Martin wants to create a magicians website and turn his magic hobby into an income. He’s not sure about the first step..

Martin write:

‘Hi everyone at Merchant of Magic. The reason for my email is I have been doing magic for quite a few years, and I am really struggling in knowing how I can make my hobby into a career. I have studied a lot of sleight of hand over the years and also purchased so many gimmicked tricks I can’t even count them, but I am struggling to get myself out there. I want to get myself a magicians website made up and start performing. I think I need a bit of help as I’m not great on a computer for a start, and I am not sure the best way to go about getting paid work.

I have contacted a few magicians in Leicester to see if they could mentor me and help me get comfortable performing in front of a crowd as I think that is one of my weak points at this moment in time because of my confidence, but I have had no luck at all and I didn’t know if you could recommend anyone who might be able to help me or if you could give me any advice on were to go from here. Sorry for the long essay it’s just magic means so much to me and I spend so much time, money and effort into it I just want my dream job to come true, thanks for reading this and I hope you can help. – Thank you, Martin.‘

We are often asked for advice by hobbyist wanting to become professional magicians. There is no easy way. Risk is always involved when making a transition like this. However, we can help by listing a few things you should be doing to make that move as smooth and pain-free as possible.

Here are some quick pointers to aim you in the right direction. For more information on turning professional feel free to search our blog here, there are tonnes of great articles that can help.

Magicians Website

If you wish to be professional it is important to have a website, unless you have bookings coming out of your ears (which you may do in time) but as you start out it is important to have a base for all the information about you. It is a great way for people to see you and what your performance is about without meeting up face to face. Your website is worth spending some time and money on. To try to make one yourself with no experience would be a mistake, it would look exactly like that, inexperienced. Your magicians website will reflect on your image as a performer, a clear and organised website that is well put together will in turn make you look organised and professional yourself. Also with regards to the photos, try to have performing photos, not just photos of you with a fan of cards and springing the cards. You want the website to show you as a competent performer, and stylish promo shots can only look good if they are accompanied by great performing shots. The most important point of any magicians website is to clearly display your contact details on every page with a clear call to action running throughout your website. Visitors should be prompted to contact you to find out more and to receive a quote.

Magicians promotional material

This is worth spending some money on the design and look. Business cards and any other branded promo material should all match so that you look like a cohesive brand, this will say you are professional without saying so.

Spend a bit of money on some postcard size flyers to hand out at wedding fairs and other events where you promote yourself. These sorts of things can become part of a promotional pack you can mail people should they wish to have more information about you. You should also have a promotional pack that matches your website design etc that you can email potential clients, again with cohesive branding throughout, so it looks like a brand and not some mish mash of photos and magician’s blurb.

Confidence

Confidence is something everyone should work on unless it comes naturally. The only way to become a more confident magician is to constantly put yourself in uncomfortable situations where you do not feel at ease. You will learn that even a fail is not that bad, and you will begin to not fear them as much. Slowly, over time you will begin to gain positive experiences from these moments of discomfort. Everyone goes wrong at some point; every magician has tricks that fail at some time sooner or later. If you were to speak to any professional magician who makes their living doing magic that said they had never failed in front of many people at some point, they would be lying. You have to realise that things will go wrong, and people will sometimes figure out what you are doing; it is all part and parcel of this career I’m afraid. You do not know what people already know. Maybe one of the spectators is an amateur magician; maybe they have a sibling who has learned and exposed some magic to them. These things happen, sometimes spectators are deliberately difficult, it is all about how you handle the situation, be polite, friendly and have fun and then your spectators will too.

Getting bookings

A good way to start getting bookings is to do as much magic in social situations as possible. For example, if you are out for a drink with friends make sure you show them the magic and look out for anyone else who is trying to see what is going on. Give them a nod and go and show them some magic afterwards. Most people ask if this is what you do for a job, simply say “yes”. Hand out business cards to everyone you perform for. Most people have a friend who is getting married or who has some event coming up, and you will be surprised as to how many people ask.

Learning more about marketing and promotion for magicians

This blog is full of ideas and tips for promoting yourself as a professional magician, however you may want to read a complete system for marketing yourself as a performer, where all the information is in order, and you get templates and a road plan for putting it into practice. It’s worth reading the ebook Highway to Success for a complete guide.

Tony asks:

‘I don’t know anything about SEO for magicians websites. Can you help me with some tips?‘

It doesn’t matter how much you practice your magic, unless you have an audience, all that hard work is for nothing. If you are ready to start performing for the public, it’s time to build a website to advertise your services as a magician. Lets look at how magicians can improve their websites, so they get noticed in the search engine site listings.

Search engine optimization, often shortened to SEO, is essential if you want your magicians website showing up near the top of the search results. However, there are good SEO and bad SEO:
Bad SEO for magicians.

There are many ‘companies’ that promise to get you listed at the top of Googles search results, by clever SEO. Many of these services uses ‘black hat’ techniques that can get you banned by Google for trying to ‘game the system’. Some SEO companies offer to stuff lots of keywords onto a website, or create hundreds of low quality links from other sites back to your site. This won’t fool Google anymore. Generally, if a companies promise sounds too good to be true, it usually isn’t true.

Never try to cheat the system when it comes to SEO. Google employs some of the world’s greatest mathematicians and experts. Their job is to stop websites from cheating and to find ways to punish those that do!
Good SEO for magicians.

The good news for us magicians, is that there are many positive things we can do, when building our websites to help the search engines rather than cheat them. The reward for playing by Googles own rules is a greater chance of a higher listing in their search results.

The right keywords.

The first step is to choose the keywords you will target. Make a list of 6 words or phrases that people looking to hire a magician in your area would type into the search engine. Perhaps your name, style of magic, location, type of event etc. So, if you are a close up magician living in Southampton, and you entertain in restaurants, your keywords/phrases could be:

Magicians
Southampton
Restaurant magicians
Magic
Hampshire
Restaurant entertainment

Content is King.

Now that you’ve picked your keywords, build them into the content you publish on your magicians website. Use them in your about page, as headers, within buttons and links.

Don’t over do it. Write for humans rather than the search engines. A keyword density of 1% – 2% per page is about right. If you use the same keyword too many times on the same page, Google WILL notice. If Google thinks you are ‘keyword stuffing’ they may punish your website in the listings. Google could even remove your magicians website from their search results completely.

3 Tips for picking a domain name for your magicians website.

1) Choose domain names that contain some of your keywords. Google includes the keywords in your domain name in bold. This stands out in the search results.

2) Choose a domain that is specific for your local area and client base. If you work 99% of the time in the UK, then choose a .co.uk domain name. Google gives preference to those in the Google UK results.

3) Avoid hyphenated domains. HampshireMagician.co.uk is better than Hampshire-Magician.co.uk
Don’t forget the META tags.

You should also add your keywords in your META tags. META tags are hidden from visitors, but search engines use them to understand and index your site.

The essential one is the Title META tag. The text you add in the Title tag is shown in the main link to your site, in the search results. Ideally, the Title tag should be your magician’s stage name, and the subject of that page (for example, Paul Smith – Restaurant Magic in Southampton, Hampshire).

Keep the page Title tag under 175 characters, so it’s not truncated in the search results.

The other two META tags that are used by search engines are Keywords and Description.

Keywords are not really used by Google anymore, but add a few in anyway. The ‘Description’ IS important, as that’s shown under the Title tag in the search results. It’s not used for ranking, but visitors that look at the listings will read it to see if the page is useful to them.

Building links.

Google tries to judge a website by how trustworthy it is. To do this, it will look at the number of websites that link to your magicians website. The more high ranking websites that are linking back to yours the more ‘SEO Juice’ your site builds up.

The best way to get links to your site is to make it interesting, so other sites will link to it. A generic magicians website is not going to be a popular site for links, so you need to think about ways to earn links. A great way to do this is to set up a ‘recommended’ page. You can then link to other types of entertainers or party services, who will hopefully give you a link as well. We on the lookout for sites linking to you with a ‘no follow’ link. These links don’t pass any ‘SEO Juice’ to you as Google doesn’t count them.

Don’t get ripped off.

At all costs, avoid companies that offer to set up backlinks for you. Google knows this is ‘gaming the system’ and the latest Google update (called Penguin) will punish sites that use link farms and bulk link-back tactics.

Be Social.

Google counts links on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, so make sure you add a few links back to your magicians website. Remember not to spam links on social networks, as it does more harm than good.

Say goodbye to Flash.

Search engines don’t see Flash, so make sure you use as little as possible on your website.

Provide a guide.

Remember to include a site map for Google to use. It allows Google to crawl your site quickly and get to every page.

Experiment.

Look at website site traffic reports for your site. Notice which keywords people use to find you. Check where you rank in Google for your chosen keywords. If you rank very low for some keywords, think about changing them to keywords that have less competition, but will send more targeted visitors to your website.

Getting your SEO fixed.

Search Engine Optimization is vital for your magicians website to work for you. – If done right, it will bring you publicity, and many more magic gigs.

One of the problems magicians face when trying to get the SEO right on their magicians websites, is who to trust. There is a great deal of companies that offer a paid service for SEO. Some are excellent, but there are many that use questionable sales techniques, and can’t be trusted.

Do you have any SEO tips for magicians you can share? Please leave a comment below. We would love to discuss this topic further with you!