Sinulog 2008 was a Blast! How to Make Money from Event Festivals

The Sinulog Festival 2008 was a blast! Not only did I participate as their official web designer but I also participated as an escort on one of the commercial floats to which I earned a big amount of money for only a few days work. So, how exactly do you make money from these event festivals?

Take Advantage of Web Traffic

Blogging about key event activities when they happen will definitely get your blog a lot of traffic. Especially with events like Sinulog where people are searching for winners of each specific category like Miss Cebu, Sinulog Festival Queen 2008 and the street dancing competition.

Covering these events and blogging first can get you a lot of traffic from search engines if your blog is SEO-optimized. But making money from these traffic means your blog must be ad-optimized too.

My blog experienced a surged of traffic during the Sinulog Festival week because my site is featured in the official website of Sinulog.

Get Paid for Your Services

These big events means a lot of work for freelancers. Photographers, dance instructors, choreographers, web and graphic designers are just some of the people that can benefit big on these events.

I earned a big amount of money from this event since Sinulog Foundation hired me as their web designer and put me in charge of the official Sinulog website. Some people I know on the other hand were hired as graphic designers and were in charge of poster layouts.

Aside from offering your technical skills, these events needs a lot of models for the vast number of commercial floats. Several of my friends modeled in the M Lhuillier Float, while I was an escort in the Placenta Float with International Beauty Queen Melanie Marquez.

It was an awesome experience. Miss Melanie was very down to earth and fun to talk to. The question that people ask me the most is how do I land these jobs? That is what we’re going to talk about next.

Connecting with Key People

In business, it really comes down to who you know. I cannot stress enough how important networking with key people is for whatever purpose it will serve you. This rule applies both online and offline.

The keyword here is key people. You need influential and powerful friends if you want to have an edge over other competitors. But how exactly do you network with them? You need something to offer.

Scott Wainner summarized it this way.

Making connections is almost always about a “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”, kind of thing. Most people are more than willing to help you (or your friends and associates), because they know that they’ll be able to cash in the favor some day. This is a very powerful business tool at any level.

Other Ways to Make Money

I also know a friend who makes a lot of money from CDs and DVDs during these events. What he does is makes a video documentary and burns them to a DVD. The Sinulog Foundation pays 500php per Video Documented DVD for which they sell at 1,000php each. Say he pays 10php per blank DVD and gets an order of 200 copies, that’s 490php x 200 = 98,000php. That’s around 100k pesos. Not too shabby for a few days work, right? But it still comes down to connections, because if you don’t have pre-orders I doubt you’d be able to sell all those DVDs.

Final Thoughts

It was both an enjoyable and fruitful event. Since big events like these only happens once or twice a year, it would be best to take advantage of it. The best thing you can do is to continually invest in yourself and network with people. When an opportunity arises, take calculated risks and use it to your advantage. Hope to see you guys here in Cebu next year. Pit Senior!

How did you spend your Sinulog 2008? Do you earn money during these events or do you spend them? Share your thoughts below.

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