ExTicketBroker.com

I recently came across this $100 off credit that Yahoo! Search Marketing is offering to any new advertisers on their search engine. I have never seen a credit of more than $25 or $50, so this is a great way to get $100 in free clicks to your website.

For those who aren’t familiar, search engine marketing ads are the sponsored links at the top of the search engine results. You can select which search terms your ads appear for (ie: “concert tickets”, “ticket broker”, etc) and when someone clicks on one of your ads, they are sent to your site and you pay a small fee for each click.

This is a very effective way to drive qualified ticket buyers to your website as search engine traffic is generally one of the best forms of web traffic since people are entering exactly what they’re looking for.  For example, if someone goes to Yahoo! or Google and searches “buy world series tickets”, they’re probably pretty likely to buy world series tickets, so if your website is selling world series tickets, you may want to think about getting your site in front of those eager ticket buyers.  This is obviously just an example and would work for any ticket event.

Now that my pitch on search engine marketing is done, here’s what you came for, the $100 off credit!

Yahoo! Search Marketing $100 Credit

Promo Code: US2302

If the above link should ever stop working for any reason (I don’t know if/when it expires), you can always get $25 off using this link:

Maximize your marketing ROI with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit.

Note the $100 off offer terms:

1. Offer open to new Sponsored Search advertisers only. (A new advertiser is one who has not advertised with Yahoo! Search Marketing for the past 13 months). Each account requires a nonrefundable $30 initial deposit. Advertisers signing up for Self Serve will receive a $100 credit into the account. Advertisers signing up for the Assisted Setup service will receive $100 off the $199 service charge. In each case, initial credits are nonrefundable and will be applied to click charges. There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.10 per click-through. Limit one offer per customer, and one use per customer on a single account.

Despite bigger problems in New York such as Governor Eliot Spitzer allegedly spending $80,000 on a high end prostitution ring, New York City councilman Leroy Comrie has proposed new legislation dubbed “The Hannah Montana Bill” that would ‘protect’ consumers from ticketing shortfalls for popular events.

TicketNews reports that

Under Comrie’s proposed bill, publicly funded venues would be required to hold 40 percent of their seats for individual consumers. The consumers would then be required to pick up their tickets in person or agree to sign a statement declaring that the tickets would be for their own personal use.

In an interview with the New York Sun, Comrie outlined his motivation for proposing the law. “Because of the way these ticket brokers dial in and develop computer programs to snap up the premium tickets, the regular customer has a very slim chance of even being able to purchase a ticket nowadays,” said Comrie.

While I agree with Comrie that the average consumer has very little chance nowadays to land great seats to hot events, is it really worth spending taxpayers’ money and government officials’ time to fight a free market system?

As reported by Ticket News, the top selling event tickets for the week of 3/9 are as follows:

1. Wicked

2. New York Yankees

3. Jimmy Buffett

4. James Taylor

5. Jersey Boys

6. Kenny Chesney

7. Boston Red Sox

8. Bon Jovi

9. Eric Clapton

10. Jay-Z & Mary J. Blige

11. Kanye West

12. Bruce Springsteen

13. Jonas Brothers

14. Billy Joel

15. The Police

16. Alicia Keys

17. Keith Urban & Carie Underwood

18. Michael Bublé

19. Bette Midler

20. Los Angeles Lakers

Ticketing Tip: Use this list to give you ideas of events to sell tickets for. Go to Ticketmaster.com and search for these events to see if any upcoming dates are going onsale soon. Go to StubHub or eBay to see what tickets in similar cities and venues are selling for to give you a better sense of which events to buy for, and which to pass on.

Occasionally I’ll post any relevant ticket coupons or discounts that I stumble across on the web. While I generally prefer to buy tickets for any events that I attend directly from Ticketmaster, occasionally when I don’t get the tickets that I want, I buy my tickets from secondary ticket sources just like everyone else. Below is a $10 StubHub coupon that I found this morning.

StubHub $10 Off Coupon

• Follow this link to StubHub
• Navigate to the tickets you want to purchase
• During the checkout (right before you place your order), there is a section towards the bottom of the page titled “Gift Certificates/Fan Codes”. Enter the below listed coupon code in this box and hit the “Add” button - the $10 off discount will now be reflected in your shopping cart.
• Coupon Code: STUBBY601

Enjoy!

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me “I was on Ticketmaster right when the show went on sale at [insert any time], but it was already sold out!” I’d be a very rich man.  The problem is, you thought you were on Ticketmaster right when the event went on sale, but you were probably actually there a couple minutes later. 

One of the most common mistakes of amateur ticket pullers is that they assume the time on their phone, clock, watch, computer, etc are all the same time as Ticketmaster’s on sale system.  This obviously can’t be the case because nearly everyone’s time pieces are slightly different, and over time, they almost always lose track of the accurate time (even if you set it just a few weeks ago).  The best way to time exactly when Ticketmaster releases tickets during an event on sale is to follow the steps listed below. 

1. About 5 or 10 minutes before your desired event goes on sale, go to Ticketmaster.com, search for your event, and navigate to the event on sale page.  Before the event goes on sale, it will display the following message: “Tickets are currently not available online for one of the following reasons. Please check back for availability.”

• Note: On sale times listed on Ticketmaster always reflect the time zone where the event is taking place.  For example, if a concert is taking place in New York and the on sale time is listed as 10:00 AM EDT but you are located in California, you need to realize that 10:00 AM EDT is 7:00 AM PDT in California and that the event goes on sale for you at 7:00 AM. 

2. Open a new internet browser tab or window and navigate to www.time.gov which lists the official U.S. time. This is the time that Ticketmaster’s system uses to set the on sale times for events.  Click on the U.S. map to select the appropriate time zone for the event that you’re buying tickets for.  The site will now show you the official time.

3. Three to five seconds before the official time that the event goes on sale, switch back to the Ticketmaster event on sale page and refresh the page (you can click the refresh button on your browser, or a faster method is to either hit the ‘f5’ button on your keyboard, or hit ‘ctrl + r’ to refresh the page).  Continue to refresh the page every two seconds until the page changes from the “Tickets are currently not available…” page, to the page that allows you to select the number of tickets you want and the seat locations.  Once that page comes up, quickly make your selection and click on the ‘Find Tickets” button.

• Note: Do not refresh the page more than every two seconds.  If you do, Ticketmaster will think that you’re an automated program trying to cheat their system and they will block you from the on sale.  Be calm, refresh the browser, and if the event isn’t yet showing as on sale, count “one one thousand, two one thousand” and refresh the page again.  Don’t freak out if the tickets don’t show as available until a few seconds after the official time – occasionally it takes Ticketmaster a few seconds to push the on sale changes out to all of their servers.

This is a pretty basic tactic, but one that the average ticket buyer often overlooks.  Now go get your tickets!

Anyone who has bought tickets on Ticketmaster.com has seen the ticket limits listed for most events. Many concerts, games, or other events have max ticket limits of 2, 4, 6, or 8 tickets which are intended to prevent ticket brokers and other buyers from purchasing large blocks of tickets, thus theoretically allowing more fans to buy tickets to hot events. Fortunately for ticket sellers, Ticketmaster’s ticket limits can easily be exceeded.

The standard Ticketmaster warning is as follows:

“Please adhere to published ticket limits. Persons who exceed the ticket limit may have any or all of their orders and tickets cancelled without notice by Ticketmaster in its discretion. This includes orders associated with the same name, e-mail address, billing address, credit card number or other information.”

Despite these warnings, in reality Ticketmaster only checks against the following two pieces of information:

1. Credit card number(s)
2. Address(es)

The following scenarios explain situations where Ticketmaster WILL cancel your order:

Say the ticket limit for an event is 4 tickets. If you buy 4 tickets in two separate orders (total of 8 tickets) and place the orders on the same credit card, the second order that you placed will be cancelled. Ticketmaster says they reserve the right to cancel all orders, but it has never happened to me or any other broker that I know.

Same thing for the address. If you buy 4 tickets in two separate orders (total of 8 tickets) using two different credit cards with the same billing address, the second order will be cancelled.

So how do I get around this?

1. Sign-up for multiple credit cards. I had 5 credit cards when I was an active broker, but 2 or 3 should be fine. Debit cards are fine too.

2. Set the billing address for each card as a unique address. The address can be any secure place that you can receive mail (the tickets and billing statements will be shipped there). A few ideas of addresses to use are your home address, work address, addresses of trustworthy friends/relatives, your school address, a P.O. box, etc.

3. Go into your Ticketmaster.com account and enter each credit card and corresponding billing address. You would think that Ticketmaster would check for multiple orders exceeding the ticket limit within a single Ticketmaster account, but don’t worry, they don’t. Again, I had 5 credit cards listed under a single Ticketmaster account for years, ordered thousands of tickets (many exceeding the limits) and never had a problem.

4. When you place multiple orders for an event on Ticketmaster.com, just select the different credit cards on the billing page during each purchase and you’re all set.

It’s easy to be intimidated by the posted warnings about how Ticketmaster will cancel your order, but if you follow the steps listed above, you’ll be fine. This little trick helped make me thousands more dollars than I would have without knowing; hopefully it helps you.

Though I don’t actively track events anymore, occasionally when I see an event that is guaranteed easy money, I’ll post on it. This is one of them, Jimmy Buffett at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield (Boston), MA always sells extraordinarily well.

Jimmy Buffett has two shows in September going onsale at Ticketmaster on Monday 3/10 at 10am EDT:

CLICK HERE for Thursday September 4th

CLICK HERE for Saturday September 6th

Both shows will sell well, though I expect Saturday will do better. This is a little counterintuitive, but Lawn seats actually sell better than most reserved seats (all but the very best reserved seats). The reason for this is two fold:

1. People go to Jimmy Buffet shows to party. The Lawn is where the party is.
2. Face value for Lawn tickets is a mere $29 compared to the $129 face value of reserved tickets. There’s a lot more room for profit with the low $29 cost of Lawn tickets.

In summary, buy Lawn tickets to either night (or both) and you will make money. During his last tour through this venue, I made more than $150 profit per pair of tickets, or roughly 5x my cost. It’s a no brainer, good luck.

UPDATE 3.10.08: 

Tickets went on sale this morning and sold out almost instantly.  It looks like tickets aren’t selling quite as well as they did last tour, but 3-4x your money isn’t too bad…

Hi and welcome to ExTicketBroker.com! Since this is my first post I thought it would be worthwhile to introduce myself and talk a little bit about what this site is about.

About Me

In 2001 I started an event ticket brokerage company from my dorm room while attending college. The roots of my business started the summer prior when I was home from college. I bought a large group of concert tickets to a favorite artist of mine, and when a few of my friends cancelled and left me with extra tickets, I turned to eBay to sell the tickets just hoping to make my money back. The show sold out and I ended up selling the tickets for about 200% of what I paid. While not exactly inventing the wheel or discovering fire, I stumbled upon something that proved to be quite lucrative for me over the next several years.

Over the next five years, I built a network of domestic and international brokers, and through multiple sales channels and industry connections, grew my ticket business to substantial profitability.

While starting and running a successful ticket brokerage company was a great experience as a college student (and part-time the year after graduation), I had other opportunities that I wanted to explore and I decided to follow those paths, thus moving on from my ticket broker days. I did pass the business on to a family member and remain involved as an advisor.

Why Am I Starting ExTicketBroker.com?

The answer has multiple parts:

1. This is an opportunity for me to archive all of my knowledge and chronicle my many unique experiences as a ticket broker.
2. Now that I’m no longer a ticket broker, I have no reason to keep all of my knowledge a secret and I’m happy to help others that may want to learn how to become a ticket broker.
3. If a few people visit my site, learn something useful, then visit a couple of my site’s sponsors and make me a few bucks - great.

Thanks for visiting, I hope you find something useful or entertaining.

- The Ex-Ticket Broker