By Dominic Reyes

Where do you spend most of your time and budget advertising for work as a magician?

Ask any professional magician where they tend to get work and the usual answer is ‘previous clients and recommendations’.

It’s true, that good quality established magicians can build up a large enough client base. These repeat clients ensure that their diaries are full of enough work to support them.But what about if you are just starting out? As a new magician you face a difficult ‘chicken and egg’ problem. You need to find enough work to allow you to replace your existing income and focus on magic full time, but until you have built a large client base, you won’t have enough repeat customers coming back to fill your diary.

The answer to this problem is marketing. Getting out and finding new clients to book you. I recently asked a group of magicians, where they received most of their new clients:

Most magicians reported that their website as the biggest lead generation tool they use.

Here are some of the most popular ways you can advertise and my opinion on them:

1) Advertising in magazines
Generally, this is a waste of time. There’s no shortage of traditional print media companies falling over themselves to sell magicians adverting in their magazines. Especially wedding exhibition magazines. The return on investment is very low and your adverting budget is better spent elsewhere. Some magicians do get regular leads from print adverts, but many magicians that take out ads, fail to renew once the first contract has run its course. It can be very tempting when a space if ‘offered’ to you. Many times the space was filled previously by another magician, so it seems like a great chance to jump in. Ask yourself why the previous magician stopped their advert? It’s worth contacting that magician to see what they thought of the experience.

2) Magic entertainment agencies.
These should be a core focus of your marketing energy. Building relationships with agents is one of the best moves you can make to bring in good quality regular work. Read this information on how to  find a good agent.

3) Directly contacting companies.
Another smart move, but very time consuming. I would recommend spending an hour each day making phone calls and sending info packs to venues and companies in your area. You can can get more info in how to contact companies to book you as a magician here  

4) Paid Adverts for magicians on search engines – PPC
Many magicians advertise on Google using Adwords. These are the adverts on the right hand side of each search results page and sometimes at the top of the page. This can be quite expensive, but will bring in new leads for you to convert.

Here are two important points to remember:
1) You need to have a good website page for the advert to send visitors. You will be paying for each visitor, so unless your website is professional and designed to capture their contact details, you will waste a lot of money.

2) Avoid the most popular search terms. There is little point bidding on keywords such as ‘magic’, ‘magic show’ and ‘magician’. General ‘short tail’ keywords are far too competitive, which means you will burn a lot of cash for each visitor the keyword sends you. A great deal of the paid traffic will not be in the market for a magician. The best keyword terms are very specific to the visitors who are most likely to hire a magician. A good example of ideal keywords would be: “magicians in Sussex”, “magicians in London”, and “hire a magician in Bradford”. The secret is to be specific, so you only get paid visitors that are actually searching for a magician to hire.

5) Wedding Exhibitions
Wedding exhibitions can be a perfect place to market your services. It’s hard to beat a room full of people arranging huge events, and that are specifically there looking for suppliers. Read our guide on how magicians can get the most out of wedding exhibitions.   

6) Restaurants and bars.
Many working magicians take on regular weekly or monthly gigs with local restaurants and bars. Although these are very low paid, they can fill blank dates in a magician’s diary and can lead to more profitable gigs as the magician gains his or her reputation. Read some advice about getting work in restaurants and bars here.

7) Promotional Website.
This is one of the most important marketing devices a magician can use. It’s vital that you set up a professional website which showcases your services, shows testimonials, and allows clients to contact you. This is especially important when using PPC advertising as your website will be the landing page for the paid advert. I highly recommend that you commission a professional design company to produce your website.

Even if you don’t want to go to the expense of a designed website just yet, there is no excuse for not creating a single page, website or blog to act as your landing page for clients looking to book you. You can create a blog to act as your magic website for free and with no skills in programing required. The blog you are reading right now is set up on the free service: Google Blogger.

DO THIS: Create a website to showcase your services. You can do that right now, by visiting a free online website maker or use a blog platform. If you prefer to have a website made professionally, contact a few designers and chat with them about your ideas. Commit to spending a few hours this week to contacting some venues and clients to offer your services.