ScottoRobotto
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ScottoRobotto
ParticipantYes, in general you get your friends and core fans to like your page, like your posts and say they are attend your events so it turns up on their friends pages giving you visibility. However the conversion rate is about as bad as the click through for banner ads. Realistically if you don’t have a huge following you won’t get enough numbers to make a meaningful bump in attendance.
If attendance and ticket sales are a problem then that implies there isn’t much of a following yet. When you put up flyers you set up as many nodes as you care to put up. A person with 0 followers can always put up 200 flyers. It’s not free and the conversion rate isn’t any better than social media but its still untapped ground.
ParticipantWith a $150 black and white laser printer you can turn out flyers for about $0.04 each, with half-sheets only about $0.02 each, which is $4 for 200. If not go to a 7-11 and use the copier for $0.15 a page, which with half-sheets is $15 for 200.
I’ve done web design, online marketing and social marketing professionally. The conversion ratio is terrible and you get far less impressions than you would get from a conventional promotional campaign. Social media is great for developing an existing fanbase and converting one-time attendees into fans. It is terrible for building your fanbase in the first place.
July 18, 2015 at 7:29 am in reply to: Suggestions on Father/Daughter dance when Bride's father is in a wheelchair #2226621ParticipantIt’s possible to dance with someone is a wheelchair. It helps to have a lightweight, sports wheelchair and it will depend on the height, athleticism, and dance experience of the bride and father of the bride. It’s also a little trickier when male (who by convention is the lead) is in the wheelchair.
About halfway through this video it changes to waltz type dance and shows a partner with a capable female lead and a male follow in a wheelchair.
ParticipantThere are three things I can see that could be holding you back. I don’t know you so you’ll have to judge for yourself.
First are you good enough? It’s a tough field and there are a lot of immensely talented people who never make it, if you’re not outstanding it just makes the wall even higher.
Second is an artistic temperament holding you back? Some DJs and bands I know will only play what they like and won’t change their image or presentation at all, like it or lump it. That’s fine as a hobby but unless what you’re selling coincidentally matches up with what the public wants its difficult to be successful.
Third, are you promoting and working as hard as you can? It’s not just about being a DJ/producer you need to be an entrepreneur. You need to promote, you need to sell, you need to network, you need to market yourself, you need to improve your product and you have to be willing to compromise your artistic integrity sometimes for business reasons. If you’re looking for commercial or financial success you may have base you priorities purely on that. I tell my photographer friends to forget about selling artistic prints, if they want to pay the bills they need to take pictures of cars for car dealership ads and houses for real estate companies.
ParticipantDrums and bass is a little niche for the casual crowd and too hardcore for most girls tastes. That is an uphill battle you’re fighting.
It’s tough with niche genres, if it is too eclectic the casual crowd will leave and if its too obscure you won’t have enough people who appreciate it to sustain the event either financially or in crowd energy.
I would either carefully setup the lineup to be a little more mainstream in taste with drums and bass mixed in or you have to give people a reason to stick around in spite of the music. Lighting is one method. Another is to check out events and look for guys or better yet girls who can dance and chat them up. Tell them how impressed you are and invite them to your event and tell them that you’ll put them on the VIP list for free entry. You’ll get a few more bodies at the event and they hype up the crowd.
While you’re at it talk to some pretty girls and put them on the list too, stack the crowd with girls and guys will stick around longer. Crowds feed on themselves, the more people there are, the more girls there are, and the more energy there is the better a time people will have. You need that in order to draw out potential fans from the general populace that otherwise would never have attended your event.
ParticipantArnaldi, I completely disagree with you on 3.
Social media is great for keeping people who are already interested in you informed and involved but it is terrible for promotion itself. Social media tends to be an echo chamber, the only people who can hear you are the people who already know you exist. It important to use social media but its also important to keep pounding the pavement and promote.
ParticipantI’ve been scaling back free shows to only people doing weekly gigs, I’m willing to forgo money for two shows if it means I’m going to be paid by them four times a month for the foreseeable future. I’ve stopped offering it to bands because they play too infrequently and I’m starting to pick them up when I do lighting for other bands shows so they have a chance to see me work.
I’ve very reluctant to increase my base prices too much more because for a lot of these bands my rates are as big a cut as most of the band members are getting. Most of these bands are putting on free shows and getting paid a little by the bar with a cut of sales. It’s not particularly lucrative but it is bread and butter work.
ParticipantMost people grab a background image off the internet and drop it on their flyer. It’s not really how you’re supposed to do it but most people do and realistically a random DJ won’t have any problems from it. However a graphic designer or a professional shouldn’t do that because they have a reputation to protect.
For local promotion go up and down the street putting up flyers and asking shops to put them in their window. I’ve heard people say to hire college students or kids as a street team to hang them up for you but I’m not sure I would trust random strangers to do a good job, if I went that way I would give them a map and a route and walk the route afterwards with them before they get paid.
Before you start bringing in more acts you should build a core following first. Their ticket sales should help pay for the other acts and you don’t want the other acts to be playing to an empty crowd or they might not want to work with you again. I would also watch a few shows of the other acts to see what kind of a core following they can bring with them.
I would also look into getting lighting. My experience has been that bands/DJs love having lighting because a) it puts on a bigger show and gets the crowds energy higher and b) it makes them feel like they made it and they are rock stars. I’ve also noticed that even big time acts are blown away when you ask them to sign a guitar. I haven’t done it locally yet but I’m planning on have the bands I do lighting for sign an electric guitar. I fix guitars on the side so I’ve got plenty of them but even if you don’t a $150 electric guitar is a cheap investment to cement a relationship with other groups, you can probably fit at least 20 names on a guitar before you run out of space. Take a picture of the signatures on the guitar, post it on social media with a link to the band and they will likely share it on their pages which will be seen by any musician/DJ friends they have.
ParticipantRight, calculating rates based on the estimated retail value of the equipment is the correct way to do it. What I meant by ownership and startup costs is that since I own the equipment and they are durable goods I could enter the market with almost no startup capital.
In a few months I plan to raise my base rate slightly to $30/2 hr and $50/4 hr and rebrand my current service as my basic package and add some new equipment to a new standard package. I will offer my existing customers a coupon for a free 2 hr. upgrade to the standard package as a thank you for their business.
I don’t plan to pick up a hazer because it’s not worth the investment for the size of the venues I work in and the lifespan of my business. What I have been working on is a diffuser for my fog machine which separates the fog using baffles and a few 120mm case fans wired to a 9v ac adapter. The baffles split and direct the fog and the fans add velocity and disperse the fog to help it cover a wider area. ADJ does something similar with their Faze Fury but they simply rebound the fog off a flat plate and disperse using a squirrel fan.
ParticipantI hear what you’re saying and my business would definitely not be at the level you’re operating at. However, I can only think of handful of events a year in my area that could afford $1,000 for lighting and they already have long term relationships with the established businesses in the area. Even if I could find an opening I would only have a small market share in a saturated market segment.
I am targeting small-time, weekly acts because I see a market opportunity, most of them use no lighting of any kind. I’ve calculated my costs and time and my numbers come out to $9.20/hr which while a little low seems acceptable to me while I develop my business. My setup would be insufficient for lighting a large venue but the bars I’ve been doing gigs at have about 800sq/ft of seating area, they would definitely seem to fall into the category of a small venue.
I imagine most DJs starting out are doing this level of work with weekly gigs at dive bars for almost no money. I also rent out small guitar amps, microphones and stands, cables, a PA and even a 6-piece drum kit to people who need support and gear. It does not strike me as a particularly lucrative business but on the other hand I already own all this gear anyway so it requires no start-up capital and about as much operating expenses as buying a beer.
ParticipantNo offense taken. The setup I recommended was based on uncertain conditions, a low budget and the assumption that most of it will never be used again.
I also assumed that since OP said party rather than show that it would be a scattered crowd rather than a large mob and central stage. Sometimes you have house parties that are scattered across multiple rooms or in a very large area. Rather than trying to fill everywhere with an overwhelming display I would rather have localized effects scattered around the room(s). In that circumstances low powered lights can work by creating focal points for crowds to gather. Since the people are closer you don’t need as much power out of the lights.
A microphase and a few cheap strobes can work if you’re only trying to light up the area near the DJ. The microphase to light up the ground and create texture and the strobes to silhouette and reflect light off the DJ rather than trying to strobe the crowd.
I’ve using one of those cheap disco bulbs in a paper lantern, it creates a really interesting ambiance lighting. The lantern I had was in a wood shell with laser cut patterns so the cutouts worked like gobos.
ParticipantFirst off, are you going to have access to power? If not you’re going to need a few car batteries and power inverters. Second, you’ll need to make provisions for weather if it rains.
As for what kind of lights, here is what I’m thinking. Since you don’t really have any walls to project on and if you’re outdoors I wouldn’t count on fog to hang around so I think you need to hit them with lights from all sides. I would use a centerpiece effect near the stage or DJ as a center point and throw in a few cheap strobes. Then get a half dozen effect lights pointed inwards towards the dance floor or main lounge area. For ambiance lighting, you could try string lights or christmas tree lights or paper lanterns.
I don’t know what your budget is but assuming it’s not too big I would get a half-dozen cheap disco bulbs off amazon for about $3.30 each http://amzn.com/B00CEALL5M and socket and cords for about $7 each http://amzn.com/B00PXHUISE . Then an ADJ micro phase as your centerpiece for behind the DJ for about $60 http://amzn.com/B00CBFTJS6 and a few LED strobes for about $10 http://amzn.com/B00UY1K032 . You could get the strobes battery powered but if you hook up the strobes to a $50 chase controller and glue on color gels you can get a really cool effect.
So if you buy 6 disco bulbs and sockets, a micro phase, 2 strobes and a gel pack you can probably light up your party for about $150 shipped.
ParticipantIf you create and manage a page it is already separate, you set permissions to manage it and to post under the page’s identity. You can set permissions to give other users different permission levels to post as the page and remove permissions whenever you want to. The problem you seem to have is the existence of your “business account”.
ParticipantOkay, what I think happened is that you set up a personal page for your DJ business. What you were supposed to do was create a business/band page for your DJ business and set permissions to manage it from your other account. I’m not sure what you can do about it now but in the future that will help prevent you from getting locked out.
March 16, 2015 at 6:56 am in reply to: Do any of you DJs typically (or once in awhile) change the key of the song? #2156121ParticipantIf you listen to some songs when the go into the final chorus sometimes, they will move the sequence up by a semi-tone. Sometimes this can bring up the intensity a little bit. Some mixes scale up both the pitch and the BPM as they mix out, sometimes with looping before they cut into the next song in the mix.
I don’t recommend screwing with pitch on recognizable songs much unless you’re doing a full remix, it’s very obvious. Someone is likely to ask if you’re having equipment trouble.
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