iCamModel » Beginner Cam Model Tips

Now Cam Girls Can Sell Paintings Picturing Themselves To Fans!

Alex Shwarz — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:06:13 +0000

Selling posters is one of the ways cam girls can make money out of their fan base besides cam shows. To sell a poster all you need to do is to print a good photo of yours in large size (like 8 X 10), autograph it and mail out to the buyers physical addresses. Most likely the fan who bought your poster puts it on the wall otherwise why would he need such a big picture. Now imagine you could sell not a large size picture but a real paining of yourself printed on canvas in a nice frame (like “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci). You can do it now with CanvasPeople.com.

CanvasPeople website provides a service where they will take your digital picture and print them onto canvas. Once you upload the picture you can choose the frame and many other things to improve the final painting. In about 5-6 days they will ship you the resulting painting. It looks so great and real that you can easily sell it to your fans for the top price.

Although I think that this new service is good for cam models, it can be used in your non-virtual life too. It could be nice and unusual present to your family members, friends and loved ones. You simply pick the best picture that you have related to that person, order painting of this picture through CanvasPeople.com and present it to them.

CanvasPeople are running great promotions right now until July 6th where you can get 8 X 10 painting of any picture you want for FREE. You’ll have to pay for shipping only. Also you can order paintings of bigger size for as cheap as size 11 X 14 for $9.99, size 16 X 16 for $23.99 and so on. I’ve personally used the free offer for 8 X 10 painting and the final product looks just great. I would definitely recommend to try this FREE offer.

Do you sell posters to your fans? How does it work for you? Please share in comments.

How Cam Girls Can Collect Donaions From Their Fans – 5 Easy Steps

Alex Shwarz — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:36:18 +0000

Here is another way of collecting donations from your fans in the form of CASH. Depending how big is your fan base you can collect thousands of dollars a month this way. Here are 5 steps how to set this all up:

1. Register PayPal account if you don’t have one

This is how you will collect your donations. All donations will be transferred to your PayPal account. Then you can wire transfer them to your bank account or use PayPal’s debit card to withdraw from any ATM. PayPal charges about 3% from the amount of transaction.

Note that PayPal does not allow adult related transaction so you should be very careful how you promote this service (more on this below).

2. Register ChipIn Account

ChipIn is that site that specializes in donations. ChipIn connects directly to your PayPal account so all money will go there. This is where you need to set up your profile with a picture and create an entry for donation. In the entry you specify what amount of money you are trying to raise and why you need these money so bad. You need to come up with an attractive title and short description of your donation campaign. For example you can write that you’re collecting donation for a new car, or perhaps you’re moving to another place and need money. Just use your imagination and you’ll come up with a lot of different ideas.

Once you fill everything in, ChipIn will create a page with a special link for you:

In adition ChipIn will provide you with the widget that can be easily put on your web site or blog:

When your blog’s fan clicks on ChipIn button it will take him to PayPal login screen. Once he logs in and enters the amount of donation, money will be instantly transferred to your PayPal account.

3. Start promoting your donation campaign through Social Networks

If you have an account on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks this is the best place to promote your donation campaign. For example on Twitter you can post a tweet with a link to your donation every day. As long as you have a solid fan base your fans will spoil you with donations.

Because Facebook and Twitter are non-adult oriented social networks all your donation transaction will be considered non-adult as well. That’s why you can safely collect money through your PayPal account.

4. Start promoting donation campaign on your blog

If you have blog you can write a short article about the donation with link to your special ChipIn page. When one of your fans makes a good donation you can write another post thanking this fan. This will make other fans to make donations as well which you can turn in some sort of competition.

Also blog is a perfect place to put ChipIn widget in the top part of the sidebar so everyone sees it.

5. Incentivise your fans to make the donation

One trick that really works is when you promise a free gift for the donation that exceeds certain amount. For example you can offer autographed poster of yours or a photo set that you will mail to everyone who makes the donations greater than $30. This will incetivise your fans to make a donation and very often they don’t ask for the gifts in return.

Conclusion

Collecting donations is a great way to collect extra cash from your fans. It will take you few hours to set this all up and it could bring you thousands of dollars. To really take advantage of donations you need to have a solid fan base. That’s why it’s so important to have different places on the Internet where you are present (Twitter, Facebook, etc) and of course your own web site or blog.

P.S. This information was kindly provided by Mikayla @ www.mikaylaxxxoncam.com

3 Reasons Cam Girls Shouldn’t Start From Membership Site

Alex Shwarz — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:40:04 +0000

I’m getting a lot of questions from cam girls, who are thinking about becoming independent, on how to start their own membership site. It’s not a problem to start a membership site if you ready to invest your time and money but do you really want it? Here are 3 reasons why you shouldn’t start your independent venture from membership sites:

1. You Will Need To Invest Money Into Web Site Setup And Design

Membership site software is not cheap. If you want to build a top notch membership site expect to spend $3,000-$4,000 for the set up and design. There are cheaper options of course but they will require more of your time and effort. Or you can use video chat solutions that charge you around $200 a month for using their video chat platform and you’ll still have to build a website around them. The point is you got to invest money to have membership site.

2. Filling Your Membership Site With Content Will Cost You

You can’t start membership site without having pretty solid amount of content in membership area. This content should combine high quality pictures and videos. It’s almost impossible to produce this content all by yourself which means that you’ll have to hire professional photographer for this. And it’s going to cost you money as well.

3. Lack Of Traffic

Ok, so finally you’ve got your membership site out. You’ve spent money on setting it up, design and filling your site with content. If you expect to start getting paying members right away you will be very disappointed. It’s just doesn’t happen this way when tones of people start hitting your site right after it went life. Your site will be one of many thousands other similar solo girl sites out there. You’ll have to work your butt off to promote it in order to get some traffic to your new site. In many cases you’ll need to pay for the traffic in terms of buying advertisement on other sites and Google. And only fraction of this traffic will buy the membership. Don’t be surprised when it will take weeks! to sell a membership for the first time.

Conclusion

As you can see it’s not wise to start from membership site once you decide to be independent cam girl. Your membership site won’t survive taking into account the amount of competition out there, amount of money you invest and no return for long time. The smartest way is to build up a large fan base first and then build a membership site selling memberships to your hungry, ready to buy everything from you fans.

Solution

To build a large fan base you do need to work hard promoting yourself on cam networks, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, forums, etc. And you do need to have a web site which in contrast with membership site shouldn’t charge anything. You should keep it updating with teasing content and more and more funs will stick around it. Because you don’t charge anything to access your site you shouldn’t worry about professional design and quality of the content. You won’t have to spend thousands of dollars for professional design and photographers. You will be able to shoot it all by yourself with regular digital camera and camcorders. Blogs are perfectly suited for all these needs. They are easy to setup and it’s very easy to publish your content with blogs. If you haven’t started your blog yet, do it now and start becoming independent cam girl.

How Camgirls File Taxes Or 29 Ways To Write Off Your Webcam Modeling Expenses

Alex Shwarz — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:51:56 +0000

If you are taking your web modeling business seriously you got to pay taxes. Otherwise sooner or later you’ll get in trouble with IRS that will result in fines and other problems. If you are making money but haven’t filed your taxes yet hurry up! April 15 is the deadline to file taxes (in US) and it’s coming close.

If the word Taxes scares you, don’t worry! There are many things you can write off your earnings which will leave you paying taxes on significantly smaller amount. So for example if you made $15,000 a year and spent $7000 for your business needs you will pay taxes only on remaining $8,000.

To file taxes you need the help of accountant. Don’t even bother doing it yourself. Accountants charge $50 – $200 but these money well worth it to make sure that everything is done right. Or you can use online services like TurboTax that will guide you through the whole process. But it may get complicated and it costs money too.

You should file taxes as self employed. As for the title of your job try to come up with something that doesn’t imply that it’s adult oriented. Many girl use “web model” and “webcam model”.

You do need to keep track of your expenses that you are going to write off. Those who file taxes as self-employed randomly get audited so you should be able to back up your expenses. The best way to keep track of your business expenses is to have separate credit card that you only use for things relating to your business. This way all your expenses will be in one place. Otherwise you’ll have to keep all your receipts. If you do collect the receipts make sure that you highlight which expenses are for business use in case there are other items on the receipt.

And now as promised here is the list of things you can write off. Note that some things can only be partially written off depending on how much you use them for the business. For example if you work from home you can write off your electricity expenses but only about 30% depending on how much you work per day. Here is the list:

percentage of rent
heat
electricity
water
internet
apartment repairs
office supplies
computer equipment
caming equipment
hair
makeup
nails
supplements
tanning
beauty products
waxing
clothes
lingerie
toys
lubricant
shoes
internet advertising
cam room decorations
cosmetic surgery
gas
airfare
train tickets
car
hotel

Conclusion

Webcam modeling business requires you to be beautiful in order to make money. And staying beautiful takes a lot of money as well. So why wouldn’t to use it as advantage and reduce to the minimum the taxes you have to pay? What else do you write off your webcam modeling expenses?

Do You Care How Your Site Is Doing?

Alex Shwarz — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:53:23 +0000

If you own a web site or blog and spend time on it you got to know how it is doing. Many cam girls start web site (or blog), keep it going for a couple of months and then give up because they don’t see any return for the work they put in it. That’s because they don’t check their site statistics. They don’t know the key metrics such as how many people visit their site every day, what keywords people use in Google to find your site, what other sites send you the traffic and so on. There is a FREE solution for accessing these statistics and it’s called Google Analytics.

Here are 4 key metrics that Google Analytics gives you (screenshots are taken from analytics data on my site, I’ve just blurred the real numbers he-he):

1. How Many Visitors You Get Every Day

As you can see it shows how many many unique people visited your site every day. If the same person visited your site 3 times a day he still will be counted as one person. See those spikes in traffic on the graph above? This is when I was sending news letter about my new articles. So you actually can see how certain actions you do on a web site are reflected in traffic increase (or decrease).

2. How Long Visitors Stays On Your Site

Bounce Rate means what percentage of visitors came and left right away from your site. This shows how your site is appealing to the 1st time visitors. So if bounce rate is high (above 70%) you need to put work into better design.

Avg. Time on Site shows how long (on average) your visitors stay on site. If this value is low (less than 2 minutes) it means that visitors don’t find your content interesting and you need to changes something (put more pictures, video, etc).

New Visits is the percentage of new visitors to your site. If this value is low it means that you have many repetitive visitors which is always good!

3. Traffic Sources

Shows what sites send you the traffic and how much of it. As you can see Google brings most of the traffic for my blog. And this is the case for many other web sites out there.

4. Keywords Your Visitors Used To Get To Your Site

Shows what keywords people used in Google to get to your site. For example if you see that “Asian Girl Fucking Blog” and other variations of this keyword brings you the most of the traffic, see if you are on the 1st page of Google for this phrase. And if you are, then there is a good chance that you can get to the first 3 spots on Google for this keyword. So start publishing more articles with this keyword putting it in a title and body of the article. Once you get to the 1st spot in google for your top keyword you’ll be amazed how much traffic you’ll be getting.

These are just 4 the most important key metrics that you can view through Google Analytics. There are other metrics that will give you even more details such as the most visited web pages on your site, top pages people leave your site from and so on.

It’s very easy to set up Google Analytics for your site. Here is a nice video I found that explains how to set it up and use:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conclusion

Running your own web site is like running your own business. You can not just start it and let it go. You should pay attention to what’s going on around your web site and do necessary tweaks to make it better. Checking key metrics through Google Analytics is the must for every website owner.

If you have any questions about how to set it up for your web site or what different metrics mean don’t hesitate to ask in comments.

Simple SEO Tutorial For Cam Girls

How Cam Girl Can Make Money With Affiliate Link

Alex Shwarz — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:28:21 +0000

Every cam girl spends most of the time online interacting with fans or looking for new fans. But many just don’t realize how easy it is to make money online besides doing private cam shows. I’m going to show how you can make extra cash by doing affiliate marketing. But first we need to clarify what is affiliate link and who are affiliates.

Affiliate is a sales person on the Internet who earns commission from every sale made. But on Internet everything is a little different than in real life. To make a sale all you need to do is to send customer to the web site you are affiliated with. If this customer buys anything on that site you will get your commission. And to send customer you need him to click a special link which is called affiliate link.

Let me make an example if it sounds too confusing. Lets say you become an affiliate of Amazon.com. Once you registered as affiliate Amazon gives you affiliate link like this:

http://www.amazon.com/?tag=

, where is unique ID assigned to you by Amazon. If somebody goes to Amazon via this link and buys something you will get 4% of the amount spent.

Well that was a basic example to help you understand how all this works. Most likely you are not interested in being affiliate for Amazon. But how about cam networks you work for?

Every cam network has an affiliate program. For example if you work for LiveJasmin just check out at the very bottom of they site and you will find Webmaster Wanted link. Once you register as affiliate you will get your very special affiliate link. And now the magic happens. When you give this link to one of your fans (who is not registered with LiveJasmin yet) and he buys your show, you’ll earn $40 (even if he spends just few minutes in private). Or you can choose to use a different kind of affiliate link that will bring you 20% of what he spends on LiveJasmin for life with you or any other model.

Warning: you can’t share your affiliate link in free chat of cam networks you are working for. It’s against their terms of service. Also make sure you check with your network if it allows to open affiliate account besides having model’s account. Some cam networks don’t allow their models to become affiliates (which I think is really stupid).

All of this should sound good but you might be wondering how you can share your affiliate link with fans if you can’t dot this in free chats on cam networks. Here are some of many ways how you can do this:

1. Your Personal Blog

If you have your own blog you can put affiliate links inside your posts and on the side bar. This is how many people make money with blogs. If you keep your blog regularly updated your fans will come back to read new posts. And these new posts can have affiliate links that will be clicked. The more fans your blog has the more money you can make through affiliate links. Plus you will get search engines traffic as well. I know people who make $50,000 – $100,000 a month(!) on their blogs in mainstream. And with adult content it’s much easier to build a solid fan base.

2. Twitter

I’ve already written how you can build a solid fan base on Twitter. When you treat your Twitter fans good and keep them updated with teasing pictures and videos they will be eager for every update you post. So once in a while you can put your affiliate link in one of the updates and many of your fans will follow this link and possibly make a purchase earning you the commission.

3. Forums

Forums can be another place where you can share your affiliate links in forum threads. You may start your own thread or you may participate in existing ones. Just make sure that your forums posts with affiliate links look natural, otherwise you will be banned for spamming.

4. Commenting On Other Blogs

Most of the blogs allow to comment on their posts. So you can post a comment with your affiliate link in it. Note that comments get moderated by real person before they are published so make sure it provides some value to the post. Otherwise blog owner won’t approve it.

5. Amazon

Ha-ha. We are going back to Amazon here. I’ve already written how you can build a wish list on Amazon to get gifts from your fans. And I’ve also explained above how Amazon’s affiliate program works. So you can combine these two together. You send your fans to buy something from your wish list through your affiliate link. No matter if your fan buys something from your wish list or buy something for himself, if he makes a purchase within 24 hours of using your affiliate link you’ll get your 4% commission.

Conclusion:

Ok, that was a long post but I hope very worse reading. The point of all this is that by working as cam model you interact with your fans online a lot. During this communication you can send links in one form or another. Many sites whose links you send have affiliate programs. So why not to use a chance to earn extra cash? People make thousands dollars a day doing this in mainstream so why cam girls can’t take advantage of this as well?

How to Promote Webcam Shows on Twitter – 6 Simple Steps

Alex Shwarz — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:30:50 +0000

Twitter could be a powerful tool for building a great fan base that is easy to convert into paying customers. You can get thousands of loyal fans that will pay for your shows, buy gifts from your wish lists, buy your autographed posters and many more. But how can you get thousands of followers on Twitter? I’m going to show you a little spammy but proven way of getting targeted followers.

1. Create Twitter Account (if you don’t have one)

If you don’t have Twitter account do it now. For the Twitter’s user name try to use your nickname from cam network or your website/blog name if you have one. Write some teasing introduction in your profile description and definitely upload a nice teasing picture (non-nude one). Make sure that it looks nice when it’s reduced to 48 X 48 pixels in size. For the best results use the close up of your face (the whole body won’t fit into 48 X 48 nicely).

2. Tweet Regularly on Twitter

As soon as you open Twitter account you should start twitting regularly so that your Twitter account looks alive. Try to send minimum 5-7 teasing twits a day with at least one teasing picture. Since the length of the twit is 140 characters max the total time you spend for all this is no more than 20 mins a day. Many cam girls are so addictive to Twitter that they can’t live without it and communicate with their fans all day long. Once your fan base starts growing on Twitter you can start promoting your cam shows and wish lists through your twits.

3. Think About Who Is Your Ideal Customer

You must already have some following if you work on cam network. Just look who is the most paying one in terms of age, work place, ethnicity, etc. If you don’t have any fan base yes just use your intuition. You need to visualize your ideal customer

4. Use Twitter Search To Find Your Ideal Customer Profile

Now you need to use the power of Twitter search. For example if you picture that your ideal customer is a 40-45 years old man working in financial field, search for some financial terms and find tweets that contain these terms. Then look up the profile of the tweet’s author and at his profile picture (most of the guys put their face as profile picture). Also, look up how many followers this guy has. He should have at least 15-20K followers. So just find at least one guy who qualifies for your ideal customer profile. Or you can find top financial guys on Twitter through Google search.

5. Look Up Followers of the Chosen Profile And Start Following Some of Them Who Qualify

The reason this people following a guy you found in step 3 is because they are interested in what he’s twitting. So they should also qualify for you ideal customer to some extend. So just start looking through the long list of followers this guy has paying attention only to profile pictures to make sure that this is a male and of the similar age. You can easily look through 40 followers a minute and pick the ones that qualify.

And here is what happens for the other end. The guy who you picked to follow receives and email notifying him that he’s got a new follower. In this email he sees your profile picture and probably gets intrigued. He checks your profile, your recent twits and there is a good chance that he will follow you back.

6. Periodically Unfollow Those Who Don’t Follow You Back

Not every one who you follow will follow you back so you may end up following for example 800 people and only 500 people follow you back. Twitter profiles with such difference between number of followees and followers look spammy, so you need to unfollow those who don’t follow you back. It would be very time consuming and annoying to do this manually but luckily there are many free tools online that will make this process easy. One of such tools is Friend or Follow.

Conclusion

As you can see it’s not that hard to build a loyal fan base on Twitter. Just make sure that the content you share through your twits is not hardcore otherwise your account can be suspended and you’ll lose all your followers.

If you are new to Twitter and have questions please ask in comments section. Also it would be nice to hear some success stories how Twitters helps in your webcam modeling business.

Make Yourself Gift For The Valentine’s Day Through Wish Lists

Alex Shwarz — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:09:30 +0000

Valentine’s Day is coming and cam girls for sure can take advantage of this event using wish lists. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting or already have established fan base. You have fans so you can ask them to buy you a gift from your wish list. If you don’t use wish lists yet, you losing free gifts and not the cheap ones. Here are 3 easy steps how to set up wish list:

Create an account on Amazon. I wouldn’t recommend any other web sites since on Amazon you can find anything you want. Then go to the Wish List section (click a link at top right) and set up your wish list profile with your picture in it:
Fill out your wish list with everything you want! By browsing Amazon site you can add whatever product you like by clicking “Add to Wish List” button on the product details page. Don’t be too greedy though. The items that you chose should be affordable.Also on Amazon you can install browser plugin that will place a button in your browser’s toolbar:

What’s cool about this button is that you can add items to your Amazon’s wish list from any site on the internet. For example you found something cool on eBay. You just click this button and eBay’s item gets added to your Amazon’s wish list.
Set up PO Box in your local post office. When you start getting a lot of gifts you don’t want to miss them when you are not at home. So let all these gifts go to your PO Box instead where you can pick them up whenever is convenient for you. Note that you will need to bring passport and proof of address to set up PO Box

And that’s it. Just share the link of your wish list wherever you can – your blog, Facebook, Twitter, emails, etc. If you already use wish lists and want to share some success stories please put it in comments.

Don’t Lose Your Face In Blog Comments

Alex Shwarz — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:16:16 +0000

One of the affective ways to promote your site is commenting on other blogs. To leave a comment you need to fill out your nickname, email and web site URL. Then when your comment appears in blog post your nickname is linked to your web site. This way you are getting a link which can drive traffic to your website. Search engines will consider this link as well in ranking your site.

I’ve noticed that many cam girls make one big mistake when they leave comments on other blogs. For example look at my last post comments:

As you can see none of cam girls comments have avatar picture (although mine has he-he). And the same happens on other blogs you comment on. It should be clear that without your avatar image your comment won’t be that attractive. Look how these comments would look if you have an avatar image:

When a horny guy sees the avatar picture like this he would most likely visit your website (by clicking your nickname). This is very affective marketing tactic. You can comment on non-adult blogs where you know your potential clients hang out and get fresh traffic to your site.

It’s very easy to make so that your avatar picture shows up on all blogs you comment (well most of them). All you need to do is go to gravatar.com and register there. The email address you specify during registration should be the one you use to comment on blogs. Then you should upload your avatar image and that’s it – it will show on most of your comments.

You need to have avatar image attached to your blog comments for the same reason you have it on Twitter or Facebook profile, i.e. to attract potential customers. Set it up once and you’ll start getting additional traffic to your site.

Why Every Cam Model Should Have Her Own Home On Internet

Alex Shwarz — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:35:50 +0000

I’ve made a mistake that many beginner cam models do. I’ve trusted part of my business to 3rd party service and it has suspended my account for no reason. Here is what happened:

Last week my account at AWeber got banned due to violation of their Terms of Service. In particular they found my blog’s content as pornography and sex-related. WTF?! If you don’t know what AWeber is, it’s the best email marketing solution that allows building mailing list and then send mass emails to all subscribers. If you have already subscribed to my newsletter (through subscribe to my newsletter popup form) you may have noticed that every time I publish new posts on my blog you get an email about this. I could do all this without AWeber but AWeber has very high deliverablity rate (so your email doesn’t end up in spam folder) and many more cool features.

So my AWeber account got suspended for the non-sense reason mentioned above, I’ve lost 89 email addresses that I’ve collected so far, my blog doesn’t have that nice popup subscribe box, I don’t have access to very useful reports about my subscribers, and so forth.

Now how it all relates to the title of this post. Many cam models fall exactly into the same trap. You may have opened account on MySpace or Facebook for example. Spend hours and hours building your fan base by shooting content (pictures and videos) and publishing it. Then suddenly random moderator finds your content pornography and sex-related and just closes your account due to violation of their Terms of Service. Or some of your fans reported. Or may be your competitor reported. The point is it could be multiple reasons your account will be closed and all efforts are gone.

That’s why you need to have your own site – your home on the internet. If you host it on adult friendly hosting there is no way it could by shut down (unless you publish content that violates the law). So spend all your efforts on your site. Publish pics and video to it and then use other sites to announce what you’ve published. If your account gets closed on these sites you lose nothing but some source of traffic.

Blog is the most easy to setup and very affective type of site for adult models. So start your blog today if you don’t have one yet.