Last year, I couldn’t stop thinking about having a Yoto card exchange.
Finally, in the fall, I decided I was ready to make it happen.
The local toy shop, Blickenstaffs, agreed to let us use their shop as an exchange point and off we went!
I set up tickets on Eventbrite and made them available to anyone in my audience who wanted to come (I set the ticket price at $10 and then absorbed all the ticket costs from Eventbrite – my goal wasn’t to make money from this event but I’ve seen time and time again that when tickets are free, people don’t really appreciate them and end up not showing up).
They sell out about a week before the event.
I’ve attended a lot of influencer events and I wanted to make this event feel as fun and special as most others, so I made swag bags – I bought these little gift bags on Amazon and each bag included a set of 10 tabs and rings for Yoto cards (my favorite way to store Yoto cards!), a gift certificate for a free audiobook of your choice from LibroFM (they emailed after I posted about this event and asked if they could provide an audiobook for each attendee which was very generous, plus their audiobooks can be made into Yoto cards so it’s perfect!), and wallet from Thread.
I also had a lot of Yoto store credit, so I ordered enough Yoto cards so that everyone could choose one new card to take home (and I chose good cards – nothing super cheap or uninteresting).
Basically, I wanted to make sure that – since I was the one charging for the tickets – everyone would feel like they were really getting their money’s worth even without any card exchanges at the event!
My sister who lives nearby offered to help with the event (bless her!) and Jen on my team is local and she made all the treats and helped make the event happen!
Here’s the email I sent to ticket holders:
“I’m so happy you got your Yoto Card Swap tickets next week – it’s going to be a fun night and I can’t wait to meet you!
Several things:
1) We will be holding this event at Blickenstaff’s in Riverwoods – they graciously offered to host it for us and it is a fun toy shop!
2) We’ll start check-in, handing out swag bags (we have a FUN surprise for you!), and letting you choose your free card at 7 p.m. We’ll also have all the cards ready to swap so you can browse before we actually start swapping!
3) You are welcome to bring as many cards as you wish for exchange. (And my feelings won’t be hurt if you decide to trade in your free card too!). We also have space for you to buy or sell Yoto cards and accessories if you’d rather do that than trade them!
4) This event is intended for adults. Please don’t bring children – it would be very chaotic to organize children interested in Yoto cards when we have 85+ adults already trying to choose cards! If you are purchasing tickets for children, please let me know.
5) There is a waiting list for this event – if you can no longer make it, please let me know so I can pass on the tickets to someone else who wants to come.
If you have any questions about the event, please let me know – I’ll be happy to answer any questions and I’m excited for next week!
Here’s how Yoto Card Swap works!
Jen, Landen and I arrived early and cleared out a place in the toy store and set up 3 folding tables for people to place their cards on. We display all the free Yoto cards on a display wall so people can choose their free cards. Jen had made a cake and bought some chocolates and mini water bottles and napkins and we had everything ready too. We also print out a list of everyone who has purchased tickets so we can check the people coming in.
When the event opened, we started checking people in and giving them raffle tickets for each Yoto card they brought.
Once you check in, you get your swag bag, put all the cards you want to trade on the table, take your free Yoto cards off the screen, and then you can visit and browse the cards to trade before the trading actually begins.
Once we’ve checked everyone in and they’ve had a few minutes to get things settled, I welcome everyone and explain how it works.
Basically, you can take as many cards as you’re carrying and we’ll all behave like kind adults who won’t be elbowing everyone for cards. Once you pick your cards, you will take them back to Landen, Jen or me and we will check you in by taking half of each raffle ticket for each card you draw.
We put all those raffle tickets in a box to pick up because I had some prizes to give away at the end.
The actual exchange and inspection may take 20 minutes.
(I’ve said in emails that we have room to sell cards if you want and I pointed it out in the welcome, but I’ve never seen anyone actually use them).
Once all the cards were gone (except some Crackling Fire and other cards that no one seemed to want), I called everyone back to attention and drew raffle tickets.
I have several packs of cards (Harry Potter, Boxcar Children, Narwhal and Jelly cards, and other favorite sets), a few items like my favorite book lamp, and two Yoto Mini players.
Luckily, no one won twice, which was surprising as some people had brought more than 20 cards and had 20 tickets in the draw!
After that, we cleared the table and went home – the whole event was only about an hour long (my perfect length for an event).
It was great to meet so many fellow Yoto lovers and I feel like it was all a great success and it wasn’t too stressful to make it happen!
The biggest question I get is “can I do this as a community/unpaid event” and I think of course!
I think it would be really fun if the library held an event like this (my library has a puzzle exchange twice a year, which was the inspiration for this idea) or organized it within a homeschool group or PTA or neighborhood group.
You obviously don’t need to do some extra things like raffles, free cards for each participant, or swag bags!
Have more questions about how Yoto Card exchange works? I’m happy to answer any questions!
If you liked this post about Yoto card exchange, you might also like these other posts:
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
