Crash Course in Business, part I

Sep 1, 2007
3,786
15
Drawing on six years of successes and failures, associations with people who understand business and those who don't, reading books on marketing and skill mastery, here's the first in a series of write-ups I'm planning to give all of you hopeful future pros a quick crash course in how to make it as an entertainer.


Social Media is a Joke

I thought of typing this up later, but then I remembered that I'm talking to magicians so I really need to get this out of the way. Forget trying to market yourself through social media exclusively. Oh, it has its uses, but being YouTube famous is about as productive as punching yourself in the stomach repeatedly. There are so many pitfalls and problems it will make your head spin and the rules of social media marketing change on a near-daily basis.

Thinking of marketing through Facebook? Virtually useless. Facebook is designed to keep you on Facebook, so forget about trying to link to your website on your profile. Any external link they let you post will be at the very bottom of the post in 10-point typeface in blue, making it as hard to read as possible and thus more likely to be skipped. And don't bother posting to keep people updated. The way the timeline is set up, you miss 90% of it anyway.

Thinking of going through Twitter? Same problems with visibility. Also, spammers galore.

YouTube? Vimeo? Pinterest? All a shiny objects contest competing for your audience's limited attention spans in an ocean of distracting crap. You'd have an easier time prospecting gigs by throwing bottles containing a sales letter into the Pacific Ocean than through YouTube.

New Media is a powerful tool, but like any tool you have to know how to use it properly. The keystone of all your marketing is going to be the list. The names and email addresses of everyone who likes you and would like to hear more from you.

Building the list however is going to take time. Many working pros spend years building their list before they reach anything resembling financial stability, and more still never even do that. They get gigs through sheer dogged determination and unrelenting obstinance, though that may also be why death by liver failure is considered natural causes in this industry.

Where ever you go that people are, try to get some names on your list. If someone liked what you did, tell them you have a mailing list if they're interested. Get their business card, and have them write ML on it (for mailing list, a-doy!). Most mailing lists you want to send out an email blast once a week, though in slow times one every other week can pass. Be careful though. Long periods of silence will mean you get forgotten.

Now, how do you set up this mailing list? My personal preference is to set up an account with Mail Chimp. It's a free service that allows you to take sign-ups directly from your website and actually plan a roll-out of timed emails. Very useful.

Speaking of your website that will be my topic next week.

Special thanks to my father, Matthew for giving me the guidance to got me this far and letting me learn business directly from his voice of 30+ years of experience. These write-ups are possible because of him.
 
Jul 22, 2013
222
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What my friend (a performer at the Magic Castle) did was make one highlight video on youtube, and that only has like fifty views. Youtube is not a huge route to success. What he did was a card trick where he gets a card into a sealed envelope, and the envelop is printed with his contact info and everything, which the spectator keeps, along with their card. He was also very fortunate, as he is an actor, and appeared performing magic on shows like Murder She Wrote, news specials, Dexter (he might have just acted in that, though), and many more, which got him a lot of publicity. I know this sounds like a random story, but it proves the point that if you want to make money in this business, you have to work in real life in front of real people. You have to push yourself and keep performing. And MailChimp is an awesome service, one that I never even thought of using, but many companies and people use the service.
 
Sep 2, 2007
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I tend to agree with you Steerpike, but with a caveat. The way people approach media nowadays is changing, and I think user-generated content sites and social media are becoming a lot more important. In five years time, the "big break" for a magician won't come when he gets a TV show, but when his videos start appearing on whatever the hot YouTube channel of the day is. And when that big break comes, audiences will want to feel connected to this new star, and not just as a faceless corporate entity. They'll want to follow him on Twitter, see his photos, see his silly little video clips, (very importantly) see him make mistakes, and feel like they're part of a community. That's when social media comes into its own.
 
Jul 22, 2013
222
1
California
I tend to agree with you Steerpike, but with a caveat. The way people approach media nowadays is changing, and I think user-generated content sites and social media are becoming a lot more important. In five years time, the "big break" for a magician won't come when he gets a TV show, but when his videos start appearing on whatever the hot YouTube channel of the day is. And when that big break comes, audiences will want to feel connected to this new star, and not just as a faceless corporate entity. They'll want to follow him on Twitter, see his photos, see his silly little video clips, (very importantly) see him make mistakes, and feel like they're part of a community. That's when social media comes into its own.
I like your thinking
 
Sep 1, 2007
3,786
15
I tend to agree with you Steerpike, but with a caveat. The way people approach media nowadays is changing, and I think user-generated content sites and social media are becoming a lot more important. In five years time, the "big break" for a magician won't come when he gets a TV show, but when his videos start appearing on whatever the hot YouTube channel of the day is. And when that big break comes, audiences will want to feel connected to this new star, and not just as a faceless corporate entity. They'll want to follow him on Twitter, see his photos, see his silly little video clips, (very importantly) see him make mistakes, and feel like they're part of a community. That's when social media comes into its own.

I don't disagree. In fact, I was going to recommend the book "Fans, Friends and Followers" in a later installment. But even when you read the book, you notice that all of the people interviewed in it all had a list like I described. A thousand Twitter followers is not the same thing as having a couple hundred people on your mailing list.
 
Apr 17, 2013
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I don't disagree. In fact, I was going to recommend the book "Fans, Friends and Followers" in a later installment. But even when you read the book, you notice that all of the people interviewed in it all had a list like I described. A thousand Twitter followers is not the same thing as having a couple hundred people on your mailing list.


While twitter is a tool to be used for sure, you're right nothing beats direct marketing. I mean look at some people twitter profile. They are following hundreds of people. How do people expect to get any useful info from twitter when there is so much coming at them. Right now I'm following 50 people. One of them is just for Guild Wars 2 so I know why the log in servers are down. But even at fifty I still miss some stuff.
 

WitchDocIsIn

Elite Member
Sep 13, 2008
5,877
2,945
Total aside .. I just noticed the Raistlin quote in your sig Krab 1 - Nice. I read those books when I was a teenager. They were my first really 'fantasy' series.

Facebook likes don't mean squat to a live performance. It's a vague metric that what you're doing or saying has some appeal to someone. But it's one thing to click "Attending" on an event notice, and a completely different thing to get off your butt an actually go, and that's for free events like parties.

To give an example. My circus troupe puts on sporadic "Burns" when we have the space for it. We put the event on Facebook and get maybe 30 people saying they'll attend with another 50 'maybe's. That's a consistent response to the event notifications. Every time we do this, we get more people showing up. Usually the majority of the people who said they'll attend on Facebook don't show up. It's other people we've invited in person, or who have heard of it through the people who've attended.

There's a local guy here, Scurvy. We had a great chat a little while ago about how social media is important for getting out there and getting your name in front of people, but you can't rely on it much beyond that at this point. I think YouTube has more potential than Facebook, honestly. At least through YouTube you can get paid. But you have to break out of the screen an into other areas. I reference Hannah Hart a lot because she's really a breakout success story. What started on a whim has become a real career. But look at what she did. She took something that was going well, and put it into the real world by going on TV shows, visiting other YouTube people's shows, did a tour over the US shooting her show in people's houses.

It's about making people care about you. If your only presence in their life is on Facebook, they're probably not really going to care about you. You have to make them feel connected.

And nothing beats real, live people in your audience.
 
Sep 2, 2007
1,186
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London
I don't disagree. In fact, I was going to recommend the book "Fans, Friends and Followers" in a later installment. But even when you read the book, you notice that all of the people interviewed in it all had a list like I described. A thousand Twitter followers is not the same thing as having a couple hundred people on your mailing list.

Absolutely. To build a strong brand, you have to distinguish between "clients" and "fans", and be aware of the differences in how you need to communicate with these two groups. A client could be someone like the promotions manager of a chain of cinemas, a bar manager, or just a celebrity. Effectively, they're someone in a position to directly offer you remuneration (whether that's in the form of money, increased status, useful contacts or anything else), and they're the kind of people you want on your mailing list. While these people may very well follow you on Twitter (and, in fact, that's a good sign that they're taking a personal interest in you), they need to be communicated with in a way which reflects their importance to you above and beyond just another "fan" who's following you just because they liked one video that you made, or because they just follow every magician.
 

Jay Adra

Elite Member
Jul 11, 2011
332
3
Australia
www.jayadra.com
Total aside .. I just noticed the Raistlin quote in your sig Krab 1 - Nice. I read those books when I was a teenager. They were my first really 'fantasy' series.

Haha, same here Christopher! They pretty much gatewayed me to LoTR, so they served a very important purpose indeed.

As for the business side of magic, I can only speculate and offer opinions based from observations (as I don't do magic professionally as a money-making endeavour), but I agree that social media can be extremely useful for some people. I would tend to think that for a local magician looking around for work, it might not offer too much help compared to a well-established magician who is sought out more often than not and needs a way to keep his "list" up to date on what he's doing, where he's going etc.
 
Apr 17, 2013
885
4
ok on the side note. It was the Dragonlance books that got me interested in magic. Growing up the only magic I ever saw the on TV with Doug Henning and David Copperfield. I read that section where Raistlin did the coin effects for the gully dwarves and thought "That would be cool to be able to do." Then three years later I saw a close up magician (my future mentor) for the first time. At that point I knew what I wanted to do.
 

Jay Adra

Elite Member
Jul 11, 2011
332
3
Australia
www.jayadra.com
ok on the side note. It was the Dragonlance books that got me interested in magic. Growing up the only magic I ever saw the on TV with Doug Henning and David Copperfield. I read that section where Raistlin did the coin effects for the gully dwarves and thought "That would be cool to be able to do." Then three years later I saw a close up magician (my future mentor) for the first time. At that point I knew what I wanted to do.

Wow, an interesting story. I never thought that series was very popular, but it seems there are a few people who read it. Very interesting that it is what started you in magic.

Sorry to go off topic :)
 
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