After New Jersey Stage celebrated its tenth anniversary in the summer of 2024, the website took a deep dive into its statistics to formulate a plan for the next decade. The goal was to take advantage of the marketing power of having over 35,000 articles in its archives and an audience that reached two million unique visitors in 2025. The numbers kept coming back to one thing - the site’s Event Calendar.
More than just a listing of events, NewJerseyStage.com advertisers get individual web pages for every performance in the Event Calendar. These pages were originally created as an advertiser benefit to go along with the banner ads, but data analysis revealed they had vastly untapped potential.
“For the past year, our Events This Week columns have regularly been among the top five most read articles of the week,” said Gary Wien, publisher of New Jersey Stage. “These columns spotlight the events found in our Event Calendar and the events presented during the week. We began making changes to the website’s design to push the events more throughout the website and did extensive work behind-the-scenes to improve their effectiveness with search engines and news sites. The changes not only worked, but increased the site’s audience numbers overall!”
Each event page at New Jersey Stage helps improve the event’s overall ranking with search engines, news sites, and AI. Events benefit from the reputation New Jersey Stage has earned over the past decade. In many cases, the New Jersey Stage event listing appears at the top or near the top of the search results. This is in addition to the exposure on NewJerseyStage.com and in the Events This Week columns.
“It only costs $10 to have your show listed in the calendar and get an event page,” said Wien. “If it’s a theatre company, $10 gets event pages for every performance in the run! Our goal is to make advertising simple and effective. For about $30-$50 total, theater companies can ensure every production of their season is in the New Jersey Stage calendar. For $50 a month, venues can have event pages for every performance in the calendar, maintained each week by New Jersey Stage.”
Event pages are still included in every banner ad purchase as well. For $50, advertisers get a banner ad (970x250 or 600x776) in areas seen by every user reading an article on the site. For $100, advertisers get banners in those key areas plus two additional banner ads (300x250 and 300x600) to be seen throughout New Jersey Stage.
In addition to the banner ads, advertisers get enhanced editorial with show preview articles turned into features and previews for more exposure throughout the website. Advertisers also get an enhanced listing in the New Jersey Stage links directory with a special page that links to all of their events listed in the calendar.
“One of the biggest benefits is being spotlighted in our Events This Week columns each Tuesday,” added Wien. “We currently have columns for music, theater, and all events. There are people who share these columns across the Internet each week and we’re always glad to see that. It helps us grow the column’s audience and shows the interest in the column.”
New Jersey Stage has subscriptions available for advertisers who wish to run banner ads continuously each month. Subscriptions are available for $50 and $100 per month that allow advertisers to maintain their ads and events in the calendar with the payment automatically made by a credit card or PayPal account. There are also discounted rates for those who pre-pay for the year.
“Our ad rates are priced for the arts,” explained Wien. “Arts organizations need to promote their shows, but often have financial constraints that make advertising difficult. We are similar to a marketing assistant. We even run stories on events that could use a last minute push while maintaining the calendar each week. Banner ads are only the beginning with us. Our goal is to help you sell tickets.”
In the last twenty years, arts organizations have watched as the number of people reading print newspapers dwindled to the point where few are still printed each day. Many that are online today place stories behind paywalls. To reach everyone, arts organizations need websites like NewJerseyStage.com which are available to all for free.
For the past 25 years, Wien has been writing about the arts in outlets such as Jersey Arts, Upstage Magazine, and New Jersey Stage. He also has decades of experience as a public relations consultant and computer programmer. With New Jersey Stage and its Event Calendar, he’s developed a method of promotion that utilizes all of his strengths. He created an Advanced Search area to let users find events by a date range, location in New Jersey, and by genre (or genres). The Event Calendar benefits advertisers in the calendar and shines a bigger spotlight on the arts in New Jersey.
In January, “Instant Ads” which creates banner ads based on upcoming events in the calendar for customers will be available. They will be a great service for advertisers who don’t have their own graphic designer. Upcoming shows will be pulled from the calendar and blended into an ad. Since the Event Calendar is maintained each week, the ads will always be current.
New Jersey Stage covers all of the arts from the smallest community theater to the largest performing arts center. The website’s advertising rates were created for the limited budgets of arts organizations.
“I know what it’s like to spend hundreds of dollars on advertising and not get the results you wanted,” said Wien. “There’s an old expression: you get what you pay for, but wouldn’t you like to get more than that? New Jersey Stage is the perfect compliment to any marketing plan. Give us a try and see for yourself.”
For information on advertising at New Jersey Stage, visit https://www.newjerseystage.com/advertise/
