In part 1 of this series I talked about how my early experiences as a fine-art fetish photographer made me realize how important personal brand-building and promotion was to success as an artist. My work as a photographer quickly led me to work with and eventually help promote a number of fetish models and professional dominatrix.
In 2004, my buddy Robert Henry and I formed Toxic Goddess, which is an alternative modeling troupe. While I wish I could tell you that Robert and I had tens of thousands of dollars to establish the Toxic Goddess name, and help the models get the word out to the masses, that just wasn’t the case. We were struggling with finding the money to set up a professional website and pay for photography equipment and expenses. The only thing we had to invest was time, and promotion fell largely on me.
I wrote up a guide for the Toxic Goddess models with some of my very basic ideas on social networking. That guide has been revised many times over the past decade, but the concepts have largely stayed the same. One of the advantages of being a model is that you have a built-in audience that is highly motivated to follow you and keep up with anything you are doing. There is great power and potential for building an engaged following if you are a model and you know how to do it.
Around the same time I became involved with doing photography and web design for several professional dominatrix. If you’ve ever established a website, you know how difficult it is to get people to visit and re-visit your site. Have you ever done a Google search to see where your name landed in the results? A professional dominatrix has a lot of competition on the web, and also must have a strong presence to attract new clients. While some pre-internet methods work (Domination Directory International comes to mind), professional dominatrix largely live or die by how easy it is to find them through a Google search and how they present their image.
Working with Toxic Goddess, professional dominatrix and more recently with TnT Burlesque, has given me a unique perspective on what tactics work best for alternative models, dominatrix and adult performers. What I’ve discovered is that it’s so much easier for a pretty woman to drive engagement than it is for a bald dude! There’s a great deal of power and possibility for an entertainer who is motivated and educated in how to attract the right followers. You can literally change the world.
Next, I’m going to talk about what “Sexy Networking” means and what I plan to do next.
