It’s been said by many occult authors who are much better at this sort of thing than I am, that modern advertising is a form of magic — and rather nasty magic at that.

Advertisers cast a sort of enchantment over people, or at least attempt to do so, in such a way that people connect their survival, their sexual identity or desires, or their cultural or social well-being, to a specific product or service. [Use OUR PRODUCT!] one ad for laundry soap might urge, showing you with a family dressed in clean clothes and a husband nuzzling his wife’s shoulder in a kid-friendly but suggestive way while walking on the beach. One gets the impression that laundry soap leads to a happy marriage, appropriately rambunctious kids, an oceanside vacation, and suitable nookie appropriate to wedded bliss.

Of course, it does no such thing.

Buying a specific laundry soap or a pack of gum can be magically linked to ideas about sex, family, social status or financial well-being, usually through image magic, but also through other forms of magic like evocation and enchantment. It’s bad magic, because it attempts to mess around with other people’s willpower and personal desires, and such magic can almost never be done cleanly. But… This also means that other things, like fortune-telling and divination services, can be linked to ideas about sex, family, social or financial well-being, and so on. But just because they can, doesn’t mean that they should.

The ethical and responsible magician, diviner or fortune-teller is thus faced with a dilemma. How do we advertise our services without engaging in the same kind of advertising flim-flam and suggestive fraud that it so common in advertising today? How do we advertise our services without coming into conflict with people’s personal desires or attempting to interfere with their will? How does the professional occultist discreetly and appropriately draw the notice of potential clients, provide them with useful services, and get return business — and can this be done magically? There are, of course, thousands of other providers of services in the country, in the world, who can likely offer these services too. How do you find your people?

Thanks to Jason Miller‘s Strategic Sorcery course, and Sara Mastros‘s lessons in witchcraft, I know that it’s important to enchant for success at every step of the way, and to pick your times after . Yet with advertising, it’s hardly ever just about creating a pretty ad. You also have to know how to get the ad in front of the right eyeballs, at the right time of day, and the right time of the month. In other words, we need to know more about advertising than just how to link our services with the traditional ‘hunger points’ of modern advertising like sex, social and financial well-being, and so on.

Fortunately, there is a keystone of modern advertising that’s ripe for its usefulness to modern magic. That process is the Product Purchase Cycle, the six steps of engagement that most customers engage in consciously or unconsciously before purchasing anything, whether it’s a pack of gum or a brand-new car. It’s useful to modern magic because it’s a timed cycle, and a good deal of magic is wrapped up in the observation and integration of existing cycles into our process of activities.

The Product Purchase Cycle has six stages. These stages are as follows: Awareness, Consideration, Investigation, Enjoyment, Preferment, and Purchase. Each point in the cycle is a point for the magician to engage with and examine, and then to enchant for better results. Let’s look at each of these steps in the Product Purchase Cycle and see how we can engage with it, ethically and responsibly, to produce better outcomes for our clients.

Wait a minute? Why are we trying to produce better outcomes for our clients? I thought this was about producing better outcomes for us, as wizards or witches or sorcerers or practitioners? Why do we care about the client at all?

Not to put too fine a point on this, but it’s easy to get a client once as a magician or practitioner or fortune-teller or what-have-you. Princess Merida from Disney’ Brave — or her mother— would tell you the same: “I’m nothing but a simple woodcarver!” Sure, fine… you get one spell. But the results are, as it were, unbearable. You have to go a long way to make up for a dissatisfied client… and word-of-mouth in the spirit business is worth more than any advertising you could hope to buy. Unless you are the sort of witch who can successfully hightail it out of your town at a moment’s notice and leave behind only mystical poetry as a solution to the dissatisfied — you’d like your clients to look you up again, and recommend your services happily to the relevant parties.

So… clients. As a witch or a wizard or practitioner… let’s use the word practitioner from here on out, shall we? We have to focus our ethical, responsible advertising and marketing strategy around clients.

Awareness

The first item is Awareness. Look, there’s a lot of people to follow on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Why should any potential future client follow you rather than someone else?

Before any client can pay you, they have to know who you are. And so this is the first part of the cycle to enchant for — that your videos, blog posts, TikToks, and advertisements get seen by the right people: your potential clients.

How do you do that?

Well, first you have to identify who ‘the right people’ are, and that means that you have to know what sort of people are in your market. One way to do this is to pull out all the Court Cards in your Tarot deck( the kings, the queens, the knights, and the pages), add in the Major Arcana from the Fool up through the Hermit, and then shuffle them together.

Ask the question, “Who is my market?” or “What is the next market I should focus on?” Draw three cards, lay them down left to right.

You’ll get three cards in some state of reversal or direct. The cards themselves will give you an indication of whether your next group of clients should be young (pages), middle-aged to old (queens and kings), or professionals of some sort (major arcana).

This reading at left makes a good deal of sense for me. I’m an older man, so it makes sense for me to gear my astrological and other services toward men my age and older who have lost their passion or their fire, and are looking to regain it; toward women who apparently have it all but are seeking a more active role for themselves; and toward men who are no longer young but find themselves in a bit of a financial pickle due to divorce, bad business decisions, or being family men without much sense of how to move their own individuality forward.

The cards relationship to each other also reveals three stories. Given the empress’s central position, marketing toward women who are choosing the next direction of their love lives makes a lot of sense too; there are fewer choices for women of a certain age, and the men in question may be in various states of debility or detriment. The King of Wands is looking forward, and I can provide guidance and hope for a future love life. The Knight of Pentacles is looking backward, and trying to make sense of how his past came unraveled (misdirected passions or an imperious woman seem to be relevant choices).

I’ve thus identified four markets that I can speak to: men trying to figure out the next chapter of their lives, men trying to figure out what happened in the last chapter of their lives; women sitting pretty but faced with a big romantic/social/economic decision.

I can now enchant for those types of clients to become aware of me. I want them to be aware of three things, too: 1) that I can possibly help them figure out what comes next, or what happened, or how to balance their choices moving forward; 2) that I am available to them upon request; 3) that I get paid for my services.

How do you enchant for that awareness?

In the Greek Magical Papyri, it sometimes says, for the start of an operation or for its ending, do the usual. In like manner, it’s not my position to tell you how to ‘do the usual’. Some of you are going to sigilize your intent, others will build honey jars. You may have to do a full-on major Tibetan ritual, or maybe you’re just going to do some astral journey-work for an hour. Do the usual, but remember the overall goal: to attract the notice of a specific type of client and claim their attention, however briefly. Come to their notice in a useful way.

Consideration

The second stage of the Product Purchase Cycle is Consideration. This largely happens in the potential client’s thought processes, and it’s subject to some influence — but the ethical practitioner creates the conditions for a positive consideration to take place through providing information rather than through outright attack on the mind of the potential client.

In the consideration stage, the potential client has to overcome a lot of hurdles. “Am I really the sort of person who needs to see a [practitioner]?” “What if it’s weird?” “What if this person is a fraud?” They’re not buying a car, after all: they’re trusting you with providing a highly risky and challenging commodity, which is either (for fortune tellers) good advice in difficult times through non-rational means, or (for practitioners who do spellwork) non-rational solutions to challenges that defy ordinary problem-management techniques.

This is the point where your communications skills shine, really — you have to have materials (on your website and/or social media) that answer basic questions, make you seem like you’re a relatively normal person, that you have a good head on your shoulders, and you would answer reasonable questions with reasonable answers. In video, in text, in audio, you have to come across as ethical, well-informed, and interested in helping people.

And you can enchant for this, too — Do the Usual. Again, for some of you this is about summoning spirits to help you write the best script for the best TikTok video ever, or the perfect thread of tweets on a relevant subject; or maybe it’s about putting a sigil on the wall behind you while you make a less-than-adequate video or putting a string of nonsense hashtags into several tweets in a row. Or maybe it’s responding to non-magical questions in a thoughtful and reasonable way, while letting a spirit hang out in your crystal ball and second-guess your responses?

You also have to keep in mind what you’re doing as Awareness magic. If you’re gearing all of your TikTok videos toward an audience made up of Pages of Cups, you’re going to turn off the Kings of Wands and Knights and Empresses. You want the people whose awareness you’re currently cultivating to consider you a source of appropriate advice — and kings and empresses need different advice than pages, or even knights a little down on their luck.

Take the other part of your Tarot deck, the one without all the court cards, and shuffle it. Ask the question, “what three strategies can I employ to create favorable considerations of myself in the target markets?” Then flip over three cards.

Sigh. For me, this is saying that this is an area of slow market growth, without immediate results… I’m going to aim my arrows or my wands and let them land where they may. I have to recognize that my potential clientele’s questions are normally going to fall into seven key buckets or concern, and demonstrate some level of expertise in most of them: love, mysteries, knowledge, power, riches, fame and facing challenges. Most any fifty-year-old would know that, right?

Oh, yeah, and I need to adopt a global strategy: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok… any platform that helps me reach a worldwide audience is likely to assist me in reaching a group of people that will at least consider hiring me.

Investigation

Investigation is the third stage of the Product Purchase Cycle. It’s usually intermingled with the Consideration stage in small purchases (like a pack of gum), but gradually become distinct and separate the larger the overall cost of the purchase becomes (like a house or a car). If I have a choice between a KitKat bar and a Snickers, I rely on prior consideration to choose which one I want; but if I’m deciding whether to buy another Ford or switch to a Subaru, I have a lot more research to do.

Again, consideration takes place mostly in the client’s mind: “Can I see myself driving a Subaru?” “Can I see myself going to a Tarot card reader?” “Do I really need to buy a spell for finding love at fifty years of age after a divorce?” It’s largely about self-image and personal brand — and coming to terms with that brand. If you’re going after a particular clientele (and apparently one of my new markets should be straight white men fifty and over who don’t believe in mumbo-jumbo, alas!), the hurdle is to appear reasonable and rational and well-informed to that client.

But INVESTIGATION takes place mostly on your website: what are your service times? What are your fees? What can I expect to get for my money? What guarantees are in place? Or what is definitely not guaranteed? Can I take a test drive of this vehicle? What are the local showroom’s hours?

It’s a little dismaying to think of ourselves as no different than a car. I mean, we’re PROVIDING ACCESS TO THE MYSTERIES OF THE COSMOS! We are plumbing the depths of the human psyche! We are calling forth the powers of the gods! But all these folks want to do is kick the tires.

Good reviews can be faked, and most people know that. Mildly exaggerated claims come across as mendacious. Is your website difficult to navigate? Does your Twitter feed regularly devolve into flame wars which you appear to lose? Are you part of a community where it appears your views are respected, admired (and maybe feared, a little)? Does it seem like a bunch of people have blocked you or reported you? Are you a rabid supporter of one political party or another, and is that obvious from your social media?

The more skittish a client is about seeking non-rational advice (like Tarot, Geomancy, or Astrology), the more that an investigation turning up these sorts of results creates red flags — and you will ‘lose’ 100% of clients from your target markets, without ever knowing they were there.

On the other hand, you can put up a lot of green flags that draw people in — make it easy and cheap to schedule a half-hour consultation; be a helpful member of online communities; write essays and create videos that are intentionally focused on your target markets, and provide immediately useful content that can be put into practice right away, like an affirmation before a first date after years of not dating at all, or how to photograph yourself for your new dating profiles (Damn, I have work to do).

In terms of enchanting for this — On the one hand, Do The Usual. On the esoteric or occult side, you’re going to make sigils, talk to spirit guides, communicate your wishes to the universe. It’s something along the lines of “When I want people like [my target market] to study me, what do I want them to hear me saying? What sorts of things should I be saying?” On the public or exoteric side, publish the materials that contain the message that you want your new client market to hear.

And let’s not forget, we’re in a metaphysical profession — so we shouldn’t discount or poo-pooh the value of prayer. Solomon king of Israel and a prince among magi prayed first of all for wisdom, and so everything else was granted to him: prayers to whatever G-D or gods you honor, for the wisdom and capability to advise and guide your clients respectfully and usefully, should not be overlooked.

Notice, again, that we’re not trying to enchant the client. We’re trying to call up in ourselves, and build up the resources in ourselves, to serve the client well: to do right by them and assist them in the question they have. And then we’re putting the appropriate general resources into our web page, our marketing materials, and our social media feeds. We’re creating an environment in which the skittish, the uncomfortable, the suspicious, and the curious alike can be set at ease.

Part of the reason for this deliberate focus on building up our own resources is that historically, witches and wizards and the like were (and remain) a profession absolutely rife with fraud — people who knew how to charm people away from their money, but not how to charm a problem away from the client. It’s possible, with some money and investment, to set up a metaphysical shop with absolutely no idea what any of the stuff in it does — I know of at least one such business staffed almost exclusively with people who have no idea what they’re selling.

Again, you can take your tarot deck without the court cards and the first ten Major Arcana, and shuffle before pulling three cards — this time on the question, “What can I do to make any investigation of my skills more favorable to hiring me?”

It’s hard to look at the three cards I drew — my task is apparently to hear people’s heartbreak, demonstrate skill at dealing with difficult times and challenges, and dispel illusions and delusions. It’s important work, of course, for the market that I’m dealing with — middle-aged folks dealing with the consequences of past actions, Empresses caught warming a throne, or older kings that have lost their mojo.

But it’s still work that needs doing. And so putting material on my website that suggests that I’m good at wrestling with these problems, or asking my spirit-court to assist me in helping people find me to deal with these issues… that becomes part of the overall strategy that I enchant for.

Enjoyment

Enjoyment is the next stage of the product purchase cycle, and it’s part of the reason why a practitioner has to focus so much on ethics when they set up their advertising.

Once the client actually gets in touch with you, is it an enjoyable experience? DO you make it easy for them to set up a time to meet? Do you get in touch with them promptly? Do you provide guidance on how to prepare for the encounter? Do you ask preliminary questions? Do you respond to their follow-up emails or make it easy to reschedule? Are they greeted warmly? Is there some sort of micro-social-encounter to make the consultation easier? Do you build in extra time for the appointment if needed? Is the client in crisis-born tears or in relieved smiles at the end of an hour?

All of that is the bare minimum expected of a day spa. And a practitioner is speaking to a person on at least a mind to mind level, if not soul-to-soul. If a client hasn’t reached a place of happiness, or at least relief, at the end of an hour — you probably shouldn’t be consulting for them. Ending a consultation with trauma, for example, makes you unworthy of trust.

How can you enchant for the client’s enjoyment? First, recognize at at least some clients are shopping around for someone who can handle some very deep and difficult stuff indeed. They may be looking for a way to process trauma, for example, or find the courage to leave an abusive spouse. They may be going through a divorce, or a bad breakup; they may have recently lost their job. Part of your task then, is to open the doors that they can’t see and say, “look, here’s a door.” THat’s on a psychological level only, of course.

I don’t happen to believe that most ethical and honorable practitioners are working only on a psychological level exclusively. I think that we’re performing spiritual medicine at the same time, and working to provide healing on levels other than the physical. But our goal here should be to follow the Asclepeian or Hippocratic oath, first to do no harm. Soul-repair is rarely harmful or hurtful; if tears flow, they’re tears of relief and ease rather than pain or suffering. And if you know or even suspect that a particular magical operation for the client is going to hurt them, you should provide due warning of that fact beforehand.

But we should also consider the (typically American) warning that many fortune-tellers have to advertise their services under: “This service is for entertainment purposes only.” The word entertainment has a lot of synonyms, among them words like refreshment, play, diversion, spectacle, restoration and relaxation. It also means “the act of receiving a guest.”

In the most-ancient sense, the practitioner is receiving a guest. That carries with it certain obligations, which the spirits that crowd around us are well aware of — to treat them fairly, to provide them with sustenance as we’re able to provide (usually with story and conversation catering to their interests, if you’re a fortune-teller; or with spectacle if you’re more inclined to magic), and to shield them from harm. The guest has similar obligations to us as their hosts… but their actions are covered through payment — and now our task is to see that they encounter the wonder and amazement that we see in them, without being harmed by it.

How do we enchant for this, for Enjoyment? Again, the responsible and ethical practitioner is not trying to hypnotize the client into thinking they got a great experience when they didn’t. The responsible practitioner is enchanting themselves — to put on a good performance for each client, to be prepared for each session, to be capable of delivering on a great experience. Some of this is about Doing The Usual, in whatever tradition you practice. Some of it is about recognizing that you are no different than the pool-boy or the lawnmower guy or the cleaning lady — a temporary hired servant who is expected to do a good job at a price-point the client finds reasonable. The pool-boy or the lawnmower guy or the cleaning lady (or even the day spa) has one advantage that you haven’t got, though: the client can in theory go see anyone in the world who has an internet connection. You have to have a way to recognize and explain and explore the meaning of spirit that resonates with them. Asking for the ability to discern this in them is critical to our success as practitioners.

It’s easy here to say Do the Usual. But it’s worth adding to that, that the usual is in part about being a responsible and ethical advisor to people in challenging circumstances. I know a tarot reader and practitioner who has clients on retainer, who call him up and ask for a card-drawing about the most-inane questions, like what color tie to wear on a date or if they should show up to work today. This practitioner, I don’t think, has served this client well; I’m willing to admit that maybe I don’t understand the particulars — but this client is somehow in the grip of their own constant fear of the spirit-world; and the practitioner is earning money from perpetuating and exploiting this fear, rather than creating a state of relaxation or ease in the client. Is there enjoyment here? Not really.

The cards from my narrowed deck give me some important options for creating the conditions for enjoyment for my clients:

• Be on their side, rather than another challenge they have to deal with — don’t present information that is a personal attack on them or their worldview.
• Recognize that they need hope in two kinds, both immediate “right now” and long-term ‘this will work out if you face it’ kinds of hope, and give it from the stars rather than from myself.
• Don’t just provide judicious support when they can afford my services, but be on their team for the long haul — which probably means that short, simple follow-up questions can be free whenever I have the time. My goal isn’t to create dependence, but self-sufficiency.

In general, this is pretty good advice, but it’s the advice I got specifically for dealing with the clients that are supposedly coming my way. When we think about empresses and kings and knights, these are the things they’re looking for: allies in whatever challenges they may be facing, hope, and a clear value proposition that favors their own needs rather than mine as the skilled expert.

Preferment

As I just mentioned, your services are up against a lot of other practitioners in the world. A lot. I don’t follow a lot of people on Twitter, but it’s still more than seven hundred people. Nearly all of them are practitioners of one stripe or another. (Some of them are teachers, which is from another part of my life; and others are role-playing game designers, which covers another part of my life).

Why on earth would I choose to treat more than seven hundred people as colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and potential allies, when any one of them could steal my clients from me or prevent me from getting clients at all?

It comes down to Preferment, which is the fifth stage in the Product Purchase Cycle. Ursula K. LeGuin, in her book A Wizard of Earthsea coined the adage, “two wizards in the same town must surely come to blows.” (I may not have the quotation exactly right, but the sense of it is correct.) If there’s only one witch in the village, and she lives in the ramshackle house right beside the forest fence — she’s the only one you can go see. If you try to leave town and see a witch in a different village, all sorts of people will ask questions. In a town with two wizards, sooner or later they’re going to poach clients from one another, and there will be a wizard-battle. In fact, the wizard-battle is really over before it begins — the town will know which of the two gives better results, and the loser is likely to slink away in the dark before dawn… or stay, but only get the uneven and patchy work from the tourist trade, not the common folk’s regular business.

Let’s say, though, that two practitioners cost $50 an hour. You can go to both for $100, and get two answers to the same question. One says “yes” to your question and the other says “no”. The real-world proof of the pudding is in the eating — if you respond to the yes, and do the thing indicated by the question, and it works out poorly — you can’t go back and not do the thing. You wind up assuming that the second practitioner, the ‘nay-sayer’, knew what they were talking about.

It’s still a coin-flip, though. The client isn’t going to choose two practitioners simultaneously, and then both “do” and “not do” the thing suggested by their question. They’re going to pick one, and they’re going to follow the advice if it seems:

• Persuasive
• Relevant
• Non-rational (derived from tarot, astrology, geomancy, runes) but not irrational (off the wall stupid)
• Sideways (not in the normal line of thinking, but still germane to the problem).

Some problems, you need a specialist. If you want someone to cast a curse on an ex-boyfriend, or you want someone to fall exclusively and madly in love with you — I’m clearly not your guy. If you want some clear-eyed advice about the second third of your life, I will provide better service for you than some WitchTok Tarotista barely out of college. Want someone to sling Tarot cards for you — can I recommend Arnemancy (aka Erik Arneson) or T. Susan Chang? If what you’re looking for is deeper relationship with the stars… can I recommend Amaya? How about Rhyan Butler if you need astrological magic? If you want a written consultation based on Geomancy, can I point you to Polyphanes? *Oops he’s not doing consultations right now* Need a sorcerer or a witch? I linked to Sara Mastros and Jason Miller at the top of this (already overly long) blog post — both of them are available and would happily take your money and your business, I suspect.

Those are just a few of my colleagues that I trust and respect to provide services just as good, if not better, than one I can offer. I can think of dozens more.

How do I create Preferment in my clients? By offering the thing that they think they need: whether that be a service like a tarot reading of a specific length during a specific window of time, or a chance piece of advice on Twitter or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or recognizing that I have peculiar specialties that are useful to specific audiences.

Who are my audiences again? Currently, a lot of my clients are Page of Pentacles or Page of Wands-types: youngish persons looking for guidance in their professional or economic circumstances. What sort of clients should I be adding to that list? Empresses; Kings who’ve lost their mojo and need future guidance; and Knights who seem to be stuck during a review of bad financial or physical experiences.

I think I have experiences that are going to help that crew: in terms of my own life experiences, I can provide guidance to the fallen king, or to the knight retracing his steps to where he went wrong; and I have some ideas that can help the empress do more than simply warm her throne, but also care for her kingdom’s welfare. And I have to assume that — if I’ve properly enchanted at all the other levels — that clients of that kind of background and current place in life, are not only going to find me, but choose me over a range of other candidates.

Still, there is something that I can do to create preferment, and that’s to help all of you readers identify your own clientele and your own current specialties. If you’re out there enchanting for your clients, sure — sometimes we’re going to overlap, and there may be direct competition for this empress or that king or this knight or that page or queen.

But your strategy is to talk to your potential client in their language. And if you haven’t noticed, this blog post itself is geared to someone who thinks like a king trying to get his wand back; or who has to revisit their key strategies as a knight of pentacles; or who is already an empress. And your language, consequently, will have to be different than mine. You can’t expect to write a blog post about how to win clients by enchanting using the Product Purchase Cycle, and win Pages or Queens to your cause — it’s not their language, and it’s not their focus, and it’s not what they’re embodying in the world.

And that’s part of the reason why I speak in the language of ethics here, and about enchanting ourselves, rather than our clients, when we as practitioners use the product purchase cycle as a framework or scaffold for our magic — Kings and empresses are by nature distrustful; knights live by a code of chivalry that may be peculiar to themselves, but still values loyalty and discretion (and which frowns on mumbo-jumbo and magic for personal use). These sorts of people want good advice and clear solutions and reframing of their problems, not mystic threats that have to be undone with $4000 spell work and mysterious rituals.

They want to know you’re not trying to pull a fast one on them.

Yeah, we use divination here, too, on the question, “how can I create a situation of preferment, where my capabilities and specialties have appropriate value relative to everyone else who is available?”

Look at that: Deal fairly with the customers and peers, don’t be a money-grubbing miser or envious of your colleagues in the business, and expect that the business is going to have a bunch of normalized ups and downs. If I’m tearing down, or publicly side-eyeing my professional colleagues, that’s not going to reflect well on me (unless I have obvious evidence that they’re being fraudulent and deliberately conning their customers).

Purchase

Which brings us to purchase. Purchase is the last step in the Product Purchase Cycle, and in a very real sense it is the only contact with the customer that I have. Until they’ve gone to my services page and actually purchased a service, I don’t know whether I’m under consideration or how close they are to buying my advice unless they tell me (by leaving a comment, DMing me on Twitter, or dropping some cash in my Ko-Fi account or my Patreon).

Until a client buys, their problems are not really mine to advise on.

From an enchantment point of view, I can Do the Usual, of course, and make them more likely to buy: sigils to improve my chances of being chosen, spirit contacts to improve the likelihood that my service is the one they find and investigate most thoroughly, written blog posts and static pages, Twitter threads that indicate that I’m the sort of person who can assist them best, and so on.

My question for my limited Tarot deck? Something pretty obvious. “What can I do to make it more likely for my chosen market to purchase my services?”

Huh. Deliver a call to action: “Buy my services.“

Respond swiftly and intelligently when a possible client comes calling; advance the effort to make the consultation happen immediately. Deliver effective intelligent advice as rapidly as possible, in the face of as complete an explanation of the situation as can be obtained.

Treat every contact and client as a live option, and “not dead yet” regardless of circumstances. No one is a dead victim here, and everyone still has possibilities moving forward. No one is at the end of the line.

Wherever possible, bring the client back into the realm of life.

In general, again, this is pretty good advice. Your advice may differ, of course, but

Put it all together

Overall, there’s a strategy here that can be further improved by filling out a marketing plan or template and a social media strategy plan, or a Product and Service Template, such as those offered by SCORE.org. (Fair disclosure: I’m a SCORE mentor and I will help you work on your business plan for free if you contact me through the chapter and sign up to have me as a mentor). Each of these can be thought of as a sigil or even as a hyper-sigil intended to deliver results in each of the six parts of the product purchase cycle.

For me, that strategy looks a little bit like:

1. Recognize that older men, middle-aged men in crisis and independent have social and cultural barriers against using astrologers and tarot readers,
   1. but not (usually) economic barriers. So confidentiality is important to them.
   2. They also have barriers against using therapists and mental health professionals.
   3. Their life experiences are not always well-served through visiting spiritual counselors who are younger than them; there’s a prejudice there that such folks don’t have wisdom yet… and haven’t had the heartbreak and heartache that goes with age.
2. On the consideration front, this means doing a LOT of emotional lifting for the long haul:
   1. write articles about the astrological transits of later life,
   2. the complications that arise over many decades in the realm of love and career and fame
   3. the personal search for truth in the face of disappointment and life challenge.
3. On the investigation front, I have to
   1. remember that my online and offline personalities are one and the same;
   2. I don’t get to be “just a dog” on the internet. People who digging will find out lots about me.
   3. My life experience is an advantage in some cases, a disadvantage in others
   4. I’m going to lose some possible clients, and that’s got to be OK.
4. On the enjoyment and preferment front,
   1. this is largely about adjusting my style of consultation to give my clients more agency,
   2. to let them lead the discussion, and let them decide what to trust me with;
   3. to answer questions directly and clearly without “on the one hand/on the other hand”
   4. to provide advice, not definitives
5. On the purchase front:
   1. provide a cheaper introductory offer
   2. provide a clear framework for consultations
   3. be free with my time, to the extent possible, for follow-up questions,
   4. to treat each client as “not dead yet.”

Overall, it’s a great strategy for me to pursue, and each of the items in my outline is a possible target for enchantment, effort, and focused magical intent.

I hope you find the overall discussion helpful, and I hope — I hope! — you use the methods outlined here to develop your own strategy and plan, rather than just working off of mine. The result will be a richer and more interesting market for metaphysical services, and a wider range of specialties and opportunities, I suspect — as well as a way to shift the direction of one’s career each time that we ourselves find that we need a new direction.

Good luck!