26 Jun
2019
26 Jun
'19
8:47 p.m.
Hi Karen
Thanks for your feedback
She ended up finding me after many many calls and web searching. Many of
the people she reached recommended others who also were unavailable, but
she hit "paydirt" when a caller gave her my name.
Many of the same referral types that you get is my "bread and butter", but
being that I do this for my full time profession, and my pension from my
former career is too small to live on, I am always looking for
opportunities to get more gigs.
(Also, over the last few months I opted for a dental implant.....I had no
idea that the total fee comes close to $6k! And then some much needed
house repairs came face-to-face with me, and they might add up to $30k!)
Although I am not looking for lots of gigs (I've been averaging about 125 -
150 a year over the last decade), I would like to be able to reach people
who have trouble finding me. A bonus of getting more gigs is making more
people happy! The world needs more people to experience joy! Invariably,
I facilitate an event in which there are scores of absolutely delighted
people with ear-to-ear grins most of the duration of the dance.
Before 2009, I had lots of work, averaging 250 gigs a year. But most of
those gigs were in schools. A combination of the economy collapse of 2008
and school testing becoming ultra-important to schools, I have lost 75% of
my school business. In fact, my all-time best year for school gigs was the
2007-2008 school year, when I was in 52 schools for a total of 152 days!
Over the last 24 hours, I have heard from two colleagues for whom Gigsalad
has been a positive feature in their career.
Thanks for the heads on my webpage. I thought I did have metatags; and
please tell me which links are bad.
Paul Rosenberg
Albany, NY
www.homespun.biz
On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 11:41 PM karendunnam(a)gmail.com [trad-dance-callers]
<trad-dance-callers(a)yahoogroups.com> wrote:
How did she end up finding you? I would add weight to that resource.
Perhaps it's her level of google-fu.
On a forum for professional and semi-pro musicians, someone asked that
same question last week. The consensus was that GS and GM are not worth it.
I took a look at each site tonight; your answers are right there in the
listings. GM has exactly one "square dance caller" listed. If it were
working, there would be more.
GS has 48 "square dance callers" listed. Most seem to have 0 - 6
"verified
bookings," suggesting that this isn't working for them. They guy in San
Francisco who says he's "led over 10,000 dances in the past 37 years" has
no verified GS bookings. This guy has 4.
https://www.gigsalad.com/elvis_tribute_artist_napanee
Looks like they've dropped their freebie listings.
A friend who runs a fire performance troupe had a very bad experience with
GS. A client wanted them to perform under an EZ-Up style canopy (I am not
making this up). Show time was early evening in the summer, and he
complained that the fire work didn't look as spectacular as he'd hoped.
There was more. On GS, you can't edit or change or delete a review. Several
of us helped her compose a reply to help ease that.
I get referrals from dance communities, other callers, other onezie-dance
party callers, and other performers. I also reach out to event venues and
other entities that could benefit from have a dance event.
True confession: I snuck a peek at the source code on your website. Didn't
see any metatags, but I did see some links that you might want to remove.
--Karen D.