When I first started camming, I did it for fun, easy money. $50 in an hour? Awesome, that’s a night out at the bar! As a higher percentage of my income began to come from camming, I started to consider transitioning from bored office girl to full-time cammodel. Once I made the switch, though, I realized that all of those camgirl documentaries and articles were leaving out a crucial point: cam babes work hard for that easy money! I started to treat camming as a true business, not a hobby, and that shift has paid off in spades. These are 6 things I did that allowed me to take my camming from “fun money” to full-time career.
- Income Tracking Diversifying your income only works if you keep track of where it is coming from. I keep track of my earnings every day broken down by site, including clip sites. For free chat sites like Streamate or MyFreeCams, I write down my log on and log off times as well to work out my hourly average on there each day. For independent sites like CamModelDirectory and SkyPrivate I keep track of how many hours I was available for shows, as well as how many minutes I spent actually performing. I use that as guidance for how well my independent percent in paid matches up against the percent in paid that sites like Streamate calculate. By tracking your income you become aware of shifts in earnings that indicate that you need to change your focus–for me I have recently increased my time spent promoting Skype shows because a larger proportion of my earnings are coming from Skype shows, and that is a trend I want to continue. I don’t just track my earnings daily, I also tally up at the end of the week and the end of the month.
- Scheduling One of the perks of camming is that it doesn’t come with a schedule, so this was hard for me to swallow, but a lot of the most successful cammodels stick to a schedule. It doesn’t need to be set in stone – mine changes week to week, but I try to get it out to my customers as much as possible, mostly using Twitter. Whether you post your schedule right on your camsites, use social media, or use your own website to get the word out, letting guys know when you’ll be online is always a good idea. Plan ahead – I sit down every Monday and schedule my work week. Cam shifts, videos to film, time for social media: it all goes on the calendar. Doing this not only allows my customers to plan their “alone time” with me, but also makes sure I spend enough hours on cam to make my financial goals.
- Time Management Camming doesn’t start when you click “broadcast”, and doesn’t end when you log off. There are photos and videos to shoot and edit, emails and site messages to reply to, social media posts to write, blog posts to draft…the list often seems never ending. I used to try multi-tasking: taking photos for Twitter while streaming live, replying to emails in between filming videos. I felt busy, flustered, and like I never made any headway on my to-do list. Finally, when I started feeling too tired to get anything done, I searched “time management” on Google. What I learned completely changed how I structured my day. I group like tasks together, set aside time for brainstorming, focus on one thing at a time, and reward myself with breaks. Take a look at the resources available online (Pinterest is a great source, too) and use the techniques that fit with your task list. When you break it down, it is suddenly a lot less overwhelming.
- Income Diversification Relying on just one site to pay your bills is a dangerous game. The traffic on any given site can change over time, and any camsite can change from easy money to begging for pennies in a few short weeks. You may not be able to control the traffic or technology on any individual site, but you can control where your money comes from. You don’t have to be on every clip site or 10 different cam sites, but having 2 clip sites and 3 cam sites at the very least ensures that a bad month on one site doesn’t leave you without money for a roof over your head. Boleyn Models eliminates the need to worry about payout thresholds by rolling all of your sites into one payment, so having lower-performing sites doesn’t result in waits for payouts.
- Automation If you use social media for promotion, you know how quickly a peek at Twitter or Instagram can turn into 3 hours of browsing photos of cats with pizza (that might be specific to me, but the point holds). You don’t need to sit in front of Twitter all day to appear engaged. I use Tweetdeck (photos post directly to Twitter instead of showing as links like they do when you use Hootsuite) to schedule regular tweets promoting my Snapchat, texting, blog, as well as my standard picture posts for #thongThursday and the like. I set aside a block of time and schedule tweets roughly a month ahead, which allows me to focus on replying to @s and RTing stuff I like when I do check twitter throughout the day. Instagram doesn’t allow you to schedule posts in advance, but I edit a month’s worth of Instagram photos at once and save them to my Google Drive, allowing me to post them whenever I want without any prep time. I also have a copy-paste document with the hashtags I use frequently on Instagram so I don’t have to type everything out all the time. I save time by only very lightly editing my photos, usually just correcting colour or rotating and cropping for the Instagram square.
- Research I only offered straightforward “vanilla” shows when I started camming. Although I enjoyed more variety in my private life, I didn’t feel confident venturing into the world of fetish, femdom, and kink–especially not when someone was paying me for it. As time went on, I realized how much money I was essentially losing by not offering these types of shows, so I decided to face it head-on and…learn. I used my college term paper research skills (which mostly just means Bing, because Google filters out a lot of NSFW results) to zero in on some specific fetish and kink topics that I was interested in. I now offer a variety of fetish and kink shows, and have moved into femdom with my own specific style, and I can perform with confidence that my customers are getting what they want because I put in the time and effort to find out what they are looking for from a webcam model. Fetish and kink can be easy money if you are willing to put in the legwork. Research doesn’t end with camshow themes either–you can get great tips on lighting, technology, webcam settings, social media promotion, and monetization if you take some time to dig online.
The “easy money/get rich quick” stories of camgirls hitting it big with nothing more than a smile and a webcam are everywhere these days. The truth is that camming takes time and effort, but by working hard and working smart, your payday can be today.
More About Cammodel Katy Churchill
