The Reader You Choose Matters Too

I’m standing in the front lobby of Anam Cara, a wellness center in Burlington, MA, in the gap between my first two readings. My first group has just stepped out of my room. Donna, who runs the place and who invited me to do this open house, is there chatting with my next appointment. All of us in the lobby sing together regularly with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, a group that mostly only sees each other when rehearsing for a concert series, so it’s rare that any of us cross paths away from the stage. For a few minutes, in the middle of an open house, a group of people who usually only see each other under stage lights are standing together, catching up.

I have a fleeting realization: these people are the answer to my unasked question. It was a question I didn’t realize I still had, one that I had pondered and experimented with on the cruise vacation: what kind of person chooses to stop by a tarot reading?

Not Just Stopping By on a Whim

On the cruise, a wide variety of people walked by my “free tarot reading” sign, and I had no real way to predict who’d take me up on it. Some people walked past before circling back to sit down out of curiosity. Others waved me away, not interested in what they saw as an interruption to their vacation. I saw some patterns but nothing definitive, so I filed away the question of “who stops for a tarot reading” and moved on. After all, a cruise ship is not a proper study.

Standing in that lobby with Donna and my seekers, that question came back uninvited. Here were people who’d sought out a tarot reading and a tour of Donna’s wellness center on a Saturday, rather than seeing a sign and sitting down on a whim. On paper, they had almost nothing in common. Different ages, different questions on their lips, different relationships to the idea of tarot itself. If this were for my marketing day job, I’d struggle to write a description of my target audience.

What I noticed instead is something closer to a mood than a demographic. Each of them was at some sort of turning point in their life. They all knew the direction they were heading in, but they felt a little exposed and unsure about it. More importantly, they all knew me personally. For them, 20-30 minutes of advice from a deck of cards dealt by a guy they know was worth part of their weekend. They were mid-story and wanted to share it and get suggestions on how to write the next chapter, and I was happy to oblige.

The Website Audit That Told Me Nothing

Around the same time as the open house, I ran my Tarot for Good site here through a search engine optimization audit, checking whether this site was technically set up to be spotted by the Google searches of the world. The tool spat back a tidy list of fixes: FAQ-style content, better internal links, proper tags, and so forth. All reasonable advice, sure. However, as I looked over the changes, I realized with a rueful grin that I was chasing the wrong problem.

There are thousands of established tarot readers online whose entire livelihood depends on exactly that kind of search-fu optimization, and probably thousands more with pages and pages of writings they’ve churned out over the years to pop up on every keyword search. Heck, even Reddit is full of people offering readings, paid or free, for the tarotphile. But being found, ranking well, and converting strangers’ search queries into paying clients? That’s their full-time job, and plenty of them are good at it. I am not going to out-compete people who’ve built their entire business around being discovered online. I also don’t particularly want to.

I’m donating primarily to local charities, which means meeting local people. Unlike most of these Internet services, I prefer being across a table from someone over a video call, and when I’m doing video readings it’s usually because I already have a connection to the person. And hopefully, I feel a little more approachable and a little less… uncomfortable? than many of the online tarot readers.

So the audit told me my metadata could be better. It didn’t tell me anything about how to find new seekers.

Crossroads and Confidants

Donna’s working through a version of the same puzzle from her side, trying to build a following for her recently remodeled wellness center that’s still finding its footing. Talking through her business challenges together helped me see my own situation more clearly.

The people who show up for tarot readings don’t group nicely into demographic categories. A younger couple counting down the weeks to a wedding. An experienced writer pushing herself to publish and be recognized in her circle. A business owner trying to will a new venture into existence. None of that shows up in an analytics dashboard. It shows up as a mood in the room, a specific kind of open-endedness that has nothing to do with income bracket or age range and everything to do with where someone happens to be standing in their own life that particular week.

The chorus connection is what led that particular group to get together in the same place. Their life crossroads brought them from “friends saying hello” into my room for a reading. If it was Trust that opened the door, it was Readiness and Openness that walked through it.

That brought me back to those search results and the multitude of tarot readers offering their online services, with pictures of them trying to look the part. I’d been thinking about getting a tarot reading from someone, not only for the normal reasons but also to learn from others’ styles. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t want a tarot reading from any of them.

This aha moment led me to revise my earlier question. It was missing an important component — the personal one. The real question was: “What kind of person chooses to stop by for one of my tarot readings?” I’d overlooked that the reader you choose is as important as the question you ask and the cards that are dealt.

Being a Reader That People Want to Choose

So how do I reliably find people who are in that moment in their life when they’d be open to a reading? It’s not a puzzle to solve like a website keyword strategy, but it is a puzzle. And the answer is both to embrace the circles and connections I’ve already made, where trust is already sitting around waiting to be useful… and to forge new ones with local groups. Be it a choir, a church community, the public schools (including the upcoming Haunted Playground fundraiser), the town fair, and so forth. I’m still getting used to the idea of putting myself out there to find those I can help. That’s better than ranking highly for “tarot reading near me.”

If you’ve ever tried to build something small from scratch, you know what I’m talking about. Meanwhile, perhaps if you’re local you’ll see me at another fundraiser, private party, or other community event in the area.