Karaoke Forums

For those that do parties what is the best way to advertise? Some cost so much they are not worth it. I have paid big bucks for ads that didnt get any responses.

Also does anybody mass email announcements and how does one go about doing this?

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If the recipients haven't given you previous permission to contact them about your services, you don't. That's called spam.

For customers that are interested in e-mail updates, the easiest way is setting up a mailing list or an RSS feed on your website. That way you type once and send to everybody on the list, and THEY decide if they want to opt in to the feed.

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Dave's not here.

I do private parties, and have been wondering the same thing. I have been thinking about maybe a vynl sign on my trucks rear window, or on the tailgate. Don't think it should cost more than $50.

Honestly all of my private parties have been word of mouth. Most of my parties are people who attended anther private party I was doing, and took one of my cards. The rest are people who have gone to one of my gigs, and asked if I do private parties, and took a card.

I do about 1 private party a month, and would certainly like a few more, as this is where I make the most money. I do pure karaoke, pure DJ, and any combination of the two. I have a nice little light rig and fog. The people paying for the party is in charge, I just facilitate, whatever they want to do or hear is what I will do

Interested to see if there are any affordable, effective suggestions.

Felix the KJ

Craigslist is good for selling and other things, but I havnt had much response for parties.

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I've gotten great response on Craigslist. Certainly worth the couple of times a week I update my (FREE!) ad. You probably want to have something a little nicer than just text or one photo. They will accept full HTML code like a webpage. Take a look.

Also had good luck buying Google adWords and limiting it to local searches only. Have had not only bars but private parties contact me. A couple of corporate events too for which I charged a 4-figure price. Of course that requires you have a professional-looking website.

A bar owner might just be interested in someone cheap, but not when someone is inviting all their friends (and maybe their boss and co-workers) to a private event. When you think about it, the place most people have seen karaoke is in a dark dirty smoky bar. Hosts of private events want to be assured your gear will look good in their home or party hall, that you won't show up drunk, you'll act professionally and not embarrass them of their guests.

As a matter of fact, I've gotten more DJ gigs because I also offer karaoke. Everyone has MP3s on their computer or an iPod, so they're not as likely to bring in an outside DJ for a casual event. But most people don't have a karaoke player, monitors, mics and a CDG library with books.

As for other types of advertising, depending on the size of your market, flyers on the supermarket bulletin boards still works!

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[font=Lucida Console]DangerousKaraoke.com[/font]
[font=Lucida Console]"Sing for the day, sing for the moment, sing for the time of your life!"[/font]

Snail mailing venues a good 3 page or less package is a good idea. By venues, I don't just mean bars. Service clubs are a biggie. Get an event or two there, and they will start coming in from all the members and their friends....

Get on all the free listings that you can on the net. This helps your name pop up more often than others in a general search, and has bought me a lot of private events- even though I don't maintain a dedicated website anymore.

The BEST advertising for parties is word of mouth. Of course, the more you do well, the more W.O.M. you get.

Working in nicer and more upscale venues will not only pay you more, but is tops in free advertising and exposure- and you get paid to do it!

It's been my experience that the Yellowpages and newspaper ads are a waste of time. However, if your area ha a weekly entertainment magazine it may be a great place to place an ad.

Just some thoughts....

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

email, email, email! Getting emails from folks at your shows gets responses and people showing up at my scheduled shows all the time.

Facebook, twitter, and myspace for networking. You can get on myspace and invite all the folks that are friends of the bars you work at.

Facebook is amazing. The program looks at friends of your friends and makes suggestions. You enter in your high school and you'll get suggestions for people you know popping up every day. From there you just network.

Between the 100+ emails I have, my 70+ friends on myspace, and my 100+ friends on Facebook and can send out messages to all in just a few clicks.

And yes, these folks will contact you for gigs... and when you do them, you network in person with the people who are at the party... and collect more emails, etc.

Referrals are the key to making good for a private gigs... its so much easier to ask for good money when the person has already seen you work. I've NEVER spent a dime on advertising in the two years I've been in business.

Now the down side is that this takes time before it becomes a dependable thing...

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Good music, good friends, howling good times!

I don't do many private shows anymore, but the calls I get are generally from word of mouth first, then internet ie MySpace/Facebook, then any and all free advertising I find on the web for karaoke/dj services. Even though I personally cannot do the shows, I do have several I recommend.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

OMG I didnt know that!!! You do that twice a week? I assume you can have hyper links also. That will tie in with DJ Intelligence very nicely.

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I have had great results with a fully graphical HTML ad on craigs as well. It is interesting to search on "karaoke" under services regular, and then try it with "includes picture", and you will find that right now only a very small percentage use graphical HTML. It will make your ad stand out.

You can also use keywords.

We also maintain a group on www.meetup.com.

I think it costs about $15 per month or so. Information on your group is broadcast to all meetup.com members interested in Karaoke, and you can even ask them to join yourself.

It is frree to be a member of meetup.com and join all the groups you want.

Once they are members of your group, you can blast email them, they can see your calendar, and social network via your group.

We also purchase Adwords from Google as well as have ads on Bing.

These are relatively inexpensive ways to get your information on the search engines.

We spend less than $50 per month on each and have gotten several parties and referrals out of it.

My bar owner advertises karaoke in the weekly "Flyer" magazine along with a coupon for some free pitcher of beer with purchase of wings. He also advertises my show on the marquis in front of the restaurant. It is amazing how many new people to the bar walk in with those wing/beer coupons, mostly during happy hour, then end up staying to see my show for the first time.

I also hook alot of the people from the pool leagues and dart leagues that are visiting our bar. The bar hosts pool leagues 7 days a week, including both my Wednesday night (two separate teams), and my Saturday night (one team) and dart leagues 3 days a week, including my Saturday night. Since these are official leagues, they play 1/2 of their games at our bar with teams from other bars visiting (and vise-versa). I always make sure to meet the visiting teams, and end up getting about 1/2 of them to stick around for karaoke. Some of them have even become regulars.

As far as private parties, I take every oppertunity to give my business card to anyone who will take it, not only at my bi-weekly shows, but also when I'm out in social situations. It is amazing how many people need a DJ or KJ for their company party or birthday party, etc., but don't know anyone and are intimidated by calling a stranger in the phone book.

I'd say I hand out about 10-15 cards a week and do about 2-3 private parties a month. I could do much better than that if I really pushed it as well, I just simply don't have the time. But I think the key is just not only exposure, but the PERSONAL exposure where the client can feel comfortable with you and see your face and talk to you before they ever ask you to work for them. I've built my business on being about 1,000 people's "DJ Friend" in my town that they all know by name and have spent time with one way or another, instead of the "anonymous DJ company" in the phone book or on the internet.

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C Mc
KJ, FL

In fact I copied the page source for your ad and will paste into my HTML editor. Of course I will totally reword it and tailor it for my needs.. But I like the layout and I hate tables. TNX

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Swingcat, Dangerous Dan, Lonman, and others in this area are in the distribution area for our monthly karaoke rag - you can list your shows in the community area for free but if you want to advertise your actual gig, you pay. Ty does a great job on this magazine and it is located in most of the venues offering karaoke. One of our gigs has a monthly ad. They are on line as well and most people know about it. I use Craigslist a lot and have gotten a very good response from that as well. Occasionally I put 8x10 'posters' on bulletin boards in our area and those seem to bring people in. The cover of our books lists our venues. Our slips list our venues at the bottom in small print as well. I hand out biz cards and never pass up an opportunity to chat up our karaoke shows.

For those curious about using Craigslist, I put ads on both the 'events' page (quite a few karaoke folks are listing there now, too), and occasionally on the musicians page (but I do not abuse this. Many musicians have very limited tolerance for the average karaoke show, so somehow you have to separate yoursel from those ... recently I did get a fantastic jazz pianist/vocalist pick up on my ad and she came to my show and loved it.)

Of course CL is free and at least in the Seattle area a good percentage of people know about it/use it. Not so sure about other towns - I've looked occasionally at other cities and it really isn't being used to its full potential.

After something that happened to me yesterday, I am weary of the facebook and email route, as I found out that it could put you at risk to be abused.

Yesterday morning I got a spam text from some KJ in the area, who I know and have no respect for, telling me about his gig for the night. I didn't know who the page was from, so I called the number the text came from. It was KJ Carlos, he said hey I got your number from Ace Karaoke's bulliton board. Since I hate spam, and don't like him, I was very mad. I told him sending unsolicited spam to people who didn't ask to be on his "List", is a bad way of doing business, and that he better remove me from his list.

He then sent me a text, saying that hey he just liked to network with other KJ's in the area. I texted him back, and said that I do network with many KJ's in the area, but only KJ's who's show I would actually go to and have respect for. If he wantted to network with me, a personal phone call would work alot better than unsolicited SPAM. He then went on to send me so many text that it put my phone past the text limit.

The moral of the story is this guy is a slimeball, and actually went to the facebook page of a KJ I am friends with, hijacked her friends list, and incorporated it into his SPAM campaign. All her "Friends" are now unhappy members of his SPAM Blast list.
I am weary about putting too much info out there. This guy has done many other things that most KJ's would consider wrong and classless, I could easily go on.

Felix the KJ

Dan I hope you dont mind me copying your ad... I did tailor it for my use.. I owe you a 12 pack..

Here is mine..... link

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Can't see any of your text over the pictures...

Looks great, Ollie, but I agree about not being able to read the text over the pictures. If I was looking for new gigs, I would definately try a Craigslist ad like that.

Nobody is going to take the time to read all the words. They go by first impressions and you either attract them or not... I need to put a phone number at the bottom though.

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