Week 3 : Finances & income streams
Sex work is WORK, and this week you will learn how to make money and manage the financial side of your amazing new business.
Understanding self employment
Watch our financial empowerment training below to get up to scratch with everything to do with managing your cam business. Feel free to get in touch with your mentor or message in the group afterwards with any questions or to share what you learnt, we’d love to hear from you!
Being self employed means you can claim your webcam expenses back on your tax. As explained in the above training, this means you can buy yourself cam essentials and save on your tax bill. Here are some of the items you can offset against your tax bill
- A laptop or electronic equipment to cam with
- A work phone if you use one
- Lighting
- Clothing, shoes or makeup used for cam
- Toys if you use them
- Transport to and from ECC shoots.
It can be helpful to get an accountant who will do the work to make sure you’re maximising your profits whilst paying tax correctly – message us for recommendations on webcam model friendly accountants. Remember, you don’t even need to specify your exact role, it’s totally fine to put your job role as content creator or model etc if you want to be discreet.
Income streams
Whilst sitting on webcam and engaging with your clients is likely to be your main income stream with The Ethical Cam Community, it’s also worth thinking about other ways you can make money from your ECC profile. You can also make money by –
- Tipping. Encourage your clients to tip you if you’ve built a good relationship with them.
- Selling content – photos and videos in your private gallery
- Direct IM (instant messaging). This is camming without the video, great for those days when you just don’t want to get ready, or you can be discreetly making money if you have company or you’re out and about!
- Phone Chat. You can chat on the phone to increase your income. Ask your mentor to help you set this up.
- Lovense. If you use toys on cam, you can connect a lovense to encourage your clients to go wild on tipping!
We have training on all of these in our training videos section for you to browse and learn more.
Building your business
Keeping up with the background admin will allow your webcam business to grow and flourish. The better organised and committed you are, the more people will engage with you, the more regulars you’ll get and the money will roll in. Once you’re more established you can also raise your prices so that your rate minute to minute can grow with your business.
In the beginning when you’re waiting for calls, here are some things you can be doing to increase your chances of making more money –
- Reply to any messages from your inbox with a short but engaging message (remember not to give them too much here, it’s usually enough to say something like ‘i’d love to know more, when can you come and connect with me on cam?’
- Give feedback to your clients from past calls, this will encourage those connections and get them coming back to see you.
- Take photos and add them to your profile – this bumps you up the pages and makes your profile get seen by more potential clients.
- Change your tagline each time you go online – perhaps with something that makes them want to come and see you. You can talk about how youre feeling, what youre wearing or offer a flirty welcome.
- If you use other sites such as X or instagram, you can send a link to your adultwork to let people know that you’re online and where to find you. (Just be careful and wary of shadowbanning on some platforms).
- Add blogs to your profile so your clients can get to know you (or your fake persona) better.
- Send flirts.
- Hop onto free chat briefly to encourage clients in. Remember to look next to their username to check they have credits in their account, and don’t engage for too long – you’re only there to entice them into a paid chat.
- Experiment with different outfits and looks to see what gets you the most lucrative clients in.
Remember, the more you put into this business, the more you will get out. Being consistent with jumping online and taking the above action will increase your earnings. It may take time and not every day will be a success, but you are in this for the long run and we promise you really can change your life with this work!
Ask your mentor for support if you’re unsure about how to do any of the above.
Money mindset
Now we’ve covered the basics it’s crucial for us to touch on the importance of your relationship to money and your money mindset. Due to the oppression of women and past traumas or poverty, many of us on webcam are finding this work as a means to improve our lives and break away from our past. Webcam modelling can help you build a new life, become totally financially independent and acquire more money than you may have had before. However, to allow for things to change around us, we often need things to change inside us first – such as our emotions, thoughts, beliefs and behaviours around money.
This is not to say that its as simple as wanting something and getting it, we know that not everyone has the same start in life, and survival is often prioritised over anything. But often we do have the power to reassess the people around us, how much we are giving to others, how much energy we are giving away that could be used on ourselves, or addressing any current or past limitations. We can chat about any of these and begin to work through them in one of our regular mental health check ins.
Listen to Rose Radford chatting to us about money blocks, and how you can start to get a better understanding of what might be in the way of you making more money right now.
We hope that after this week you are feeling fired up and ready to welcome in abundance! Share with us in the whatsapp group how you’re feeling if you’d like to.
Congratulations! We hope you have enjoyed the lessons learnt this week. Time to move onto week 4!
