iCamModel » Revenue 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

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?

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.

Why Every Cam Girl Should Have a Mailing List

Alex Shwarz — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:43:32 +0000

If you don’t use mailing list on your site or blog you are losing money. The longer you don’t have it the more money you lose. Collecting email addresses of visitors who are interested in your content makes you really independent cam model. Let me show you why.

Here is how it works:

You put web form somewhere on your site (in free area) that collects names and email addresses from visitors. You can see such a form on my blog to the right (it says “Subscribe to Newsletter”). Sure not every visitor leaves his email address but those who do most likely are interested in your content.
Once visitor fills out the form and clicks the “Submit” button he receives confirmation email that asks to confirm his email address by clicking the link inside.
Once visitor clicks the link he’s taken to the “Thank you” page. At this point you are getting email subscriber who is interested in your site/blog since he filled out his info (name and email address) and confirmed his email address.

If you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet you can use the subscribe form on to the right (close to the top) to go through the whole process see how it works. Plus you’ll receive my newsletter

So if you update your site or blog regularly your mailing list will start to grow. In 3-4 months you may have hundreds of email addresses. And it will be growing every day. I know guys who have up to 250,000 email addresses collected this way.

And this is how you can use this mailing list to make money:

Set up so that once you publish new article on your blog the automatic email gets sent to all your email subscribers. This email could include a little snippet from the article and link back to your blog to read full article. This way you’ll be getting instant traffic spikes to your blogs when you publish new articles. And more traffic means more money, right?
You can announce your cam shows this way. For example once a week you can send out an email about your upcoming show with some teasing pictures, etc. This way you’ll be getting instant buyers of your show. No need to waste yur time in free chats. And if you changed your cam network you can let your fans know about this via email as well.
If you sell your picture sets, calendars, lingerie, etc you can email announcements about new stuff for sale.

These are just a couple of ways how you can earn money from mailing list. There are many more, just use your imagination. This is called email marketing. The point is that you have backward communication channel with your fans. You can reach them whenever you want. Email is the most reliable way to reach people. Most people check their emails every day, more regularly than checking their Facebook or Twitter pages.

So if you have your site or blog running and don’t have mailing list set up yet, do so now. It’s not hard to set it up at all and you can easily do it by yourself. There are many services out there that help you manage and grow your mailing list. If you can afford to spend $20 a month I would definitely recommend AWeber. This is the best email subscribers management solution on the market. It provides all you need: customizable web forms, interface to send broadcast emails to your subscribers, integration with your blog, documentation and video tutorials, etc. I use it myself and very happy. And the first month is just $1 so why not to try it?

Update: AWeber is not adult friendly. See my other post for more details.

Have you ever thought about using mailing list for you site or blog?

Working On Multiple Webcam Sites – Pros And Cons

Alex Shwarz — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:46:57 +0000

Every webcam site offers a unique environment to work in and it’s important you find one that suits your personality. Sites like WebCams.com have large model databases, so if you’re alluringly cute, you could be quite successful on that site. However, if you enjoy chatting to clients and can sell yourself (or want to learn how to), LiveJasmin could be a good option for you as it has a free chat program for surfers to increase your exposure and build up your client list. Once you have a base site to work from, you can often work among other webcam sites at the same time to bring in more money.

Having multiple chat programs open simultaneously is the best way to get as many shows into your online time as possible. Many models run 1-3 free chat sites and have 1-3 offline sites open at the same time to earn faster. Using this method of performing, you will do better with some sites some days than others and will get a lot more paid opportunities than if you’d been signed to just one site.

While it’s nice to think of monetizing your time this way, be aware that many sites prohibit their models working with other sites. Check the ToS (Term of Services) agreement with each site. Some ToS agreements don’t allow you to use other sites so to stop having your account closed with them, you may need to be careful and either only use them or not use them during your multiple site sessions. LiveJasmin is the best webcam site to be signed up in if you’re looking to have multiple webcam sites streaming at the same time as it does not prohibit working on other sites. You can juggle more than one chat site by leaving a standard message for the other sites when you go into private chat. Make sure site administrators don’t view this message as it may breach their ToS and you may get your account closed.

Make sure you’re organized before each cam session so you don’t get flustered and remember your priority should be on paying customers rather than the free customers and you will learn over time that many free-goers are there to see what they can get from you for free (not all, but many). Teasing is the best way to get their cards out rather than giving the prize before they buy.

What is your experience with working on multiple webcam sites?

Pros and Cons Of Using Zombaio For Processing Cam Show Payments

Alex Shwarz — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:17:46 +0000

Zombaio is a third party processing service that is easy to use for anyone hoping to branch out and work with their own webcam services or pay site. Just like most services in the adult industry, there are pros and cons that can determine if they are the right service or product for you.

Pros

You don’t need a business license if you are an independent worker and will only be required to register your Social Insurance (or Social Security) number with Zombaio to get access to their service.
Setting up the system can be quite easy when using the non-recurring payment structure, as you only need to copy and paste the html code into your signup page to get it started. Once your paperwork is in order, you can be set up and operational within one business day, meaning secured payments can start streaming through in next to no time (some third party processors can take up to several weeks before being fully useable)
You can opt in for email notifications about payments made to you, supplying you with the username and email of your client, providing an easy and fast reference of payment confirmation at the beginning of each cam show
Setting up the system where clients can purchase credits for webcam shows can be difficult and would require extra experience or assistance from a knowledgeable friend to set this up. Zombaio has a preset value for price per credit for clients use which is not changeable, however the preset value is reasonable so you can leave it as is if you want

Cons

While Zombaio is overall relatively easy and fast to set up, there are aspects of it that may require a further technical knowledge including setting up your own website, understanding how to use FTP and editing html code. This can be hard to impossible for a model that doesn’t have any experience with these parts of an online business however there are usually techs available to assist with a lot of the set up if you need.
Setting up a virtual wallet to enable revolving credit, which is ideal for webcam shows is much more difficult than sticking to the simple one time payment method (which lets your client send you money before the cam show) which can be useful but not quite as convenient
If you don’t have much computer experience, it’s best to choose the non-recurring payment structure because it is very easy to set up, however this can cause some confusion between your client and yourself if he pays ahead of time or pays too much/too little for the session. It’s best to contact the client first and arrange a booked appointment time before he pays to save problems

As a whole, the service that Zombaio provides is much better than a lot of the other competitors out there and the only major problems you may find will depend on your level of experience with website building, html and technical set-up.

Have you had any experience with Zombaio? If so, please share.

Start Becoming Independent Cam Girl

Alex Shwarz — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:57:20 +0000

If you are working on cam sites like Cams.com or LiveJasmin and getting 30-35% from what you’re earning it’s time to start becoming independent. And as I mentioned before the reason you are dependent on these sites is because they have huge visitors traffic that your earnings depend on.

So what are the opportunities when you have your own traffic? With your own traffic you have to pay commission only for utilizing web cam platform that allows you to perform your cam shows. And this commission is much lower than you pay to cam sites you work on (around 25-35%). So basically you’ll be getting 65-75% of your earnings. Or some cam models using instant messengers (IMs) like Skype or Yahoo and getting even larger share.

So how can you get this traffic? First of all there is no easy way. You’ll have to work hard for at least 2-3 months to see the results. But when you look at how much time you spend in free chats and not getting any privates you can afford to spend a couple of hours a day to invest in your future.

First of all you need to start your blog under your own domain name. This is your own private home on the Internet where you can do whatever you want. You will not find this freedom on social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Plus blog is the easiest form of web site to set up and update.

Then you need to update your blog regularly with fresh and interesting content. By content I mean short articles accompanied by pictures and video. This is where you’ll have to spend half of dedicated time. The other half you need to spend on promoting your blog everywhere you can – social networks, blog directories, forums, other blogs, etc. If you keep doing this your blog will grow fast, you’ll get thousands of returning visitors who’ll be looking forward for your next show. Then you can start membership site but it’s another story …

So, don’t waste your time. Go towards becoming independent!

Update: all free spots are already taken. If you are interested in having your own blog check out my new service