I need your help.
If you can pause for a couple of moments, I will be so grateful! I will click in a little story and explanation down below, but right now I can really use your review. I am guessing you have seen me on one stage or another, right‽ May I please request a review? This seems to be the best link for the Google My Business:
https://g.page/r/CXw5EphgNY-IEAg/review
or
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Professor+Phelyx,+Mentalist+Magician/@39.6722611,-106.0164648,8z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0xa862669918c5a97f:0x888f35609812397c!8m2!3d39.6776514!4d-104.895332
If you have anything against the Googler, that's okay! Yelp will work too!
https://www.yelp.com/biz/professor-phelyx-denver
Whew! Thank you for that. It is the reviews, testimonials, endorsements, and recommendations that help me far more than the coffees (which I do so love)!
I have some dates open in December and in having some recent discussions with my competitors (who are also friends) I am learning that I should be booked up.
For many years I needn't have been concerned about appearing on the first page of a Google search for Denver magician, Colorado magician, Denver corporate entertainment... This was partially credited to the fact that I have been the owner of www.phelyx.com since about 1993. The simple fact that the URL is almost thirty years old and still with its first owner has kept me in good ranking with the search engines. I even had some great link-back from magazine articles and newspapers!
Well, don't get too complacent, ol' boy.
Recent research indicates that I am not even on page two.
Folks who work with SEO have a joke. The perfect place to hide a body is on page three of a Google search.
Back when I was a teen I decided to dig into the local music scene. I liked the punk scene and all of its horrors that were mostly true. I ran in those circles with the offering of an ability to create show posters and album art and I stayed there for many years. I did the work with ink and paper and my dear friend, the Xerox machine. I often helped with creative ways to get cassette tapes into the right people's hands to earn bookings. We had calculated "hook formulas" for the tapes. We knew which decision makers listened to audition tapes in their cars and who had interns work through stacks of tapes as the first elimation round filters.
Back then the venues would do all of the promoting of a show. The VENUES distributed the handbills and posters. I can't stress that point enough because about the time that Nirvana was first charting, everything changed. The LA scene was a greed-fed machine that changed the game for the whole country. In fact, the idea of "pay-to-play" was introduced in the popular Los Angeles clubs right around 1989 and it stuck for a long time. "Pay-to-play was a model that realized that bands were getting exposed to some influential people at those key clubs and it literally means that the bands would pay the venue for the privilege of some stage time. That's when other folks learned that it might be a good trick to explain how much "exposure" a gig would be.
Don't do that. Ever.
Another treatment of the time is what became a blanket model adopted by all clubs in the country and is still the current practice. As an act, you will be booked if you have a proven following. They don't care to listen to your records first, just prove that you'll bring people in.
Social media is now the meter used to determine viability as an act. I know that's no secret to you. My last show followed Ben Palmer who kindly remembered me from previous shows. Ben is the creator of PalmerTrolls. That's what he does. He Trolls large companies and celebrities and publishes the typed interactions. He is pretty funny! His live show is basically him working as an emcee to his own videos that are on YouTube. He does have also a successful Pateron account. I am mentioning him because he tours the country for live appearances due to the social following he has generated in social media. These numbers open doors.
I'll give you plenty of stories about the music business another time.
All I am getting at here is that what it takes to promote one's own art is so different than what I studied, and I purely fell behind. Like totally caught with my pants down "fell behind". I guess I have always worked under a belief that I have to get my work in front of more people. It turns out that I need to have an effective website that is meticulously and constantly adjusted and that it's far more important than the quality of my work for audiences.
Grumble.
I can't blame it on anyone but myself really. I can tell you that it makes me sad to know that these additional hurdles are eliminating our exposure to a lot of really great art. If I had the means I would create an agency that served to help good artists just do what they do best. Make art!
Oh, would you care to have that link to the Google review again?
Here:
https://g.page/r/CXw5EphgNY-IEAg/review
Very gratefully,
Phelyx