Tips for Pro Reading?

Hey readers,

Recently I have really felt the desire and need to go pro with my Tarot (and possibly Lenormand, but mainly Tarot) readings. I'm almost 20 (in Oct) and I feel like this is the time to act. I've been studying and practicing the Tarot for over 5 or 6 years now, and I feel I'm at that point now in my journey where I need to be reading professionally. Plus, it doesn't hurt either that I've had numerous recent people I've read for tell me I'm pro level at this stage.

I don't want to drop crazy $$$ on anything serious if I don't have to, but I will invest in what is necessary. I just sort of want my own little personal profesional Tarot practice, maybe some business cards and potentially a website provided I do well enough in my first year of pro reading. I don't have my driver license yet, let alone my own car, so until then I will mostly be doing readings out of my house or at my nearby Starbucks or something; I'll have to get creative with location.

I read a statistic from Mrs. Benebell Wen that claimed most people who do not know who the reader is will pay at most $10 for a 15-minute reading, and $15 for a 30-minute reading. Also, how do you pro readers prefer to set your prices by – by spread/amount of cards drawn, or by amount of time for the reading? I've seen it done both ways.

For those of you who ARE already professional readers and have had your own small Tarot practice established for some time now, I need all the tips and advice I can get on setup, advertisement, price rates, etc., to get me started, so please do not hesitate to shed your wisdom here to guide me. I'm enrolling myself in a couple Counseling classes at my college come Fall on account of reading that Counseling will benefit my practice on a personal level, so I will have that covered.

Thank you so, so, so much to everyone who comments.

Thanks,
Chris

This is the advice I give to someone in your circumstance: test things out! Set up to read somewhere public, for free (or optional donation), in random different public places. If you sense the Universe is guiding people who really need (perhaps life-changing) readings to your table, then circumstances would seem to be ripe.

Now, if you try all that but don't sense that people are being invisibly guided to your table, personally, I'd say (for whatever reason) circumstances aren't quite ripe. If you can't "give it away for free," then to me, it's hard to charge for it. Of course that is just an opinion.

P.S. The other thing you can do is seek Enlightenment. The best readers (to me) have those same qualities as the old martial arts teachers -- a smiling, laughing, graceful and pure compassion which is also detached, not seeking anything but merely doing what they do, then moving on, seemingly with neither plans nor concerns, simply in this moment, observing and acting with the simplicity of birds.

ThtDancerGuy said:

I don't want to drop crazy $$$ on anything serious if I don't have to, but I will invest in what is necessary. Chris

Click to expand...

MY Advice: DON'T spend a lot of money up front. Have clients pay you BEFORE you read, you are charging for your TIME not for results. And get a good set of business cards made and pass them out like crazy.

Finally: the advice I was given when I first learned: Charge for what you do and give value for what you charge.

I started by reading all my friends for a quarter ($0.25) a reading. I have gone up a lot since.

barb

Don't plan on making enough money to live on, first of all. Your readings should just be considered "mad money" unless you find you meet with phenomenal success and people are mobbing you for paid readings.

If you're going to do business cards, get the card blanks at Walmart or somewhere like that and print your own. Don't spend a lot of money on business cards at first. Your return on them won't be great enough to justify expensive business cards to begin with. If you don't have a printer, then just get the blanks and put your contact info on them by hand till you make more with your readings.

Make some flyers and put them on all the free bulletin boards you can find around town.

Start small and work yourself up to the bigger expenses. Depending on where you live, you may find that nobody is interested in readings.

Above all, give good value for your readings. Don't skimp. Go the extra mile. And always, always keep your readings in strict confidence. Don't discuss them with anyone at all except the sitter whose reading you did.

The biggest tip I can give you is to relax and let the reading wander into your mind as you look at it. The very worst thing you can do is get anxious and afraid of being "wrong" because you'll freeze up and no information is likely to get past that. If you relax, then your intuition will never fail you. Say what you see and if a scrap of music or a phrase or something appears in your mind right away, then that's what you say even if the card meanings you've learned don't match exactly.

Good luck! I wish you great success!

PS: And don't always expect to be right. You'll have plenty of sitters along the way who will say that what you've read for them has no relevance, but those sitters are the ones who often come back a few months or years later, all amazed because what you saw was right. :