Setting your lead preferences
In order to book gigs, you need to be sure you're getting leads that appropriately match the service you provide. You can do this by setting various preferences in your control panel.
Note: Many of these preferences primarily affect the leads sent to you by GigSalad. You may still receive some direct leads that do not match your preferences exactly.
To review and edit your lead preferences, log in to your control panel and go to the Edit PromoKit section.
Choose your location
You must set your location when you join, but you can change it at any time through your lead preferences. When choosing your location, consider both where you actually live and what your competition is like in the surrounding areas. This is especially important if you live near a larger city. Sometimes it can be more fruitful to put that nearby city as your location rather than the smaller town you live in. However, be sure it's a city you're comfortable with traveling to regularly for gigs.
You can also purchase additional locations for a discounted price if you travel regularly to certain cities or have multiple locations for your business.
Pick your categories
Categories are the single most important aspect of your PromoKit, so take your time browsing all of your options and choose the best one(s). If you don't put yourself in enough categories, you'll get fewer leads. But you also don't want to add more just for the sake of adding. Only choose categories that truly match the services you provide. Otherwise, you'll end up wasting time declining leads or trying to sell yourself to a client looking for something completely different.
Your main category is the most important and should be the primary service you offer. Then you can anywhere from 1 to 19 additional categories, depending on your level of membership. Learn more about adding categories.
Remove event types
When you join GigSalad, you'll be opted in to receive leads for all types of events. If there are certain gigs you do not want, you can go into your preferences and remove those event types. If you change your mind later, you can always add them back. While your category choices do appear publicly on your profile, your event type selections will not. This setting is only used when sending leads.
Save your travel preferences
You should set your travel preferences to be the furthest you are willing to travel for a gig. You can customize your coverage by drive time, driving distance, or just aerial radius from your location. If you have any services with unique travel requirements, you can customize your travel preferences further by category in those cases. If you live in an area near the U.S./Canada border and do not wish to receive leaves outside of your country, you can adjust that setting as well in your travel preferences.
Note: If you have a free membership, you will only appear in searches and receive leads for events up to 200 miles from your location.
Adjust your performance lengths
You can choose the minimum and maximum performance length you prefer for events. This setting can help prevent you from getting leads for gigs that are shorter or longer than you're able to service. For instance, if you're a singing guitarist that isn't interested in serenades, proposals, or singing telegrams, then you might set your minimum performance length to 30 or 45 minutes.
Note: This setting is for lead preferences only. This is different than the Gig Duration setting in the additional details displayed on your profile. Your gig duration allows you to show what your typical performance length is, whereas your performance length lead preferences are the min/max you'd ever want to accept.
Specify advance lead notice times
Your advance lead notice preferences tell us how far out or how soon an event can be for it to be a viable lead for you. If you don't want leads for last-minute gigs or events that are a year or more away, this setting can prevent those.
Maintain your calendar
Unavailability is the most common reason for declining leads. This makes your GigSalad calendar the greatest tool you have in managing leads. There are several ways to keep your calendar up to date to ensure we do not send you leads for dates and times you are unavailable.
- Set your general availability & lead blocking preferences - telling us when we should be blocking leads will save you a lot of time declining or responding to leads you can't service.
- Sync with an external calendar - connect your Google or iCloud calendars to have your unavailability automatically transferred to your GigSalad calendar.
- Add events and unavailability manually - when you book or schedule something outside of GigSalad, be sure to put it on your calendar to block conflicting leads.
Check out these articles to learn more about the various calendar features.
Note: Blocking dates on your calendar only affects the leads sent to you by GigSalad. However, in the near future, they may also affect direct leads. We are currently developing an option that will let event planners filter their search results by availability on the date they choose.