Self Distribution - getting the word out!

P

Phil D

Hi,

So I have decided to bite the bullet and try distributing my film online from my own web site! It's a bit of an experiment I'm going to give it 6 months or so and see what happens. The film will be available for download for viewing on ipods and PSP.
I was wondering if anyone else has tried this?
I know the important thing now is to get traffic to my site, and advertise the film. Does anyone have some suggestions of things I could try to promote my film?

I'll keep you up to date with my little experiment, and let you know how it goes.
 
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I have some experience with promoting the site.
1. You need to register in as many search engine machines as you can.
2. Use banner networks. You can place their code on your site, but unless your site is a forum or a very popular site this type of advertisement is ineffective. You`d better buy adverts. I don`t know any english speaking banner networks, so you need to search.
3. Ask your friends to promote it.
Generally, it depends on your budget.
 
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Try sending submission articles to related sites- type the keywords you think would bring people to find your video in Google, and see what comes up. From there, contact those websites and ask them to link you!

Here's a couple sites to start:

www.rewindvideo.com

www.microcinemascene.com

Also, consider doing an online press release through a company like PR web. Why not contact an already established indie website about a joint press release? We had a joint one with Indietalk because it covered our film, and the resources here that helped make it. If you can come up with a good spin like that, site owners might jump at the chance, because the press release would start showing up in feeds around the web promoting you and them.

Also, there was some discussion on Viral campaigns- why not send out emails with links to your video and ask it to be forwarded? If it's really quirky and funny, it might stand a good chance at living a large email campaign.

Hell, print out posters and put them all over town with your website address and a cryptic/curious picture!

Remember to optimize your site for search engines (submit them manually, make sure your keywords and description are rich and specific, and create a literal web of links to and from your site to others.

I wrote a half-assed article on Google, but the main three parts of SEO (search engine optimization) are:
1) Quality links (inbound and outbound) to relevent subjects (aka with similar topics and good amounts of content)
2) Focus on your keywords as your content, and make sure you stay specific and form your own niche.
3) Most importantly- don't try and trick search engines by oversaturating keywords or linking to site with high pagerank but no relevance to you- Google can see through this kind of farce and could possibly blacklist you.

Other than that, just get on forums like this and spread the word- find other communities and websites that you think your movie applies to, and then advertise (some places may require you to join and participate with thier community before shameless plugging).

Marketing is a tough subject, but very interesting- just be creative and come up with an original enough concept for the ads and you'll get the traffic.

Good luck!
 
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Censusadvert3.gif


So as part of my continueing marketing campaign, I knocked up his animated Gif today in After Effects.
Does it do the job? Comments welcome.
 
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that's very nice...the image is a bit dithered for me though. You may look at optimizing the color palette so you don't have to have it dither when reducing the color information to fit in the GIF format's colorspace (256 colors). One of the tricks I used to use is to posterize the images first. This will even out the colors making less dithering necessary.
 
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