Whoa, you’re 6’1″? That’s awesome! I feel like such a freak at my studio because I’m 5’11” with weird shortish hair, and all of the other girls are under 5’5″ with perfectly straight natural-looking blonde or brown hair, but I suppose I’m not getting clients *despite* being tall, but possibly even because of it. Mind-blowing.

I’m amazonian in stature (6ft 1,’curvy’ etc) and my hair is a weird color, so I sympathize (although I recognize that the terrible size politics in this industry mean that being a BBW must be a whole extra bit harder than that).

I used to lie about my height in adverts because it scared off so many clients (or that was my ex boss’s theory), and tried to downplay my curves, but then I realized I was just missing out on a bunch of clients who actually liked tall women with big (great) asses. So my approach now is just to play up all the weird different things about me, instead of trying to flail around in a category I don’t fit into.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to get work if I was really thin, a foot shorter, etc etc, but I also think the clients I do get tend to really appreciate me for being, well, me. I bet yours are the same. I say keep your wild hair, and instead of trying to change things which, as you say, you mostly can’t do anything about (which is good, because you sound awesome), try some brand rejuvenation of the kind suggested above (which might help you connect a different set of clients), and then just focus on being your own great self.

I know the self-image stuff is really hard, and I don’t want to come off all “just think positive thoughts and get a manicure!” here, but I think self-care is a good idea anyway. Is there stuff that helps? Things that make you feel good about yourself, or that help you disconnect your self-image from sex work stuff (I feel like my dependence on sex work for validation of my attractiveness/acceptability is pretty fraught)? Do you have friends who get this stuff? Now is a good time to call in reinforcements, I think.

Luck! x

I’m a web developer but my wife’s a sexworker and I give her what help I can drumming up business: obviously the web is limited in terms of actual, reliable contacts but as I always say (I[‘m freelance myself) “downtime is downtime” – that is to say, if you’re not working then you may as well try things in the spare time.

Anyways, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a really wierd and ever-changing specialised area of study, where you start to look around at what your clients are searching for, and start to tailor your web presence to “hook” their searches. There are a million different ways to do this, but if you can manage it then it has the potential to totally change your business online – corporations pay BIG money for SEO people, simply because it’s a really wierd area and it can be very valuable.

I hope I’m not butting my head in here with obvious tips, but I do find that regular business tricks are often missed by sexworkers cos you guys can sometimes just not see the forest for the trees. I’d recommend sites and people but to be honest it’s such a diverse area – and who knows, maybe it’s just not gonna work for a given branch of sexwork in a given geographical area – I would start with reading a decent definition of SEO and then searching for blogs and people from there.

Meanwhile best of luck – as johanna says, this is not an all-or-nothing proposition, mixing incomes can be great; but that’s also a reason I recommned SEO to sexowrkers – if you’re good at it, it’s a transferrable skillset with no real recognised form of college degree to support it. In otherwords, if you’re good at SEO people will pay you a lot of money and not ask questions about how you learned it.