Curtains Up!

How can I get more gig inquiries? Please keep in mind that on Gig Salad, many of our members choose to post their website address as well as their phone number on their PromoKit, and many of our members get contacted directly, outside of our system. If you haven’t received many inquiries through our email system and would like to measure the effectiveness of your Gig Salad membership, please be sure to ask where a talent buyer found you, as corporate and consumer talent buyers are very likely clicking your website link and visiting your website, then inquiring from there, or are picking up the phone and calling directly.

For this reason, the majority of gig inquiries and gig opportunities will go directly to you by phone or email and not through our system. Our low membership fee is a fantastic value for the advertising exposure you will receive from your PromoKit.

To increase your traffic to your Gig Salad PromoKit as well as your chances of getting gigs, we strongly recommend the following:

Photos
People are visual, and can tend to be skeptical when it comes to hiring someone they found on the internet “sight unseen.” So, give them something to feast their eyes on! Be sure to upload a Main Thumbnail photo, and images in the photo gallery. The main thumbnail photo works best in Vertical orientation, and the gallery photos work best as Horizontal shots. You can upload a virtually limitless number of photos in the photo gallery, but we recommend posting between 3-10 shots that best represent your act.

Our statistics show that members posting main thumbnail photos generate many times the number of profile views as members with no photo displayed! Click here to upload photos.

Bio and Talent Overview
When talent buyers are looking for an entertainer to meet their specific needs, they want information, and they want it quick. The talent overview is a great way to give the pertinent information about your act. This is the text that also shows up in search results on our site, so make it brief and compelling. The talent overview also is indexed by Google and the other major search engines, so be sure to include (at least once) a common term that someone might search and find you when using a search engine. The biography section allows you to go into greater depth into your history, and can give a more complete perspective to the buyer of what you are offering. This too is indexed by the search engines.

Music
If you are a musical act, YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED AUDIO SAMPLES on your profile! We can’t stress this enough. Good audio samples can get you gigs, whereas an absense of audio samples can almost guarantee you won’t get a call. Again, talent buyers want to know who you are, and a lack of information communicates negatively. Click here to upload audio samples.

Video
If you are a specialty or variety act, we strongly recommend that you upload video. For example, when a typical talent buyer hires a magician, they are not simply shopping for someone who can pull a rabbit out of a hat… they also want a first-hand account of that individual’s personality and crowd interaction skills before they send along a deposit check and contract. They best way to accommodate them, by far, is to make sure to have video samples in your profile. You can either upload your own videos or simply embed the code from the videos that you already have uploaded to YouTube, Photobucket and GoogleVideo.

Website Link
We allow our members to include a link to their website, and in fact we encourage you to do so. We simply ask that if you do place a link to your website on your profile, that you in turn place a link to Gig Salad on your own website. You can link directly to your own profile page on Gig Salad if you like. When our members place a link to Gig Salad on their website, this helps our search ranking. When we come up at the top of search engine results, that increases your chances of getting gigs! We don’t require that the link is placed on the home page of your website… we just ask that you place it somewhere…. anywhere! At the same time, when we allow you to place a link to your site on our page, it helps your own website’s search rankings.

Your Contact Email Address
It’s always best to not use an email address like hotmail, aol or yahoo or another “free” service such as those because junk mail filters can sometimes block emails, thinking that the gig request is on its way to you is an automatically-generated spam message. It’s best to use an email address associated with your domain name, if you have one. We give the option of posting your email address in your PromoKit but this is not recommended. (unless of course you want spammers contacting you peddling cheap prescription meds and enhancement products)

Testimonials
Be sure to include some testimonials from satisfied clients on your page. Potential buyers like to see what others have experienced from hiring you.

Talent Categories
Choose your talent categories carefully.We allow you to choose 1 main category and up to 10 sub categories. If they apply to your act, please feel free to use all 10 sub categories, but please do not choose categories that have no relevance to the service you offer.

Search Engine Optimization
If you’ve ever asked “Why am I not at the top of search engine results?” you’re certainly not alone. The first page of Google is where everyone wants to be. Here are some tips on how to get your Gig Salad press kit there, front and center:

It benefits you to add more information to your profile. The more relevant text the better– our site gets found near the top of many Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engine searches, and if you want your profile to be found, put relevant keywords wherever possible on your pages. For example, if you are a hypnotist in Boston, try to think of phrases that people commonly type into search engines: for example, be sure to include the phrase “hypnotists in Boston, MA” in a complete sentence, or whatever applies to your act in your Talent Overview and Bio sections. (Ex: If you’re interested in hiring a hypnotist in Boston, MA, look no further!) Search engines look for text within the individual profiles on our website.

Every day we refine and adjust our website to make it more search engine optimized. Our goal is to become the most widely recognized talent directory in North America, and we are working night and day toward this goal.

At Gig Salad, we rely not only on Google search results for traffic, but also on our print advertising (newspaper and magazines), online advertising, radio (later in 2007), sponsoring of events within venues, and our relationships with talent buyers and event planners. We’ve had companies like ABC Television, America’s Got Talent, Good Morning America, The United States Government, FedEx, The Hyatt Regency, Walt Disney Corporation and thousands of others contact talent on our site and our traffic increases every week. Rest assured, we’re working very hard to make Gig Salad a place where both the talent buyers and our members benefit GREATLY.