Sales, Marketing, Business – Making money and keeping it
Again, prep matters.
Banking
TLDR, get a Bitsafe account to protect your normal bank account. Why? Read on…
Making money, can get your banking cancelled.
Julie signed up to Platform, did well and after a few months her bank said “Julie, you’re using a personal account for business. We’re closing your account”.
Anna also joined Platform, and set up a business account, and a few months later her bank said “Anna, you’re getting payments from Platform. We’re closing your account.”
You do not have a right to a bank account. They can say NO for any reason, even to decades long customers.
It’s a lottery, but you don’t want to win, and GOOD NEWS! you don’t have to play.
BE SAFE. There is an alternative – use Bitsafe (nothing to do with bitcoin).
All your incoming funds from adult sources go to your Bitsafe account, then you pull it across.
As far as your bank is concerned, you’re just bringing money in from another account with another company. It hides where your money comes from. There is literally nothing for them to see.
Bitsafe knows what we do, and it’s cool with it, and they are Netherlands based, so very Ok with sex work of all types. This is your solution for all platform money.
Note – UK is in SEPA and the UK bank – sending or receiving, does the conversion to Euros, so Bitsafe is cheap for us. (I usually lose about 3% on exchange. To protect my bank account, well worth it).
Sales
Your sales will come from Platforms – content ones, camming ones, via payment to your Bitsafe.
Also, through your own website. Which is in effect direct from clients.
What you won’t have is the ability to get paid by Credit Card. The TLDR version – it’s costs so much to set up that platforms, even after they take their cut, pay better, UNTIL you are selling at least £1000pm of content. That’s when to look into CC.
Exhaustive (near as dammit) article on how to get paid direct by clients.
Marketing
This is a slog and the reason most people bail from porn. Because for every hour spent making porn, 3 hours is spent editing and 20 hours on marketing crap. But without the marketing crap, no sales.
Gird your loins, this is work.
The main thing is that you should try everything, but when you find what works for you, mostly do that. But it will take months for you to know, and a lot of what you do to start will be a waste of time. Chalk it up to learning and keep making more content.
To get sales, needs marketing. Platforms are great for handling the mechanics of storage and money, but YOU have to build your fan base to make sales. You can’t make porn, put it up, and sell loads. It’s not 1996 any more.
Social Media, and by Social Media I mean Twitter (because everyone else hates us) and some swear by Reddit (though I haven’t got my head around that site yet).
You need to post lots of pics, very short – a few seconds – clips and maybe make BJ and fucking GIFS AND YOU NEED TO BE A PERSON. Get involved in chat, but curate.
If all your tweets are “buy my porn”, you get faded out of people’s TL because Twitter notices they ignore your posts. It’s your chat that keeps people involved, so they see your “buy” posts 🙂
On a collab? Selfies with each other.
Posting a pic/clip with another performer in it? Tag them. Get RT’s to their fans:-) And if you get tagged, you RT.
It takes time for this to work.
If you cam ALWAYS post countdown to camming. “Camming at 2pm British Summer Time – that’s in 3 hours”. Then an hour later, then “On Cam NOW”. The time stuff matters – you probably have fans overseas and 2pm means nothing, but “in three hours” does. Do you know what time it is in Denver?
On platforms as you start to get interaction, you have to milk it.
Taxes
Make sure you register.