We Built a Tool to Find Baller Meetup Sponsorship Opps

ByGreenlane January 4, 2016July 15, 2023

There’s tons of value in Meetup.com groups. If you’ve never taken part, they’re organized get-togethers that can resemble little mini-conferences, meet & greets, networking events, game nights, and basically any idea that can bring together a group of like-minded people. That’s right – a bunch of people, united by a common interest in something, all under one roof and talking about that something.

If your business IS that something, you can do wonders for your website, brand, community and personal stock.

Participating in Meetup groups, from a business perspective, is fun and easy. It’s also really impactful if you pick a growing group and make yourself a big part of it. Whether it’s by presenting, sponsoring, offering deals, and getting links back, you’re bound to win when you’re bound with a winner group.

How can we find a baller growing Meetup group?

make-copy-tool — Wanna use the free tool we built? Just make a copy!

A strong, growing group with an engaged base and great, frequent events is where we’re going to get the best bang for our efforts. How can we find such groups, without digging through pages manually? What we decided to do was build a tool that scrapes Meetup data into a Google sheet, analyzes, and shows trends and stats. Check it out here, and read below for the logic and how to use this thing.

Membership numbers are nice, but attendance growth is key.

We definitely want to find a strong, growing Meetup group to focus our attention on. I’ve seen plenty of groups with impressive numbers, but a steady decline in attendance when we take a look. Check it out:

Technical.ly Philly not only has great membership numbers, but attendance is clearly growing strong over the past two years.

Philadelphia Happy Hour has a high number of members, super-frequent meetups, but a somewhat declining attendance.

This Philly singles group, by contrast, has thousands of members - but no one seems to be going to the events! — This Philly singles group, by contrast, has thousands of members – but no one seems to be going to the events.

What else can the tool do?

We wanted to take a look at even deeper info on who’s going to the group. We added the ability to quickly see the newest members, in the Meetup Detailed Stats tab. This also pulls the user’s bio and website if found.

Another thing we want to look at is member bios. Meetup bios are unique for each group the member is in, so better bios means more engaged users. Right in the main tab, we’ve listed all members that we’ve found who have bios under the graph.

Check this out – tons of members with tons of bios!

Whoops – I haven’t updated my Technical.ly profile in a few years!

How does this tool work?

We built this thing in a Google Sheets doc, and it’s completely free and open-source. In fact, we do 100% of the scraping and crawling using nothing but standard formulas! The main one is ImportXML – it’s basically magic, so go learn more about it.

The main formulas that pull data are:

[toggle title=”Get the past Meetup events” bgcolor=”” textcolor=”” bordercolor=”” opacity=””]This code gets the <li> tags from the past events page and lists ’em all out!

=query(IMPORTXML('Meetup Detailed Stats'!$D$2&"events/past/","//li"),"SELECT Col1,Col2,Col4 WHERE Col4!=''[/toggle]

[toggle title=”Get Meetup group overall stats” bgcolor=”” textcolor=”” bordercolor=”” opacity=””]This pulls out the main stats for the group.

=query(importxml('Meetup Detailed Stats'!$D$2 &"events/past/","//ul[@class='dividedList small']/li/a"),"SELECT Col1,Col2 WHERE Col1 !='Our calendar'")[/toggle]

[toggle title=”Get individual group member details” bgcolor=”” textcolor=”” bordercolor=”” opacity=””]Grabs member details and bios. Totally not creepy!

=iferror(importxml('Meetup Detailed Stats'!$D$2 &"members/","//div[contains(@id,'memberInfo')]"))[/toggle]

Conclusion

Sponsor Meetup groups. Go out and speak. Network, make friends and get results. A link from a strong, growing Meetup group can work wonders. Just remember – even though we’re scraping and analyzing, don’t think for a minute about spamming groups.

You’re building a brand in front of real people, and they can smell BS a mile away. Finding the ideal Meetup group is a great step in the right direction – now you’ve got to become a real part of the community!

Using Google Search Console Tools To Clean Up Your (404) Act

ByBill Sebald April 14, 2020July 15, 2023

This article is an entire rewrite from its original 2012 version. When Google launched the new Search Console (thus killing the legacy 404 report), it rendered the old version of this post useless. The bad news – the new URL inspector doesn’t work the same as the legacy report. In the previous report, you could…

Digital Marketing | SEO | Technical

Step-By-Step Google Disavow Process

ByBill Sebald January 27, 2014July 15, 2023

Read Full Article

For one reason or another, plenty of sites are in the doghouse. The dust has settled a bit. Google has gotten more specific about the penalties and warnings through their notifications, and much of the confusion is no longer… as confusing. We’re now in the aftermath – the grass is slowly growing again and the sky is starting to clear. A lot of companies that sold black hat link building work have vanished (and seem to have their phone off the hook). Some companies who sold black hat work are now even charging to remove the links they built for you (we know who you are!). But at the end of the day, if you were snared by Google for willingly – or maybe unknowingly – creating “unnatural links,” the only thing to do is get yourself out of the doghouse.

Digital Marketing | SEO

Optimize NOW For Entities and Relationships

ByBill Sebald February 13, 2014July 15, 2023

I remember a few years ago blowing the mind of a boss with a theory that Google would eventually rank (in part) based on their own internal understanding of your object. If Wikipedia could know so much about an object, why couldn’t Google? In the end, I was basically describing semantic search and entities, something that has already lived as a concept in the fringe of the mainstream.

Analytics | Digital Marketing | SEO

SEO Reporting: How to Build Meaningful Analytics Reports

ByBill Sebald October 9, 2019July 15, 2023

The SEO report. It’s a calling card for some agencies. These reports can be ornate or no-frills (everyone has their own style). Smart companies use APIs to compile reports without spending manual hours. Some rely on automatic SEO reporting tools. For other companies, it’s a time-intensive and considerably low-value exercise.

Content Strategy | Digital Marketing | SEO

How To Work Relationships and Concepts Into Your Copy

ByBill Sebald December 5, 2014July 15, 2023

The folks at Mountain View made the conscious decision that keywords alone couldn’t deliver them the results they wanted to see (ahem, “their users wanted to see”). Google tried some different modeling but ultimately came around to semantic search (that is, using semantic technology to refine the query results). Now I said much of the industry has picked up on it. Not all. I still see a lot of pretending Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird never happened. That’s unfortunate for innocent clients around the world. But for most of us probably reading this, we’re students of a new lexicon. With words like “triples” and “entities” and “semiotics” and “topic modeling.”