Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Are you a Hunter or a Farmer?

There is a certain romance to the “hunter/gatherer” lifestyle. You wake up in the morning not knowing exactly what you’ll eat, or even IF you will eat. It is only through your skill and determination that you are able to put food on the table each day.

But if you can get past the need to have that sort of drama in your life, the farming lifestyle has a lot to offer. A farmer wakes up and with almost complete certainty know EXACTLY what he is going to eat and exactly how much of it. A farmer has almost complete control over which crops he grows, which animals he raises, and how many of them he decides to take care of. In other words: fate, destiny, luck, and fear have little place in a farmer’s life.

I’m not talking about REAL farming or hunting. I’m talking about how you run your business. You can run it like a hunter, where each day you have to set your sights on a new prospect and hope that you are able to make the close. If you spend a disproportionate amount of your time marketing then you are probably a hunter. If you have to constantly revise your marketing materials you are probably a hunter.

Farmers on the other hand sow their seeds and then watch as a handful of seeds explodes over time and becomes enough food to fill a grain silo. When every show you do systematically and automatically turns into two, three, five, or ten additional shows, then you are a farmer. If your marketing expenses keep dropping year after year and your income keeps growing by at least 20% each year, then you are probably a farmer.

I’ve had the good fortune of working with several excellent performers who kept their bank vaults full because they were great hunters. But once I showed them how to become great farmers, their worlds were changed just as dramatically as when mankind left the Stone Age to enter modern society.

Right now performers find themselves between the busy month of October and the lucrative month of December, and as many hunter/gatherers tend to do, they sit by the campfire eating and enjoying life with no thought as to what will happen during the slow months that always come.

Farmers would NEVER allow their family to eat seed, no matter how hungry they were. To eat the seed is to doom your family to hunger. That is one of the differences between hunters and farmers.

If you are ready to take the first step toward securing a strong, CONSISTANT income for you and your family; If you are ready to wake up knowing that you have shows on the books for years in advance; If you are ready to stop spending so much time marketing and more time actually performing, then take some of those October and December profits and invest them like a farmer does his seed.

I have a workshop where you can learn ALL of what I do to keep my schedule booked years in advance (see http://julianfranklin.com/schedule.htm ). The fee is not cheap, but it is guaranteed. If you don’t make ten times your investment in the first twelve months, I will fully refund the entire purchase price.

You owe it to yourself and your family to at least find out more about the program, so go check out http://KidShowBusiness.com. You can sign up right from the web site if you want, or you can call my office if you have any questions.

I look forward to seeing you in January!

Monday, November 06, 2006

Do Your Lips Move?

Shawn e-mailed to ask: Do you do "lips closed" real ventriloquism or the open mouth with a distinct puppet voice thing? Just curious as I am adding puppets in to my act.


I do some of both. It depends on the puppet. With Axtell's Magic Drawing Board, I think the illusion is much better if I can keep from moving my lips too much, so I try my best to do good ventriloquism. One puppet I have is a "whisperer" so that I don't have to worry about it at all. And my other performing puppets fall somewhere in between.

All things being equal I think it is best if your lips don't move, but each of my puppets has a distinct look and I want them to all have a distinct sound. In otherwords, all things are never equal. I'm not talented enough I guess to make the range of voices I want when my teeth are clenched, so for some of them, I don't even try. I think that not moving my lips would be nice, but getting the character I want and having him be able to say the things I want in the way that I want is much more important. To me anyway.

If the puppets are animated, interesting, and engaging, and you look at them when they speak, then the audience will all be looking at them when they speak. If your show is entertaining, they will forgive you on the rare times when they do catch you.

And there is something strange that happens when you stop caring if they see your lips move: THEY stop caring if your lips move. Instead they realize that since you aren't trying to hide it, they don't have to try and catch you. So they focus more on the storyline and forget about whose lips are moving anyway.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The second way to use a blog to grow your business is to use it as a way to let your customers, clients, and prospects get to know you better. If you've ever read my "Business of Magic" column in the Linking Ring you probably know that I believe people buy from those they know, like and trust. A blog is a great way to get people to know, like and trust you.

When you update regularly people are driven back to your site on a regular basis to check up on what you are doing. If your entries are short and interesting people will check back with you on a regular basis, like their favorite soap opera.

Hopefully you'll be back once a week or so to check out new marketing ideas and business building concepts as I post them here on a regular basis.

Start a Blog

You could start a blog and use it as your web page. Ideally you update your blog on a regular basis. I mean, that's one of the principle ideas behind a blog is that you regularly post to it. But not all people do.

I know a few people who create blogs and leave them as static web sites. If you already have a web site then this isn't an idea of any real value, but if you are currently using a web site with a very long URL (like www.members.aol.com/houston/freesites/username) then you might be better off getting a blog with a better URL. You can still get blogs with great names if you go to www.blogger.com