Friday, January 7, 2011

Getting Paid to do Magic

So, one of the most common questions I get asked by magicians is, “How do you make money with magic?” This is a great question.

The first thing you have to take into consideration is your bag of tricks. Do you have enough magic and is your magic good enough to warrant charging a fee? Well, if you are a member of MagicianMaker and have been learning the magic in the site, the answer is yes. The magic from MagicianMaker is hand selected to be top-notch magic that will amaze, but is easy to learn.

Next you have to consider who you are, what kind of magic you like, and where you want to share your magic. For instance, are you interested in performing for kid’s birthday parties? Do you wanna do close-up magic in a restaurant? What do you think about setting up a table on a street corner and giving street performing a real shot?

Let’s think about this. If you’re just getting started, who do you normally do magic for? When I first started, my first audiences were my family, friends, and my church group. Now, those audiences didn’t pay me anything, but I did get really valuable experience from showing my street magic to them and from doing actual shows as well.

In fact, one of the best things I can advise is to perform as much as possible for as many people as possible. Penn, of Penn and Teller, calls this “flight time”. The idea is that the more “flight time” a pilot gets, the better pilot he or she becomes. The same holds true with magic. The more you perform, the better you will get. And the better you get, the easier it is going to be to start getting paid.

So, do this first. Go out and perform your favorite magic for friends and family over the next couple of days. In fact, here’s a challenge. Find an open, public space. Go to a party, a coffee shop, wherever. Go somewhere there are people milling around and hanging out. Take one of your buddies and begin by showing your buddy a few tricks. See if you can build interest from the people hanging around. If they start paying attention to what you are doing, do some magic for them and try to build a crowd. It’s actually pretty easy.

If you have the guts to do that, you definitely have what it takes to start making some cold, hard cash with magic. So, get on that now. In the next blog post, we’ll deal with actually making some bucks. I’ll share real world advice that has worked for me over and over again. Until then…Make An Impact!




2 comments:

  1. Looking forward to the next post!

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  2. Can't wait. I've been learning magic for about 4 yrs now and I wanna go pro w/ it!

    ReplyDelete