You can waste a lot of time on the Internet…and money. By being smart you can increase your bookings and have great clients come to you.
How?
Start with advertising. A service like Skipthegames.com lets you reach out across the globe so that when clients are coming to your city you are easily found. Using the Internet for advertising is just the beginning of what you can do: once you have placed your posts you need a strategy.
The internet and social media offer everything from websites, to blogs to Facebook pages to tweets to help you promote your business. You can spend hours every day updating your social media. But is it worth it?
Bottom line you need to be internet savvy to gain real internet traction for your business. And to understand what that means you need to think like a business. (Warning: there will be math but it is really easy and very profitable math.)
In business there is a very straightforward idea – return on investment, ROI. If you put a paid post up for a month and it costs $100 that is an investment. If it brings you three $200 dates your revenue is $600-$100=$500 as a gross ROI. It is more complicated than this but that's the general idea. The old saying you have to spend money to make money is true.
Another old saying is that time is money. But how do you value your time? A simple way is to say that you are working 12 hours a day, 5 days a week so you are "on the clock" 60 hours a week. If you have 6 $200 dates a week for a total of $1,200 and another $300 in tips you are making $25.00 an hour ignoring expenses.
Now, let's say putting a paid post up gets you two more dates and costs $25.00 per week. If you make your $200 plus $100 in tips you will have spent $25 to make $500. And your take home per hour would go from $25 to $33.00 an hour.
What you are currently making a week divided by the number of hours you are "on the clock" will tell you what you are making an hour and therefore what an hour of your time is worth if you invest it.
The very simplest thing you can do is create (or have built) some sort of web presence with three things on it: your working name and city/neighbourhood, your services and rates (depending on the legal issues in your area) plus a few great pictures.
You can certainly do this with a stand alone website but that will cost money – domain reservation (Go-Daddy.com, $9.99 per year but check for coupon codes), web hosting ($5.00/month various places) and some sort of web design (3-6 page basic site with one gallery $250-500, monthly update costs $100-$250, marketing and search engine optimization – $300-$1000). It's a good idea but the ROI may not be as high as with other solutions.
Let's look at a low cost, savvy, alternative. Putting up a blog at Google's Blogspot is quick, free and easy. You can do it yourself. It will take you a little while to figure out how to post and how to upload pictures but it really is very easy. You need to be aware of a few things with Blogspot – first, no nudity otherwise you become an adult blog and a screen comes up warning people off. Second, think of the blog as an extended ad. Be friendly, approachable but don't give too much away. You want people who go to the blog to call, text or email you.
Remember to have a call to action on your blog. "Call me now, I'm sure I have what you are looking for." is a lot better than a straight telephone number or email.
The best thing about Blogspot is that it is owned by Google. Which means that the Google search spider will check out your blog pretty much the day you put it up. Google is king of the search engines. There is no need to even think about Bing or Yahoo… if you do well on Google they will follow along.
The thing about Google is that it is a complete system: to get a Blogspot blog you have to have a Google account which will give you a number of things: a Gmail email address, a Google+ account and, if you sign up, a Google Places account. Of all of these, the Google Places account is the most valuable because it will put your business in the local search results for Google.
There is, however, evidence that Google Places may be reluctant to list escorts as escorts in Google Places: which means that you may want to list as a "model", "entertainer", or "hostess" or "companion".
The one thing you have to have for Google Places is a real address where you can pick up mail as Google will verify your business by sending a post card with a code.
Savvy escort's Internet takeaway
- Get a Google Account
- Create a Blogspot blog
- Create Google+ and Places pages
- Get Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts
- Use TwitterFeed to post your blog posts to social media
- Put up two or three blog posts a week – cute, non-nude selfies are great
- That's it…no cost, no hassle and now you know
OK, so you have a Blogspot blog… now what? Well, blogs do well when they have new posts two or three times a week. A post can be very short – "Gorgeous day in Denver – let's share it" or lengthy. It is a great idea to post pictures.
With a smartphone you can keep the blog lively with "selfies". If you buy a new skirt or a pretty bra, post it. No need for a hard sell. Just post about the fun you are having and how much you would like to share it.
Details – location, email, phone number go in the "sidebar" which runs down the side of the page. These won't change so make sure that you get them right the first time.
The internet has changed a lot in the last five years with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet. This means that you need to pick a Blogspot theme which is "responsive" which means it automatically determines what device a user is using to look at your blog and presents the blog in a format compatible with that device. It's a neat trick.
What about social media? Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin?
While social media may be fading a bit with younger people, it is actually growing in the over 30 demographic. So setting up accounts for your business in each social media makes sense. Using the Gmail address you got with your Blogspot blog for all of your social media will keep everything tidy.
Have a good picture ready for your social media effort. And a good, legal, description of your business. FB, Twitter and Linkedin all have varying policies on prohibiting "illegal" businesses from using their site. So — don't be illegal. Offering companionship, arm candy, a dinner date or modeling is legal. So are pretty pictures of a pretty girl with all the naughty bits covered.
The problem with FB, Twitter and Linked-In is that they can take up a lot of your time. The good news is that once you have set up your accounts you can use the miracle of internet technology to automatically update your social media whenever you update your Blogspot blog.
TwitterFeed.com uses something called the RSS feed from your blog to post to Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. It takes a little while to set up but once you have done the set up your professional social media presence will be automatic. Every time you post to your blog your social media is instantly updated.
Returning to ROI, having a web and a social media presence can be very good for an escort's business but, realistically, paying someone to build a site, maintain it and market it is expensive. Several hundred dollars a month is a realistic number. If you keep it to $400 then the site itself is costing you two $200 dates a month. Worth it? Perhaps in a few months your paid for web presence will bring you five or six additional dates a month and you will see a very decent ROI.
However, if you go the savvy route of building your own Blogspot blog and social media presence, you can do the work yourself when you are not busy and see a return the first date you get from your web efforts. ROI? Huge because you are investing your downtime.
There is one other huge benefit from "doing it yourself": once you have built a blog and attached it to social media you will have a useful, marketable, skill. If you have a "day job" you can build a blog, Google Places site, and social media for that business. You may not make money – although there is no reason why you can't build similar setups for other escorts you know and charge for it – but you will save the costs of the web designer and social marketer.
Escorts know that the internet can build their business. Savvy escorts learn how to do it themselves and keep the profits.