HOOK: E-zine By, For, and About Men in the Sex Industry

First impressions are crucial. They're the most lasting thoughts a client will likely hold of you, and they are the foundation for everything else they learn about you. So whatever your initial contact with a potential client, make it a good one. For an escort there are three major sources for initial impression: internet, print ad, and word-of-mouth. Although other methods occur, such as face-to-face, they are significantly more infrequent.

Being The Best "You"

Some guys are targeting suit-and-tie vanilla, others the jeans'n'boots raunch and everything in between. No matter where you lie, you'll be best served by making sure that everything you are presenting is an image of high quality. When people see trash on the street they are much more likely to litter than if they see a street that is kept clean. The same is true of you: if your image is one of top quality, you're going to be treated much better and regarded with greater respect.

What is the best style to present? You. Be yourself. If you're generally uncomfortable in a monkey suit it is guaranteed to show if you try and fake a caviar image. The market is broad enough to suit all types. Be genuinely you and you'll be able to relax which will make clients subconsciously more comfortable around you.

Choose the wording in your print ads, your web site, your telephone sales pitch all with care: use of proper English is important. If your use of punctuation and spelling is improper, your image is going to die. If you are using grammatically incorrect wording, it had better be for a good reason. I'd have no problem getting a "y'all" from a Southerner even though it's not a dictionary-accepted word, but an email that says "Im wanting to get together when Im in town. When is you free?" is an immediate red flag. Being a professional escort, your clients will be even more reactionary to get contractions without apostrophes and incorrect adverbs coming from you.

To Tell The Truth

Be honest in your promotion. Much as you believe that you are you can not advertise that you are the best or the hottest or the most-anything unless you can provide absolute proof. Everyone believes they are the best and there is no way you can prove that you are. Legally speaking it's called false advertising. Quality clients note that kind of thing and move on. They immediately think,"If he's making false claims in his ad, what else is he going to lie to me about. When he says his dick is 8", does that mean it's 6"?" A lot of potential business is lost because the discerning man immediately sees the false advertising for what it is and doesn't want to chance that the person who has lied in their ad will lie on the phone. I know that any number of escorts do advertise they are the best and the hottest and will immediately respond "It's working fine for me." Two thoughts though: How much better could it be if you weren't turning many guys off? And, are you really content having your name publicly associated with false advertising? In the long run, word-of-mouth will come back to hurt those who do engage in this practice.

Looking from the standpoint of our peers, for someone to say they are the "Best escort in Vancouver" by very definition means they are publicly declaring that all other escorts in Vancouver are inferior to them. Do you really want to treat your brothers like that? There is a lot to be gained by working together--networking with other local escorts. And so much to lose by alienating yourself from them.

For my massage business I claim to be "Vancouver's Premier Sensual Masseur." I can make that claim because it is a provable fact--just ask any other sensual masseur to compare tax records with me: we've got fact, case closed. So use things that you can prove. Or make claims that can be justified: "One of Vancouver's Best." "Top-Quality Service." Another area to watch for in telling the truth is that if you advertise something, you better deliver! Does your web site say that your dick is 8½" ? You better not show up with a 7" pecker. Hell, even 8" isn't good enough. You've lied to your client, and even if they don't say anything, they won't forget it. If you say that you do rim, you'd better be ready to straddle up for a full feast when the client requests. If you suddenly change your mind because the client isn't so desirable, you know your name is mud. Okay, so their butt isn't so clean? Invite them to take an erotic shower with you first, and scrub them down well. Then, get your tongue ready.

Remember, word-of-mouth is an important source of your marketing. When you piss off one client, that is not just one person you're destroying future business with. That is them, their friends, their friend's friends . . . And you don't even know that you're losing all that business!

Using The Internet

Boeing established a website a few years ago. Everyone wondered why, after all every airline on the planet knows exactly who they are, what they offer, and how to contact them. A reporter asked the question and Boeing,s response was, in essence, "Because we want to stay in business." For an escort the internet is immeasurably more important than for a company like Boeing. If you don't have a website, you're going to find it a lot more difficult to thrive, and definitely be at a disadvantage to others who are web-enabled.

Quality Design=Quality Escort

Your website is the first impression of you to a lot of guys, it's a no-brainer that the better your site looks, the better you look. If you've got a half-dozen ads littered around a page, your image drops fast. Limit the advertising on your site--anything more than two ads on a page is going to be severely detrimental. Hell, I'll go as far as to say that even two is pushing the limits. The argument that those ads bring revenue is not going to change the fact that if you keep all those ads, you kill a lot of potential clients.

Create a layout that is very consistent and very easy to follow. Of course you know your way around your website. But how easy is it for someone unfamiliar? Have everything well laid out on your status bar and be totally consistent in your verbiage. If you call it the Photos page in your status bar, don't refer to it as the Gallery page in text. Use terms people understand. If you want to be artsy and use oblique names for everything you can get away with it only if you're using either roll-overs or status-bar text that explain it in plain English.

If you take a look at my main escort web site f-ckme.org/asm, then compare it with malekneads.com you'll notice that the Male Kneads site has a much sharper look and feel to it. That's because I hired a professional design firm to create the image and a professional programmer to translate that image into html. The Fuck Me site is home grown and lacks that sharpness (among other problems . . . ) and somewhere down the road I'll hire both of them to overhaul it as well.

To maintain the quality image and help engrain me into guy's minds, my Male Kneads business cards use the same photo and logo as on my web site home page and are full color with varnish (not cheap, but paid for themselves many times over). I also have gift certificates in quality stock with the same images.

Don't want to spend on a graphic designer? Okay, do the next best thing. Get a friend to critique your site. Preferably one with a good graphic eye, but any friend who knows how to state their own mind will do. Why? Because they have better perspective than you. Face it. You're too close to the project to have an objective view of it!

Kill the Pop-Ups

I absolutely hate those #$%&* windows that pop up to advertise something. Frankly, the instant I see one coming, I kill the website that generated it--no questions asked, which means if you have pop-up windows on your website, you'll be hard pressed to even get me to look at your site. On the links page of my escort site I state that I will not link to any website that has pop-up windows and I've received countless positive comments from guys specifically thanking me for that. It's important enough for visitors to write me a note on it! Pop-ups are bad for your image no matter how you use them. If you're on geocities you've got pop-ups right now. Granted, they have the least annoying pop-up windows of any I've seen. I can hear you rationalizing now, "but they generate income" or some other excuse that allows you to keep driving a lot of potential clients away.

Don't make your site too fancy. There are web designers who have pulled out all the stops: they've got flash and high-power javascript and huge graphic images everywhere on every page. Forget it! Remember that 75% of your audience is still on 56k modems. If you're using very much of this stuff at all they'll give up before they even load the first page. Who wants to visit a web site that takes 2 minutes to load? 17 seconds is where you lose them: if your web page can't load in 17 seconds, they're moving on. So if you do have a flash intro, make sure there's an option in the bottom corner to bypass the flash. If you do use javascript, make sure it's not the high-power stuff that takes a year to download all the stuff it's using. I have on average 2 or 3 javascripts running on every single page of my Fuck Me web site, but it's only the games that require extra download items, and even they take less than 30 seconds on a 56k modem.

Keep Speeding Along

Thumbnails are not tiny images of the same picture file that visitors are going to view. If you're using thumbnails on your website, make sure that they really are little tiny graphic files. That is the whole point of a thumbnail: it's a very small file that will load fast. It's not the graphic just shrunk down. Once again we're talking about loading time and losing the viewers interest. Those thumbnails have to load in one second flat on a 56k machine. Anything slower and you need to redo the file.

KISS (appearance)

Use fonts sparingly. First, keep in mind that not every computer has the same fonts that you do. Sure, everybody's got Arial and Times New Roman. But the fonts lesser known fonts you find on a Windows 98 machine are not the same as on a Windows 95 or on a Unix or on a Mac. Stick with these: Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS Bold, Courier New, Courier New Bold, Courier New Italic, Courier New Bold Italic, Georgia, Georgia Bold, Georgia Italic, Georgia Bold Italic, Impact, Symbol, Times New Roman, Times New Roman Bold, Times New Roman Italic, Times New Roman Bold Italic, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet MS Bold, Trebuchet MS Italic, Trebuchet MS Bold Italic, Verdana, Verdana Bold, Verdana Italic, Verdana Bold Italic, and Wingdings. That's all.

Next, remember that too many fonts just make your website look like soup. Two fonts should suffice. Three is max. You don't even want to use the styles of the fonts too much, or too many different sizes. It just turns into clutter and looks crowded. DON'T USE ALL CAPS. Don't forget to use caps.

Get someone else to proofread everything you write (I really should practice what I preach!). Even if its grammatically correct, a second perspective will often contribute a superior way of wording the same sentence.

Never put a counter on your site. What is the point of it? It looks just plain corny. If you're not getting a lot of traffic the number will be small and make you look bad. So you fudge the number up, but anybody familiar with the internet will figure that out quickly and your reputation is shit. Look at any really good web site. How many of them have counters?

Constantly change and update your web site. Keep them coming back. Generate more interest all the time. I have one guy who daily logs into my Fuck Me site just to read my "silly thought of the day". (Believe me, I don't go in and manually change it daily!) I'm constantly adding more to my site and guys come back to see what's new. Those who just had mild interest at first are bound to start warming up after the third or fourth visit. Before they know it, I've got them hooked and a new client is born.

AOL is--bar none--the slowest and least powerful internet service provider you can subscribe to. This is because unlike everyone else, they are a hybrid of current technology and the ancient pre-curser to the internet: bulletin boards. Not the type we know today, but those old dial-up BBS's. In an attempt to make their servers appear faster than what they really are AOL uses a lot of caching. That's where a web page that has been used is stored in the operator's computer so that it's quickly available next time a user requests it and it doesn't have to be retrieved. The problem with that is if the page has been updated since originally cached. I've had it happen to me. I changed a page on my web site and the next day a guy is in my site's chat function talking while viewing my site--and I realize he's reading something that doesn't even exist on my site. AOL had hung onto it from the day before.

What amazes me is how their marketing machine manages to keep bringing in clients despite all this and their being among the most expensive. But it's the easiest!? Of course it is--Fisher Price in-line skates are the easiest too. But you grow up and get a regular pair of skates, and once you've taken the time to learn them properly you discover you can go so much faster and do so much more.

AOL is also very proprietary, which means your access to the web is limiting and it's difficult to get outside of the AOL universe. They do not want AOL users going outside of AOL material. One method they use to try and keep everything in-house is by putting a gate on your email: unless you make sure the gate is turned off, you can't even receive email from people who don't use AOL. This is just one of numerous habits that make their system a problem for an escort reaching out to the world.

The chat rooms: I've heard of escorts who swear they need AOL because they spend time in AOL's chat rooms to drum up business. My opinion on that is two-fold: AOL doesn't have an exclusive lock on chat rooms. And second, if you want to build quality clientele, why are you hanging around on the virtual street-corner? Not that there aren't nice guys in chat rooms, but the quality escort-hiring men rarely have time to spend in chat rooms.

A Site To Call Your Own

www.yourname.com is more memorable than www.hostsite.com/theirserver/yourname/yourpage.html. Also, it presents a much better image. If you have your own web site it says you are much more serious about business, that you invest time into your own business. You also have a lot more flexibility in what you can do with your site. Shop around--you can buy domain names for as little as $20 per year. Network Solutions is the granddaddy of domain names, but you're wasting your money if you pay their $70 fee. Also shop around for a host. For an escort site, options are severely reduced since many hosts won't accept anything pornographic and as an escort you automatically are rejected. Hosting services know this so the prices are inflated for many services--don't be easy prey for an overpriced web host just because he said he'll take you. Need help on where to shop for web domains or hosts? I'm happy to offer suggestions, including my own hosting services.

Riding On Your Name

Most escorts of course use their stage name as their web site. William Jones is a good stage name--it can't be misspelled very easily. Guys will have no problem typing in www.williamjones.com. Sean Johnston is a horrible stage name. Do they type www.shawnjohnson.com, www.seanjohnstone.com, www.shawnjohnston.com . . . The possibilities are numerous. I've been lucky and managed to go one step better with www.f-ckme.org/asm. Believe me, nobody ever forgets my URL. And in ads it doesn't matter how small the print--it gets noticed. An unexpected bonus is that from reading my monthly statistics I'm discovering that I am linked to dozens of web sites--city-specific web sites, guy's private home pages, even a couple pay-porn sites! The only reason I've been able to figure out is because they like my website name. It's catchy.

Never abbreviate your stage name. William Jones should never use the name "Bill" or he's suddenly creating possible confusion over what his URL may be.

Matched Addresses

Okay, you've got your www.williamjones.com address. But your email address is william69@hotmail.com. What?!? Talk to your web host--they should be able to change it in about two minutes flat so that you can advertise ANYTHING@williamjones.com, and all the email will still arrive in the same spot you're used to getting it from. Then promote william@williamjones.com as your email address. This will help engrain your URL into clients minds. You can also create other email addresses so that you can trace what source the email is coming from hotescort@williamjones.com may be the email address you use on your escort4you.com listing. topescort@williamjones.com is used in your print ad in the local rag . . .

Never put anything on your home page that isn't you: no advertising, no links. None. Never. Don't do it. No way. With rare exception, this is a sure sign of a shitty design. This one isn't just my opinion. The computer section of your local book store is crammed with books stating that. So how do you deal with web rings which require to link to the page you've got them on, and with gay search engines that require a reciprocal link to be located on your home page?

Web rings: You create another page in your website that looks and functions identical to your home page in every way except that it has the web rings at the bottom of it. There are no links anywhere in your site leading back to this page--it is a one-way entrance. So how do ordinary visitors to your site find your web rings? You have them listed a second time on a standard page in your site specifically designed to hold them. Those arriving through web rings come in through your back door, those wanting to leave by web rings exit through the web rings page in your site. Kinda complex, I know, but it meets everyone's needs, doesn't fuck up your high quality design, and still requires every entrant to agree to your site terms.

Gay Search Engines: Write them a very nicely worded email (Don't forget grammer, punctuation and spelling!) saying you'd like to join their search engine but their requirement of a reciprocal link on your home page will damage the quality design of your well laid out site. You would be happy to place their link on your easy-to-locate page clearly designated for such. Trust me, they'll be happy to give you permission. They only made that rule because of all the shitty designers, and don't mind making exceptions for quality sites. But be honest: they will check up on you and if you get the permission before you've got that quality design up with no advertising on the home page they'll mark you as a problem and you'll be hard pressed to get them to do anything.

Information Overload

Provide tons of information. As long as it's well laid out, it's difficult to overkill the volume on your web site. For those clients who are in a rush, they can just graze over what they want and move on--because your site is well laid out and they can quickly find what they want. For those who start to become more interested, you can capture and hold them with more and more information. Hang on to those guys: they'll be calling you. My Fuck Me web site currently has in excess of 40 pages not counting photos--you wouldn't believe what the average length-of stay for each visitor is.

Market Until You Think You're Gonna Puke!

Market the hell out of your website. Here there are numerous possibilities. And you want to use every blessed one of them! Of course you're listed on sites like www.escorts4you.com. That's great--but you need promotion of your own site.

Major search engines: There are a million people ready to take your money and promote your website for you to the search engines. Half of them are scam artists. Half of them are going to charge you too much. Which group you want to use? That's right--neither! Do your own website marketing. You'll know exactly what's going on, how those things work, and over time you'll develop an understanding to keep tweaking and keep your website at the top. And all it costs is your time. Your web site deserves an investment of your time. (Don't bother searching for my escort site. I haven't practiced what I preach yet on that one--too busy!) If you don't have your own website it will probably be very difficult to get listed with any of the biggest engines. Need direction on how to go about marketing? Ask me!

Gay search engines: There are 20+ gay-specific web sites that will catalogue your web site in their searchable listings. From my statistics I know that guys use them. Get listed! Another reason to have your own web site--many of them will refuse to list you if you're on geocities or homestead, etc. Want to locate those search engines? Ask me!

Banner Exchange: If you look at my escort website you'll notice that the top of every page (except for the home pages) has an ad banner on it. I belong to several banner exchange networks, and every time somebody views a page I get ½ credit for the banner shown. Every credit I earn gets my banner displayed on another member's web site. The banner exchange gets their money through using that other half of the banner displays to promote themselves and to display banners of paying advertisers. I've been told that banner exchanges won't work on many of the free hosting sites because the credit counters conflict with the site operating software so you don't get your credits properly counted.

Web Rings: I know Yahoo! did a lot of very annoying things in the transition when they bought them and the whole changeover was a nightmare. But that's behind us. I think. Join all the ones that match you, and only the ones that match you. If you promote yourself as a preppy vanilla guy, then don't join the scat ring thinking it will bring you more horny traffic. It won't--it will just scare away all your potential regular clients when they see you belong to a scat group. If you live in California, don't join the East Coast Escorts webring--remember our little chat on honesty?

Banner trading: Contact other escorts or anyone you know with a web site that you'd like to trade with, and if they're willing to promote your site too, swap banners with them. Of course since your web site has a quality design their banner is naturally going to be nicely displayed and easy to locate, just as you'd want yours done on their site. And it's got to be real banners, not text links. Guys find text links too boring to click on them much.

Advertise on your local city gay information website. This is the only one of these suggestions you'll have to pay for, but it is well worth it. Tourists all look up the local gay information websites, and they're going to come across your ad banner. In my first week of advertising with www.gayvancouver.net the generated business paid for the year.

Escort listing sites are useful. I've referred to www.escorts4you.com a couple times already showing my distinct preference for it. Why? While it's not perfect, I find it's layout makes it easy to use. Want to try and rate one of these sites? Pick a world city at random--a less popular one. Say, Boise, Idaho. Now using the site you're looking at pretend you are a guy looking for an escort in Boise, Idaho since you'll be there on business next week. How easy is it to narrow your search down to escorts in Idaho? How fast does the site load? To be truly objective on speed, make sure you're using a 56k modem for that--over 75% of your clients are! If a page can't load on a 56k machine in under 17 seconds, guys aren't going to stick around to view the escorts and you're wasting your time listing on it. As for which sites to use, my personal opinion is that there are so many free advertising resources on the internet, there is no reason I should be paying one of these sites to list me--so I don't use those that require money. To find a listing of those available, check out this sites list.

To Build A Better Banner

Okay, so now you need to have your own ad banners! If you can operate a mouse, you can create your own banners. It's that simple. Or you can get professional grade ones made for you at extremely reasonable rates. I've made some of my own animated ones but I'm still trying to figure out how to keep the file size very small. Damn computers. Want to know where you can go for banners that you can make in 5 minutes? Ask me!

Why do you want to be doing so much marketing? Because people are often slow to react. It takes an average of six times seeing a product advertised before a consumer will respond. You've got to be hitting them with your name again and again and again. If you aren't, somebody else will be!

It's All About The Money

If it is all about the money for you, you're in the wrong line of work. Money is nice, but true satisfaction and enjoyment of your work should be the primary goal. Yes, the money is definitely nice in escort work, but what is life if the dollar is what's driving you? You're going to spend roughly a third of your life working. Better make damn sure that it's doing work you really love.

The Quality is Right

How much do you want to charge? There is no magic answer to that question. I'd say the best possible canned response is "absolutely no less than 80% of the top priced guy in your city." But remember that you must deliver the goods. If you're high priced, you better be giving them the best: keep yourself in top physical condition. That includes details like getting enough regular sleep so your face doesn't look like death-on-a-stick, keeping away from recreational drugs--who are you trying to kid: your body will only handle them for so long before it rebels, and signs of them will show to others long before you realize it. My massage clients are often shocked. I tell them if they smoke, how much they drink, if they're getting enough water, what level of drug consumption they have (obviously I can't distinguish between pharmaceutical and recreational), if they've ever been in a major accident, and sometimes I can even tell if they spend all day in front of a computer. Granted, because of my training and experience I naturally have greater skill than the average client you see to be able to determine so much! But no matter how you try to cover it up, the body provides a clear map of all these things. Unlike your car, when this machine breaks down you can't just go buy new parts.

The Price is Right

In general, the higher your prices the better your clientele: there is a lower percentage of cheapskates at the top, though there are still an assortment of jerks. When dealing with the upper class you're bound to eventually run into very wealthy men who are willing to spend almost limitless amounts of money to enjoy the company of fine young men. They want only the best class of escorts and assume the expensive ones are where to look. Be quality, and keep your prices high. Very high. As long as you keep attracting clients you know you haven't overpriced yourself. So don't worry about those cold calls from guys who tell you your prices are ridiculous--there are plenty of lower-priced guys for them to call. You'll make twice as much money in half the time because you're focusing on delivering caviar, not spam.

Early in the year I received a phone call from the advertising director at a gay paper asking me how business was. I told her it was doing just great, and she found that quite interesting since several of the escorts who she serves had commented on how bad it was. As part of my own marketing I do keep an eye on what the competition is doing, so I immediately responded, "Tell them if they want business to improve they need to raise their rates." I know it sounds strange, but it's true--the serious escort shopper out there knows the adage "you get what you pay for", and he believes it. He wants something that's really good--so he won't call a cheap escort.

This is for guys who do massage, as well. Massage and escort are two distinct fields, and each has its own market. I know the two tasks can often overlap, but there's a much larger area where they are mutually exclusive. So why are you marketing them as the same product?

I have Male Kneads to focus on massage. In my marketing of it, there is not even the slightest hint of escort work. This is because a lot of sensual massage clients are driven away at the mention of sex: that is not at all what they're interested in. They may be in a monogamous relationship, or they may simply be worried that as soon as you get them alone you're going to be putting heavy pressure on them to go for the escort and raise the price. Whatever their reasons, marketing massage separately provides a much broader base of clients. Once I am with a client I have no problem letting them know that I am an escort as well. By then they're comfortable with me and if interested then we can talk upgrade. If not interested, I'm not scaring them because by now they're at ease that what I am already providing is what they wanted.

On my Fuck Me website there is specific mention about my massage and links to my massage web site as clients there definitely won't find anything negative about that knowledge.

Marketing massage separately will increase your potential client base beyond belief. I now pick and choose my massage clients and turn away many simply because I'm "too busy."

Treat everyone the way you want to be treated. We all have regrets of occasions when we didn't and it either ended up making us look like complete jerks or just plain embarrassed us into how lousy we'd made someone else feel. Everyone deserves honesty. Everyone deserves respect. Everyone deserves fairness.

There are guys whose focus is to get in and out as quick as possible--arrive, get the client off quick, collect the money, and leave. These are the guys who do not get repeat business, and over time, build a bad reputation so their potential client base is ever-shrinking. Do they really think they're fooling anyone when they try and claim that what they're doing can be even be considered fair or honest?

When you do screw up (even if it's out of your control), go the second mile to make it up to them. Mike in DC recently had an experience where he was forced to cancel on a client on rather short notice. As apology he offered the guy a half-price deal. The guy accepted. The guy appeared to be a tightwad and paying Mike exact to the two quarters it took to make the half-dollar required for half payment. So Mike was surprised when a week later the same guy called again eager to make another appointment. The second-mile treatment paid off nicely. And Mike is comfortable, proud of the fact that he treated the guy damn well. If Mike hadn't treated the guy so well, he may have gone and bad-mouthed Mike to his friends (read "potential clients").

Treat everyone the way you want to be treated. Your conscience and your wallet will both thank you.

Evan Teed has been a professional escort in Vancouver, BC for over three years and can be contacted here. He is a certified fitness instructor, trained weightlifting instructor and trained masseur with a strong passion for health and fitness. His MBA (management emphasis) degree helped secure a position for five years as vice-president of marketing for a retail chain with stores in six countries. He decided, however, that enjoyment of life was more important than a career that was consuming all his time. Having varied interests Evan owns several business ventures. With strong belief in the power of the internet, each one has its own web site. His ego is remarkably immense.