Marketing

Making your testimonials more visible on Facebook

Jan 20

Previously I’ve written about getting amazing client testimonials, and my last post was about posting photo’s taken at the event on Facebook. In this post I’m going to talk about combining these two techniques together.

If you post a customer testimonial as a status update it will quickly become “stale”. That means that once the information has gone past people’s homepage that it won’t ever be seen again.

However, if you post a photo online it gets added to an album so whenever people go through that album they will see the picture and that content lasts a lot longer. Instead what you want to do is combine a photo from an event, along with the corresponding testimonial from that event as a DESCRIPTION on that photo. Now that testimonial will last a lot longer on your account so people will see it.

Using photo’s of children in your promotional material

Jan 19

If you’re my friend on facebook then you know that after I perform at a birthday party I like to post a photo of me and the birthday child together.

I’ve had a couple people ask me “Do parents mind you posting photo’s of their children online?” and the answer is no, they don’t mind. The reason is because I ALWAYS ASK permission before I post the photo.

Buying the perfect domain name

Jan 07

There are lots of things to consider when selecting a domain name. A good domain will be something that people can remember, that’s unique, and matches your site content.

Whenever I need to purchase a new domain name I always go through the same process:

Brainstorm different ideas
Create a shortlist of the good ideas and make sure the .com is available. You can see if a new domain is available by searching for it on www.GoDaddy.com.
Ask a few people what they think of possible names
If I’m not 100% satisfied with the name, I’ll go back a few hours later or days later and see if I can come up with a better name
Register the domain name

Here a photo of my brainstorming sheet when I was trying to come up with a domain name for this blog:

Video Interview with Tommy James – We Live and We Learn

Nov 23

Earlier this week Tommy James made an interesting post on The Magic Cafe. Here’s that post:

I have something I NEED to share with everyone who has purchased my Lop Sided Cyclops or intends to buy one in the future. We all need to learn from our mistakes and I hope MY mistake will be a learning experience for anyone else. I just received a letter from a teacher at a school that I need to share. I’m not proud of it in fact, I’m hitting myself in the head and saying “Why did I not foresee this as a possibility!???” Please read her letter and then I will tell you how I responded.

Dear Mr. Tommy James,
Last week you put on a performance for our school. Most of the children enjoyed the show greatly, you were funny and magical. However, I would like to bring to your attention, a skit that I found very offensive. When you did your flying eyeball trick, you mentioned a “monster” who had one leg shorter than the other and walked around the stage limping. You had no way of knowing this, but in my class, I have a student who was born with a birth defect and has one leg shorter than the other. The minute you said that, he looked at me and several students looked at him. I am writing to you, to ask you to eliminate this skit from future performances. You never know who will be in your audience, monsterizing a physical defect can be very hurtful. Please consider this in the future.

Thank you,
C.

Read More…

Networking Events — Why you don’t go to them

Nov 18

Networking events are a great way to get new business. These events are filled with people who are fellow business owners, local government officials, local media, and other individuals who are highly networked. My guess is that you already know that you should be going to these events but you aren’t. If you want to get more bookings you need to be in front of the people who can hire you.

My guess is that one of the reasons you don’t go to these events is because you don’t “know anybody”. Really that’s just an excuse to cover the fact that you don’t like to network. Yes, its uncomfortable and awkward, but I’m going to tell you exactly how to get over it. As a performer you have a natural skillset to navigate these types of social situations. Most businesses don’t get to immediately demonstrate their services– but we’re very lucky because networking events are exactly the type of environment that we’re hired to perform in!

How to Perform and Work Internationally

Nov 18

Many magicians have a dream of performing internally but there’s many road blocks to navigate along the way. That’s why I decided to do an interview with Paul Romhany who’s without a doubt one of the most qualified people in our community to answer the golden question “How do I work internationally?”

For the past 25 years Paul Romhany has been travelling the world performing at corporate events and festivals, as well as cruise ships around the world. During that time he has been in over one hundred countries and in 2012 flew over 500 hours to get to gigs. When asked where he lives he replies, “I’m a Citizen of the World”. The answer that Charlie Chaplin gave when asked the same question almost 80 years ago.

Why You Should Work For Free

Nov 11

Should you never work for free? Should you always turn down charities? Do you offer discounts or reduced rates for not-for-profit organizations? There are lots of things to consider when considering these types of shows.

The problem with free shows

Often these show offers come with the promise of “great exposure”! While its true that there will be an audience that hasn’t seen you before, more often than not you aren’t going to end up directly booking more shows because you performed at their event.
I’ve also found that for free shows they are more likely to be less organized. These events will be run by volunteers or people who are just trying to help out, but may be outside their element. You will need to take extra care to make sure that you get as much information as possible upfront, so that when you arrive you can put on an amazing show just as you would at any paid event.
When donating a performance it will cost you money to perform at their event. You will still need to pay for gas, the wear on your equipment, and all of the consumables such as playing cards, rope, and flash paper.
Make sure that when you accept a donated show that everyone else at the event is also donating their services. There’s nothing worse than donating your time to arrive at the event and find out that the reason that they couldn’t pay your fee is because they spent their money on food, bounce castles, etc. I only donate my services to events where everyone else is also donating their services. (Once upon a time I discount my show fee for an organization but when I arrived I found out that the reason they asked for a discount is because they had already spent the rest of their money on other activities. I only made that mistake once…)
One of the biggest dangers of donating a show is that you will be giving up a date/time that you could have sold to somebody else. If this happens you not only lose the money you could have made, but its also costing you to perform at another event still. This is why I am very specific with the groups that I support. I have to be willing to not only donate a show for their group, but I also have to feel it was still worthwhile if I have to turn down a booking. Some performers will offer to do the show under the condition that they don’t receive another booking on that date/time. I would never ever do this– I feel its unprofessional because it shows that you don’t care about the success of their event. Read More…

Improve your emails — gMail

Nov 11

There’s no doubt that gMail (Google Mail) is the best email service in the entire galaxy. So if you’re using hotmail, yahoo, or any of the other services I suggest you get with the times grandpa. The spam protection is amazing, the custom filters rock, the themes are decent (check out the cool cloud wallpaper I’m using right now in my account), and I can access it anywhere in the world on any web-enabled device.

Anything that can happen, will happen

Nov 03

This is just too funny not to share! As you can imagine, when performing for children the unexpected happens at basically every show…. But this was something I certainly didn’t see coming!

Leif Get’s Canned By A Preschooler

Mastering the one year follow-up

Oct 26

Right now is a great time of year to talk about “Mastering the Follow-up” because with Christmas around the corner you’re probably turning down shows because you’re already booked. Sadly there’s no way to clone ourselves to work multiple parties at the same time, but you can take these leads and turn them into seed contacts for next year ensuring that you make as much money next year as possible. By booking parties earlier people will be able to accommodate your schedule and you’ll be able to book more shows and thus make more money.