Dear Fellow Magician,


Do you have a great-looking website, but no one is finding it?


A fantastic, high-quality website is one of the most valuable tools for booking magic shows in the 21st century. It's pretty indispensable.


But a good website is only part of the answer.


You've got to get traffic to your site.


If no one knows about you, they won't find your website. And you won't get the bookings. It's that simple.

Search Engine Optimization is the long-term answer, and it's my favorite. But it takes months to build.

 
Today I want to talk about the fast one. The one that can put you in front of buyers this week.

Google Ads.

Now — before you close the tab, let's deal with what you're thinking.

I knew they'd start squawking.

And you know what? They're half right.

 
Google Ads has taken money from a lot of magicians and given them nothing back. I've seen the accounts. I've cleaned up the wreckage. If you've tried it yourself and watched a few hundred dollars evaporate, you are not stupid and you didn't do anything unusual. You did what the platform steers everybody into doing.

Here's what nobody explained to you.

Google Ads is not an advertising platform. It's an auction — and Google is not on your side of it.

Google makes money when you spend money. Every default setting in that account, every helpful-looking suggestion, every "recommendation" with a little checkmark next to it, is designed to increase what you spend. Not what you earn.

That isn't a conspiracy. It's just whose business it is.

So the entire job of running Google Ads well is knowing which of Google's suggestions to take and which to refuse. And you can't know that from Google's own training, because Google wrote it.

Let me show you what I mean. Ninety seconds, no jargon.

Think of it this way.

 
Good SEO earns you the table by the door at the dealer's room. It takes months, but once it's yours, it stays yours.

 
Google Ads rents you that table. You can have it tomorrow morning. But you pay rent every single day, and the moment you stop paying, you're back out in the hallway.

 
That's not a knock on Ads. Renting is exactly the right move when you need the table now — a slow season, a new market, a new show you're trying to sell. I run ads. I run them for a dozen accounts.

 
But because you're paying rent by the visitor, three things decide whether it pays off.

 
1. Who sees your ad.

 
You pay every time somebody clicks. Every click. That includes the twelve-year-old looking up how to do a coin trick, the person searching for magician jobs, the guy comparing magician salaries, and the parent in a state you'd never drive to.

 
None of them will ever book you. All of them cost you the same as a real buyer.

 
2. What your ad says.

Google doesn't just sell to the highest bidder. It scores how relevant your ad is to what the person searched, and a relevant ad from a small budget routinely beats an irrelevant ad from a big one — and pays less per click for the privilege.

 
This is the good news in the whole system. You do not have to outspend anybody. You have to be more relevant than them.

 
3. Where they land — and whether you can tell what happened.

 
This is the one that gets skipped, and it's the one that turns advertising into gambling.

 
Most magicians running their own ads cannot tell you which clicks turned into actual booking inquiries. They can tell you what they spent. They can tell you how many clicks they got. Ask which ad produced a paying show and the room goes quiet.

 
Without that, you have no idea what to turn up and what to shut off. You're just feeding the meter and hoping.

Now put those three together and you can see exactly how it goes wrong.

 
You set up an account. Google walks you through it, cheerfully, and every default is set to spend. You pick some obvious keywords like "magician." Google starts showing your ad to anyone in the neighborhood of that word — including everyone in list #1 above.

 
Your ad says "Magic for All Occasions," which matches nothing anyone actually typed, so your relevance score is poor and you pay a premium on every click.

 
They land on your home page. Some of them fill out your form. You have no way of knowing which ones, or which ad sent them.

 
Three or four hundred dollars later, you shut it off and tell people at conventions that Google Ads doesn't work.

 
It worked exactly as designed. Just not for you.

 
Oh — and one more thing you should know, because almost nobody does.

 
Google will add keywords to your account that you never approved. 

It's a setting, it's on by default in most accounts, and it's why magicians tell me "I never added that keyword" and are telling the truth. Unless somebody turned that off, it is still happening in your account right now.

I take the account off your hands entirely. You perform. I handle Google.

 
Here's what that means against those same three things.

I research what buyers in your area are genuinely typing — which is often not what magicians assume — and I build the account around those searches, separated by market so your birthday ads and your corporate ads aren't competing for the same dollar.

 
Then I do the part almost nobody does properly: negative keywords. These are the searches I forbid your ad from showing on. Tricks. Tutorials. Jobs. Salaries. Free. Costumes. Supplies. 

The hundred variations of people who will click your ad and never, ever hire you.

 
A well-built negative list is worth more than a bigger budget. It's the single fastest way to cut waste out of an account, and it's the first thing I look at when I inherit one.

 
I'll also shut off the automation that adds keywords behind your back.

Writing ads is copywriting, and copywriting is what I actually do for a living.

 
I write ads that match what the person searched, which improves your relevance score, which lowers what you pay per click. Better ads literally cost you less money for the same position.

 
I also use the ad extensions most magicians never touch — the extra lines, links, and details that make your ad physically bigger on the page. 

More space, more reasons to click, same cost.

Before a single dollar goes out, I make sure the tracking is telling the truth.

 
I check that your conversion tracking is installed, that it's counting real inquiries and not counting every visitor who wanders past, and that it survived whatever was last done to your website. (A site rebuild silently kills tracking. It happens constantly, and nobody notices for months.)

 
Where your site allows it, I'll set things up so you can see which kind of show each inquiry came from — so "you got five leads" becomes "three school assemblies and two birthdays," and you know which ads to feed.

 
Then, every month, I go through the account: what people actually searched, what's wasting money, what Google quietly changed, and what needs adjusting. 

Because Google will try something new every month. Every. Month.

I expected some skepticism.

I'm not a big name in magic. I don't create tricks. I'm not on the lecture circuit. Unless you listen to my podcast, The Professional Magician, you may never have heard of me.

Here's what I've got instead.

I've been running Google Ads since 2002 — and I've kept current the whole way, because Google rewrites the rules constantly and most of what's written about Ads online is years out of date.

I manage a dozen ad accounts right now, for working entertainers, and I go through every one of them every month by hand. Not a dashboard. Not a VA. Me.

I know your buyers, because they're my buyers. Twenty-plus years as a full-time professional magician — birthdays, schools, corporate, trade shows, libraries. I know what a PTA president types into Google, because I've spent two decades getting hired by her.

That last one matters more than it sounds. An ads agency can run an auction. It cannot tell you that "school assembly" and "school show" attract two different budgets, or that the word "cheap" in a search is a red flag worth blocking.

Here's what clients say: 

“After 4 months of having Cris Johnson use his marketing expertise to boost my business after COVID, I made so much money I could afford to buy a copy of the Daredevil #1 comic book.”

"Cris has recently worked on copy for a complete website, email campaigns, and autoresponder copy for my new venture. He did an amazing job with the complete project. Cris is also a wizard with SEO and has helped me, in a very short time, reach number one on google search."

"Cris is an excellent copywriter with a vast knowledge of digital marketing. He’s smart, conscientious, punctual, and thorough. He’s a great communicator and an all-around nice guy. I'm getting very regular inquiries, Cris -- THANKS!"

These guys (and many others)  trust me to get them results. And they wouldn’t be willing to put their names in the same space as me if I didn’t give them the results promised.

Right now, you’re probably wondering about the price.

I won't promise you a flood of bookings in week one.

 
Here's the honest version. The first few weeks of a new account are partly research — real searches from real people, teaching us what your market actually types. Some of that spend buys data rather than bookings. That's not waste; it's how the account gets sharp. But you should know it going in.

I also won't promise Google Ads is right for you at all.

If your budget is small and your season is long, SEO will serve you better, and I'll say so. If your website isn't ready to receive traffic, ads will just help people leave faster — and I'll say that too.

Which brings me to the awkward part.

There are two benchmarks. This isn't takeaway selling. Let me explain both.

 
One: your website has to be good enough.

If I send paid traffic to a site that doesn't sell, you'll pay for every one of those clicks and get nothing. You'll blame me, and honestly you'd be half right for taking the job.

So I look at your site first. That protects your bank account and my reputation at the same time. If the site isn't ready, I'll tell you what it needs — and if you'd rather fix that first, that's a conversation we can have.

Two: your budget has to be real.

Setting up and running an account properly takes real hours, and I'm a one-person operation. No assistants, no VAs, no offshore team quietly doing the work under my name. I do all of it myself.

That means your budget needs to cover both the ad spend and the work. If it doesn't, I'd be taking your money to do a rushed job, and neither of us wants that.

Don't worry about working the budget out on your own. That's part of what the call is for.

I don't post prices, and I want to tell you why rather than just leaving you to wonder.

 
Magicians' businesses are nowhere near alike. One of you works a single county and needs one campaign. Another works six states and four markets and needs the whole thing rebuilt from the ground up. One of you is starting from nothing. Another has an account somebody else already made a mess of, and cleaning that up is a different job than starting fresh.

If I posted a number, I'd be overcharging half of you and underquoting the other half.

So here's how it actually goes. You fill out the form, I look at your site and your situation, and we get on a call. Then you get a real number for your account — a setup fee, and a monthly fee for me to run it — and you decide.

Whatever it is, it's on top of what you pay Google. Google charges you per click, and how much you spend there is always your call.

I'm one person, and I go through every account by hand every month. That puts a hard ceiling on how many magicians I can take.

 
I also still perform 100 to 200 shows a year. (Let's be honest: would you take marketing advice from someone who quit performing?)

 
So the openings are limited, and they don't come up often.

 
If you want one, fill out the form now, while you're thinking about it.

Right now, somebody in your area is typing "magician for kids birthday party" into Google.

 
They're going to hire whoever shows up. Today that's somebody else.

 
You can be the name they see — as soon as this week — without learning any of this yourself.

 
--Cris