In this episode, Jared Judge shares his whirlwind experiences from the past weeks, including unique gigs, effective networking strategies, and SEO tips to boost your music career. Discover how trading blog posts can improve your Google ranking, why networking is crucial, and how to land higher-paying gigs. Jared also recounts his adventures, from a cryo sauna experience to participating in a high-end catering event.

"High-end gigs are not just about the paycheck; they offer the support, respect, and professional connections that every musician deserves."

- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)​
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Secret To an Unlimited Stream of High-Paying Private Event Gigs …Without Spending a Fortune on Online Advertising or Having Any Connections!
- Fulltime Music Academy (Gig Vault): 24,665 High-End Venues + Event Planners: Use this directory to book your highest-paid gig to-date.
- Breaking Into High-end Gigs Masterclass: How I Went From Broke Musician to Thriving By Breaking Into These Largely Unknown High-Paying Gigs

What's up, renegade musicians? Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast, where we do things differently than most musicians because quite frankly, we see that most musicians are stuck with gigs that they don't like, working too hard, schlepping too many pounds of gear, playing their hearts out, only to be compensated less than adequately.

And that's what we renegade musicians seek to change, to eliminate from our life. And that's what we do.

So anyway, I'm in Wisconsin right now. Y'all know that I live in Denver, but I'm back visiting some family and it has been a crazy couple of weeks in Denver and then also in Texas because I visited some family there too. But this isn't a story about my family.

This is a story about a couple things that have happened that I am using to advance my renegade musicianship and get me higher paid gigs. Let me think a couple fun things have happened.

I don't remember what I've told you on the last episode, but I played a wedding at the Evergreen Lake house, beautiful venue.

And in fact, at that venue I met up the photographer and officiant. Both of them were people that I have recently interviewed over Zoom, and we traded blog posts on our respective websites. And so I think, yeah, I did chat about this, but it was just crazy seeing both of them there.

In case you haven't listened to the previous episode, getting links to your website on other people's website is a great way to rank higher on Google.

And why do you want to do that? So that when somebody is searching for some sort of entertainment for their party, wedding, corporate event, whatever, that you actually show up.

Because odds are your website, when somebody's searching for corporate event entertainment in insert your city, you're probably not even showing up on Google.

There definitely are things that are showing up and most of them are going to be dj companies. And that's because they have gotten lots of links to their websites on other people's websites.

And so I've recently been trading blog posts where we basically just interview each other and then take the transcript of that interview, feed it to ChatGPT, ask it to write a blog post, and then posting that to our respective websites with links to each other's website.

And I've actually noticed a significant improvement from doing that. And so that was crazy to be at a wedding where two of the people that I recently did that with were since going to Wisconsin.

I just scheduled another interview with one of my friends in the events industry that I met at the a networking event.

His name is Brian. He runs ignite entertainment. They do, like, really cool experiences like axe throwing and other kinds of things at events.

And we're going to write blog posts about each other and post it, get some links so that Google sees us and ranks our websites higher.

Anyway, so let me tell you a little bit about this other really cool opportunity that I just had a chance to do, which involved me getting into a cryo sauna with negative 175 degree temperatures, crazy winds.

And so this was at a catering company's headquarters in Denver, and they also happened to run a corporate event venue called Social Capital.

The catering company is called Footers Catering. And I actually originally methadore one of the staff members, Aaron, through the networking event that I had met my other friend who I mentioned here at National association for catering and events. And so that is a networking group for the events industry.

I keep mentioning that these exist. Not many musicians take me up on joining them, despite the fact that they see how many private event gigs I get out of them. I don't know.

Maybe they just don't like money. So anyway, I met this person through that networking group, and I actually had become the host of their podcast, the networking groups podcast, the Denver NACE podcast. And you'll take a listen.

If you listen to that podcast, you'll see a recent interview with Erin Young. And it was awesome. We did it actually in person, and she hosted me with some food and some drinks, and it was a really good interview.

I asked her about her personal life, her experience working with footers catering, and it was really cool. And then she mentioned that they cater lunch for their employees pretty much every day or every Tuesday. I'm not sure which.

And I said, hey, I'd love to, you know, sponsor one of those lunches and give you guys a free 30 minutes concert. And she said that would be amazing.

So we put our heads together, planned it out, and then that happened last Tuesday, actually, just less than a week ago.

It is now Monday, July 1. And so it happened Tuesday, the last Tuesday in June. And it was great.

It was a lot of work because it was out on a patio, and they were kind of spread out. So I set up two speakers, ran cables pretty far apart from each other, and then played. And it was hot, really hot.

But everybody loved it. I got to introduce myself on my own microphone because that's another part of my setup that I don't really mention that much is I do have wireless microphones that I could use for speeches.

Or if it's a wedding, I could let them use my wireless mics for the officiant and any readers, but I don't really enjoy running sound in that way, so I don't really market it that well.

And that's okay, because you shouldn't have to do things that you don't want to do. So anyway, I used my own microphone, introduced myself, thank them for being here or for allowing me to perform for them, and it was good.

Got tons of great feedback, and they definitely took lots of photos and videos on their phones and posted it to their socials, which is cool.

And I do believe it planted a very strong seed for them, bringing me in for their corporate events that they host. So, yeah, that's the kind of thing that I do. And then after they mentioned that as part of their workplace wellness initiatives, they have what's called a cryo sauna, which is not a hot sauna.

It is a liquid nitrogen cooled box that you get into, and for about three minutes, you experience negative 175 degrees Fahrenheit blasted at your body through high power fans. And they. I had to sign a waiver to do this, which was scary.

And then they had me, like, you had to wear closed toes, closed toed shoes, which I had. You had to put on ear muffs, gloves. And then they also had some headphones, like, sound.

What is it? Sound cancelling. Noise cancelling headphones. And they put on a song, which I put on Zed's new song, out of time.

It's a single that he just released, one of my favorite EDM artists. And, yeah, I get to experience it. It was the perfect way to cool down after a sweaty performance, and it was so much fun.

There's a picture of me that on my Facebook and Instagram, in case you want to see what that looks like. Just kind of looks like I'm in a freezer, because I am. And it was.

It was pretty awesome. Uh, that was actually. Was that Monday or Tuesday? I don't remember.

I think that was Tuesday. Yeah, that was Tuesday, because the night before Monday, I played a non profit event, and this. I live streamed this into the business tips for gigging musicians, Facebook group.

And I live streamed my setup. And this was a nonprofit event for a conference, which was like an international society for technology educators. Yeah, iste.

And they had a conference in the Colorado convention Center, and they were hosting a VIP event. And so they reached out to me via email, just saying that they were looking for a live musician for our VIP event. And I said, yep, I'm available.

And I quoted them a thousand for 2 hours. And then they got back to me saying, hey, nope, we're a nonprofit. Can't do a thousand.

And they counted 600. And I accepted that because it's a nonprofit and it's technology educators, which I am a former public school educator. And so I kind of wanted to just be in the room.

It was a great performance, actually. Like, they all loved it. And as I was finished setting up, I got to chat with the CEO of the conference and a bunch of his staff, and I mentioned that I'm a former public school teacher.

And they were like, hey, we got to have you introduce yourself on the microphone when we do our, like, welcome thing. And I was like, okay, sure, let's do it.

And so about halfway through my performance, the CEO got on the microphone, I stopped playing, and he was welcoming everybody, thanking them for coming.

And then he said, I got to introduce you to our lovely musician. And everybody applauded, and he said, Jared Judge, come on. Come on up.

And so I went over to him, and he said, Jared, could you introduce yourself and tell these people about, you know, who you are and your background? And so I did.

And when I mentioned that I'm a former public school music teacher, everybody cheered, which was really nice. It was like, oh, yeah, I'm in a room of my former colleagues.

And so that was really cool. And then, yeah, the rest of the performance was good. Some of the staff of the hotel were listening in, and I saw them, like, jamming and bopping their heads.

And so I chatted with some of them afterwards, and I gave them my cards because that's, you know, we, as business savvy musicians, renegade musicians, you might say. That's what we do. We network and market our services.

And so I gave him a couple cards and said, if you guys have events in the future where my music would be appropriate, just let me know.

And so I got an email the next day from their manager, who was not at the event, who said, hey, we heard from our staff members that you were a hit at this event, and I'd love to get to know you more.

And then she scheduled a 30 minutes meeting with me to go over pricing so that she could add me to the hotel's preferred vendor list.

So, you know, these are all kind of the spiderwebs and dominoes that I knocked down just by showing up, doing a great job, and being business savvy enough to network while I'm at these events, right? I'm not, like, pushing it by getting on a microphone and saying, hey, hire me.

No, I'm just doing my job really, really well and then being extremely professional, but also pushing the connections afterwards by giving out business cards to the right people, saying the right words. So immediately after that, that was Monday night.

Tuesday, I had that gig. No, Tuesday. Yeah, it was a gig.

It was that catering company thing. And then Wednesday morning at 330 in the morning, I got on a plane where I got in the car to get to the Denver airport for a 520 flight to Milwaukee. And it's been a blast.

But I'm exhausted. I've not had much chance to just sit down and focus for any length of time. Um, yeah, let's see.

Thursday we went to Summerfest, which was awesome. You know, Wednesday was the travel day, so you don't really get to do much. Wednesday.

Thursday we went to Summerfest. Really awesome stuff. Saw some really cool people.

Nappy roots. Eve six, elenium, Alice in Wonderland. It's a fun artist.

Check them out. Then Friday, went to a Brewers game, watched a grand slam happen, which was awesome. Saturday, we kind of did get to chill a little bit.

Sunday, my mother in law, she is an actress, so I saw her in a show and she was really great. And then today is Monday, July 1. So I've been so busy.

I need a break, man. Hopefully I'll get one soon. This week should be a little bit easier.

It's July 4 week, so I'm gonna sit back and focus on some BookLive things, get some emails out to some people.

And yeah, I'm working really hard on getting more support articles and videos, walking you through how to do specific things in BookLive, like how to see the directory of the event planners and venue owners near you, how to reach out to them using the email templates that are provided, just even how to write a contract and send it all, you know, kind of things that I take for granted because I've been using the software for so many years.

But like, to a complete newbie, you got to understand why you would want to do those things in the first place.

Which, spoiler alert, the answer is you'll increase your capacity to book more gigs and then you gotta understand how to do it click by click. So that's what I'm gonna record some videos to do. All right.

That's where I'm at. I know this was a jam packed episode, but you're renegade musicians. You can handle it.

And hopefully it was inspiring because my biggest thing is like, I don't just want to be a talking voice in your ear. I want to be the reason why you actually take an action today that you wouldn't have taken yesterday. I kind of like so tired of musicians just staying in their shell and not doing things because of fear.

Fear that it won't work or fear that they'll embarrass themselves. Like, I don't care, and you shouldn't either. Life is too darn short for this.

There's so many opportunities. Your music deserves a better stage than the one that it currently has. And I'll even say that about me, too.

Like, I don't know, $600 for 2 hours. It's not. Not that much.

I could do better, and I'm planning on doing better. And so that's why I do these podcasts, is to inspire you, but also to inspire myself and reflect on what I'm doing. Figure out what adjustments and tweaks I need to make.

But the important part is making those adjustments and tweaks. Don't just let it sit. So go out there, take some action.

Do something. And if you want to check out those new articles that I'm writing, go to support.booklive.com and check out the video walkthroughs.

They'll even show you how to get free website hosting so you don't have to pay a subscription fee to Bandzoogle or Squarespace or anything like that. So check those out, support.booklive.com and then get your free BookLive trial at booklive.com.

all right, thanks for tuning into another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, “Your music will not market itself!”.

Bye, everybody.