Speaker 1Shut up and sit down. Welcome to Being On Stage, the only podcast that gives you motivation, inspiration, and confidence to be better on stage. No matter how you entertain, sing, dance, band, comedian, public speaking, MC, drag, burlesque, performance art, or street performer, this is the show for you. Hey, hey, rock stars. Reggie Dawson here. Welcome back to the show, and thank you for tuning in. So, part two. Last episode, we hammered out all about promoting yourself, social media tools you can use. So, if you listened to this episode first, you want to definitely check out the last episode, episode 72. Learn how you can promote yourself on social media and some tools to use it. So, this episode, we are talking all about promoting your show. So, you got booked. You got the gig. Congratulations, kid. You're on the stage. How do you get people to show up? Like, let me back up. Yes. By all means, the venue should be promoting the night. Absolutely. You should be on their marker. You should have a flyer. You should be on their social media posts. Absolutely, 100%. But, you cannot rely solely on the venue to promote you. Because, listen. If you're at a restaurant or a club, people have, literally dozens of choices with what they want to do with their evening. Sometimes, in larger cities, hundreds of choices what they can do with their night. So, you can't rely solely on the venue. You don't know how well they're going to promote it. You don't know what the focal point is going to be. And, keep in mind, their job is to promote their portion of the evening. So, if it's a restaurant, they're promoting their menu, their chef, with live entertainment by. If it's a bar, they're promoting the whole night. They're promoting the drink specials. They're promoting the DJ. Featuring performances by you. If it's a festival, or any type of other event like a conference, or anything like that, they're promoting the entire festival, or conference, or event. Not just you. You may have your name on that flyer, and, granted, that feels awesome. But, you can't count on that to get people there for you. When someone books you, no matter who it is, whether it's a bar, a restaurant, an event, a booking agent, an agency, no matter who books you, they're making an investment. So, in order for them to see a return on that investment, because most businesses, when they make an investment, they want return. In order to see a return on that, you have to bring people to see you. Because they're going to, they can notice the difference between their regulars coming out, and people coming out for the entertainment. People coming to see you. So, how do you get people there for you? I talked about last episode, having your own Facebook, and then having a Facebook page. When you have a show coming up, you can probably do well to post it on your personal Facebook to get your friends and family to come. It would also be really cool if you could talk to the event or the venue, like if it's a restaurant, say, "Hey, if someone comes to the door and mentions they're here to see me, can they get like a 5-10% discount?" Or, can they get like a free appetizer, or free soft drinks, or whatever? That does two things. It entices people to come, and it gives them a reason to tell the venue that they're there for you. So they can see that return right there. You've got 20 people coming up saying, "Hey, I'm here to see Johnny on the guitar." Yeah, they're giving out 25% discounts. Well, 25% discounts. But, they're also seeing, "Wow, he brought 20 extra people that wouldn't have came." Or 30, or 100 extra people that wouldn't have came. This may not work for all venues, but hey, that's not something we do. Be cool about it. Don't be demanding. Be cool about it, but it doesn't hurt to ask. So how do you get people there? Whether you have a deal or you don't have a deal, number one, share with your friends and your family. They want to check you out. They want to support you. Whether they can or can't show up, whether they do or they don't show up, they still want to support you. They still want to see that you're making it and you're doing something with your talent. Okay? Of course, you want to share it on your performer page as well. Your Facebook page that you created to promote just you, the performer. Maybe your name is, you know, Johnny on the guitar. Or, you know, Steve the juggler. On that Facebook page that you've created, you want to post there as well. This updates anybody that has followed you from previous shows. So, post on your Facebook page. This also includes Instagram and Twitter. This should, you know, your social media is kind of a regular thing. This goes without saying. There's a system to how you post. I'm going to share that with you in a minute. So, something else you do to promote your show is you create an event on Facebook. Yes. Maybe there's already an event for the night or the festival. But you create an event that is specific to you and the time that you're playing or the time that you go on and that you're performing. Okay? So, if it's Johnny on the guitar at 10 o'clock, then that's your event. If it's Jerry Juggles at Kid's Corner at the fair, then that's your event. Jerry Juggles at Kid's Corner County Fair. So, you make your event specific to you, what you're doing, when you're going on. Now, when you create this event, you want to make it public. This shares it with anybody that's looking for events in the vicinity of where you're going to be. So, you want to make sure you have details in there. Date, time, location, actually put in the address of where it is. You want there to be an event description. You want to describe what you're going to be doing, who it's going to appeal to, what time it's happening. You know, is there anything else going on? You know, around the same time. Like, hey, after you check this out, you can go check out the Midway and see all the rides. That's telling them there's other stuff going on as well. You want to, of course, have a picture in the event. And it's got to be a descriptive picture. It can't be something random. It can't be like a picture of a Ferris wheel. It's got to be like a picture of you juggling with kids in front of you. It's got to be a relevant picture to the event that you're doing. If you're playing guitar, it's got to be a picture of you playing guitar. Or like one of your promo shots. Once again, I'm going to bring up the website Canva. C-A-N-V-A. If you need to make anything graphic, and yes, there's a charge to it, but there's also a free option. I only use the free option. Everything on my Facebook and Instagram is done through Canva. But if you need to make any kind of graphic, I recommend using Canva. You can whip it up in a matter of minutes and it's ready to share. You can use it for your event flyer. You can use it specific for this event if you want to just add some text to one of your promo shots or anything like that. That's your go-to. That's how you can make these images that you're going to share. Lastly, there's a lot of larger sites that you can use to promote your shows. And I don't want you to shy away from them. But things like Eventbrite or Eventmasters or even search Google. Like for example, Orlando. Search Orlando. Orlando Events on Google. There will be a ton of websites that you can add your event or your show to at no charge. Some of them are going to charge you, but don't use those. You know? Don't use those. Find the ones that you can add your show to for free and add it. Because here's the thing. It may seem like some obscure site that you've never heard of, but that site is there and there are other events posted for a reason. Somebody somewhere is looking at that site. Don't you want to make sure that your event is in front of them and that your show and your performance is in front of them as an option? So use those as your tools. Use those sites. Those event sites around you and your city. Hell, if it's a big event, call the paper. See if you can put it on the calendar for the paper. A lot of times they have a community calendar that you can post to for free. Things like this. This is things that people aren't necessarily always thinking about doing. But why not? Don't you want to get it in front of as many people as possible that you're performing? Get them there. That's the return. You want people to show up. So you've created the event. You've shared it on your page. Let's talk about the system in which you share. So sharing the event on your personal page or your personal profile page versus your Facebook performer page. So on your personal profile page, truthfully, I would start all your posting two to three weeks out. Maybe a month out. Your personal profile page, a month out, two weeks out, one week out, two days before, the day of. I know this seems like a crazy number, but I promise there's a system. So one month out, two weeks out, one week out, two days, day of. On your Facebook page, like your performer page, you can go a little more crazy with sharing the event. But I warn you, change up the post. Don't keep resharing the same thing over and over again because Facebook picks up on these things and it doesn't show up in people's feeds. So change up the picture, change up the text, and actually share something of substance. You can share a rehearsal video. You can share pictures of you and some of the other performers practicing. You can share a promo picture. You can share an audio snippet of your singing. You can post a giveaway that you're going to do. Anything you can share. But as long as it's something centered around your show and the specific performance. I would start those posts about two weeks out. This is considering you have regular gigs that are going on. If you don't have regular gigs and it's more like you have bigger gigs, maybe a month out. So a month to two weeks out. If you're two weeks out or more, once a week, within two weeks, twice a week. Okay. So two weeks and in like, I don't know, 11 days. And then you want to do like 10 days, eight days. The last five days, you want to do it every day. The last day I would do the day before twice and then the day of. So it's kind of like progressively more. Okay. Now, if you have other regular gigs that you're doing also, and you're promoting more than one gig, then maybe there's a cycle you go through. That would be a good idea to use the app buffer to help you post consistently and make sure that your gigs are cycled through properly and promoted in a way of which you want them promoted. Now, moving into the event. Now, a lot of people think they can just create the event and it's done. And that's great. Yes. People are going to be able to find the event on Facebook, but once you've invited people, or once people have shown their interest, it's easy to just forget about the event. You don't hear anything else about these events until the day of, and you get this little notification that says you have an event going on today. Okay. Next, once people show their interest in the event, or if they say that they're going to the event, because let's be honest, not everybody that says they're going actually goes, but once they say they're going, or they show their interest on the Facebook event, it keeps their attention. Posting in the event generates a notification that they get on their homepage and Facebook, letting them know this person posted in this event, this person posted in this event, this person posted in this event. Even if they don't read the post, they're reminded of the event that's happening that they're interested in. And sometimes that is enough to get them to go back and say, I'm going. So the posting that you do in the event, you've got to keep it interesting. Those rehearsal videos, what you're working on, how excited you are, it's coming up, what you're going to do for your audience, share the excitement that you have for your upcoming performance, because the people that are even remotely interested need to be excited in order to plan to go. And even people that said that they're going, they need to be excited in order to actually get off their duff and go. It's so easy to just, for us to just sit back, relax, and watch a video on our phone. We don't need to go out and see somebody. We can just pull up YouTube and watch whatever we want, right? Wrong. The live experience is something special, but you have to generate excitement to help people realize how special it is to get them there. Once they're there, they're going to be hooked. They're going to become a fan because you're going to rock that stage. So create your Facebook event, keep posting in it consistently on your Facebook page, on your personal page, post your event regularly. The Facebook event is huge. Post your event regularly. Posting in it on a regular basis is the biggest thing that you can do to get people to remain interested and excited about your event and your performance coming up. I think it's about time to wrap this show up. I'm getting kind of heated. I'm getting passionate. I'm talking faster. I'm losing my voice. My throat's going dry. I'm not complaining. I'm just really, really passionate about, like, I really love when people can be successful in their shows because they took the time to promote it correctly. So listen, if this is something that interests you and you could use a little extra help, go ahead and send me an email, reggie at beingonstage.com. I'd love to work together with helping you put together your promotional package and promoting your next show. Look forward to hearing from you. As always, rock stars, keep on shining.
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