocking Referral Spam in Google Analytics

    If you regularly check your referring traffic in Google Analytics, you have likely seen your top referrers dominated by spam sites. In an effort to get their domain names in front of your eyes, your site is visited by one or more spam sites. This is known as referral spam. You may look at your list of sites that refer traffic to your site and want to know how this site is sending traffic to you. So, you may visit it. At worst, this site may try to infect your computer with malware. At best, it will bombard you with ads, making fractions of cents on every view. So, please do not visit these sites. The effect in Analytics is to show more traffic than you’re really getting combined with a higher bounce rate than you’re really getting.

    The spamming referral sites currently includes the following domains:

    Spam in Analytics Statistics
    Spam in Analytics Statistics
    • darodar.com
    • semalt.com
    • buttons-for-website.com
    • us.wow.com
    • adviceforum.info
    • makemoneyonline.com
    • ranksonic.info

    We have taken steps to block traffic that is coming from the known spamming referral sites. This will help restore accurate numbers to Google Analytics by eliminating this bogus traffic. There are ways to filter this in Analytics, but I would prefer to block this traffic from even hitting the site if possible. If your site is under a normal maintenance service with Cyber Scriber, this has likely been installed on your site today. Please contact us to confirm or if you would like to request this filtering for your site.

    Update: 4/15/2015. More spam urls are showing up now, so these urls have been added to the filter.

    • 4webmasters.org
    • social-buttons.com
    • best-seo-solution.com
    • buttons-for-your-website.com
    • best-seo-offer.com
    • Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com
    • forum69.info

    This will likely continue to be something that has to be updated until Google makes a simple “mark as spam” option in the referring url list. Hopefully this is something in the works.