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 How to get more Paid Gigs

Secret to getting more paid bookings

Gig salad and Gig masters tips and tricks

 So you have now managed to become a talented artist in your field. It doesn't really matter what type of artisit you are. Whether your act is Magic, Mentalism, Hypnosis or a even a cover band, the fact is we need gigs. Right!

You may ask yourself; "What gives you the right to offer me advice on the subject, if you yourself do not even have a gig site?"  Well as Owner, Promoter, Designer, Marketer, and developer of Nexus Magic I have had to learn the rules of S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization). I have had to become some what of an expert on S.E.O. to stay competitive in what is a very competitive niche market for me. I now in edition to providing you all Magic from my online magic store, also teach classes part time locally on Search Engine Optimization at the Learning Exchange in Northern California.

A few of the secrects I wish to share with you today will help you boost your bookings tremendously. The rules of S.E.O. also apply to gig sites like Gig Salad and Gig Masters. I am not going to try and even explain all that you can do, but I will give you some basics that will increase your bookings over time. And certainly increase your visibility within the search engines.

 First off lets discuss the difference between On page SEO, and Off Page SEO. On page is the on page content of your Gig site booking page. The contents on your Gig page should not only be discriptive of your talents and references, but also throughout your gig page should have words that match that of what someone might type into a search engine to find you.

 So if you are a Magician in Southern CA, and you specialize in Birthdays, and Bar Mitzvah's then you should find a way to incorparate these potentially searched key phrases in your pages content. You could even include one of these keywords in your title somewhere. 

 So lets look at a an actual Gig page as an example: Hire a Magician in Southern California for your next event. And entertain your guests in a unique and exciting way.

Kosmyk is a very loyal supporter of my store, he purchases a lot of products from Nexus Magic. So I will review his page and make suggestions to help him out, and along the way you may learn one or two things to help your gig out as well. Kosmyk's Gig salad page could use a few adjustments. So, lets review it together so you understand the adjustments I would suggest. Lets start with the title, the title is created when you first create your Gig page.

WARNING: If you have already created your Gig page you can request to change this part if your are a Feautured Member. Otherwise you would need to delete your page, and open a new one. If you have your Gig page URL on printed material, and or many links back to your Gig. Do not close your account, that would be bad on many levels, so I advise against this. However, if you are considering on opening another gig page on another Gig site like Gig masters or vice versa. Then by all means do so with the following advice in mind.

If you notice the back half of his URL matches his title:  /kosmyk_the_magician_upland. When Kosmyk created his page at some point the site asked him what he goes by, he typed "Kosmyk the Magician". He simply answered the question the site asked him. In doing so Gig Salad used this info to create the URL.

In looking at this (Magician for hire in Southern California) I spot several things I would change. First of all I would have chosen a more search friendly title. You may have noticed the structure of the previous sentence seemed off. What is in perenthisis is the title I would have selected instead of Kosmyk the magician. This is search friendly and many more people in Southern California would type this in a search engine to book a Magician. Ahh I see the light bulb just appeared above your head. So with a title like this you are simply giving the search engines what they want, and in turn to deliver the Searcher what they are looking for.

Now what if many people have this or similar title in there URL. This is where the additional content on your page comes into play. You want to include your title Magician for hire in Southern California in the description of your page also. And you want this phrase as a natural part of a sentence or paragraph. It could look something like this: I have been a Magician for hire in Southern California for 20 years, prior to that I lived in New York. 

Now you would add other things in the body that would not only describe your talents, but also cater to other search posibilities. Example:  I have been a Magic entertainer for parties for over 30 years. I have worked as a Magician for Birthdays as well as been apart of a booking entainment for corporate events such as Sony, Ford, etc. etc. - Notice how I put a few other possible keyword phrases in the body of those two sentences. (Magic entertainer for parties) (Magician for Birthdays) and (Booking Entertainment for Corporate Events). This is good stuff for Search engines. It's important not to sound contrived or purposeful when doing this and you never want more then a few key phrases. Most importantly, make sure that your puntuation and grammer is in proper order. The more proper your information is the better you will rank with the search engines. These simple changes will effectively boost your presence on the search engines. This is some basic tips to incorporate into your on page SEO.

Off page SEO is just as important, and can also have a significant impact on how your gig is found. There is so much we could discuss with regard to off page SEO. So I am going to keep it as simple as possible. Once you have made the changes to your gig page and you feel that it is now more SEO friendly. At this point you now want optimize these new Keywords that you have added to your gig page, especially the Title phrase if you opened a new gig account.

How to optimize Keywords

Did you see in this blog just above middle, there is a link that took you to Kosmyk's page? (Hire a Magician in Southern California) This is what is called a "Hyper-linked anchored optimized key phrase". So in essence I am optimizing this key phrase to Kosmyk's gig page. So Kosmyk would now want to put that key phrase into his description somewhere as part of a proper sentence. And because my blog has good page rank with the search engines it will associate this keyphrase with Kosmyk's page. In turn the search engines will place a little more value to Kosmyk the Magician's gig page. This is how you optimize a keyword. Now it is important that this Anchored key phrase be in a blog or website that is relevant to your act. If you are a Magician then you want the Hyper-linked anchored optimized keyphrase to be on a website or blog that is relevant to magic. If you are a musician then a music website or blog. Relevency is just as important as the keyphrases, and content quality. Notice also that it is apart of a sentence and not just anchored text, surrounding the hyperlinked keyphrase with relevant words gives the link more power, and relevancy.

Most blogs allow you to add this key phrase method easily with the little chain link. If you want to see what I am referring to just open your email, and look at the little edit bar where you would pick the size of your font typically you will see two little chains. One is normal and one is broken. To use them you simply type out the sentence with your key phrase in it and then you highlight the key phrase you wish to anchor. Now click that little chain and it will open a sub window prompting you for a website address or url;  you can copy and paste that url in, and select save, okay, or done. Whatever it prompts you to do. If you made a mistake and highlighted the wrong key phrase not worry. Simply, highlight the text and this time click the broken chain this will delete the hyper-link but leave the text.

If someone is placing this link on their site for you then you want to give them what is called an Href tag.

In figure 1 is the raw coding for what makes up the a fore mentioned Hyper-linked anchored optimized key phrase. You can see how the url is placed between the quotes and the keyphrase after.

In figure 2  you will see that the coding you added including the url is no longer visible. This is because the url is now embedded into your Key phrase. If you are sending this Href to someone you want to place the code on Notepad and email it to them as an attachment. Also you may want to save this file so that you can send it to many web masters who may be able to place it one their websites.

Additionally, be sure that you link to your Gig site from your own social circles, I.E. your own website, Twitter page, Facebook, Blog etc. etc. But do it in this way, link your social pages together and only have one or two of your social circle link directly to your page. So your facebook links to your twitter, and your twitter links to your blog and say your blog links to your youtube and Gig site and your youtube completes the circle by linking to your facebook. This is a circle of links with your blog being the spout to your Gig site. In this example you surrounded your gig site by your social circle with only one of them your blog in this example linking to your Gig site. This is called a link wheel. There are no limits to the size of your wheel I would only caution that you want no more then two of them linking back to your gig site and only add social circles that you are active on. These methods will in time get you more gigs, and help you rank better in the search engines. Remember if you can get your link on a high ranking website or blog, more power will come to your Hyper-linked anchored optimized Key Phrase.

I want to give a quick shout out to my students from the Learning Exchange. I enjoyed our last class tremendously and wish you all great success in the future. If any of you have questions or would like to schedule consultation email me directly through the magic store email.

Jason Ring | Owner
Backroom Magic Forums
Nexus Magic Store

Email: NexusMagicStore@yahoo.com

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