The biggest challenge facing indie artists today is really the same one as always, exposure. At first the web seemed to be the solution to that problem in and of itself but as things have evolved over the last 10 years or so it's become obvious that the web is only a tool. A very good tool I should add, but like any other tool you have to know how to use it and that's where many people are falling short. You might think of sales as being your biggest challenge but in reality that concern comes further down the road. In order to have anyone buy your products they first have to be aware of your products. This blog is going to be about how to expose your work to the largest audience possible both on the web and off it.
Developing the Indie Media Show helped me to learn what works and what doesn't and how to use the amazing tool provided by the Internets in the best possible way at the least possible cost. Let’s face it, most indie artists are not blessed with the same kind of bankroll to promote their products as the big labels and that single fact is the biggest reason that the artists the labels promote are available everywhere and you aren't.
The first thing that you need to do is to have your music, whether in video or audio form, available everywhere that it possibly can be. Just having your mp3 on your MySpace player and iTunes and your video on YouTube isn't enough. Five million other bands also have their music on those channels. What is going make a listener discover your music above others? Nothing, unless you make it happen.
Lots of people have been preaching about the power of web 2.0 and social media in general to make you a success. It's true the word-of-mouth is great advertising, and having an involved street team is a wonderful thing. But I think we've all found out by now that their impact is limited. From what I've observed social networks are fairly worthless when it comes to exposing people to new music on a wider scale (except when it's done in very specialized ways).
There are other things to take into consideration when you're making decisions on where to feature your music. Whether you're concerned about royalties or not is something to think about. Some sites pay them and some don’t and some in different ways than others. Some people like to balance the two and pick one song off a CD to use as a “throwaway”, or depend on a music video to sell the CD much in the same way a TV commercial sells a product.
The following list is going to consist of what I think are the best places on the web for you to put your music. I'll give you a little explanation on each. The criteria used for inclusion in the list was simply the sites being among the top 10 destinations on the web in their category on Alexa. Combined, the total users weekly on all the sites listed are roughly 10,000,000 people (for streaming audio/radio). This is certainly a worthwhile audience to go after.
The other factor that I used when considering sites for this list were the ones that are commonly available through web to TV or web to radio technologies. The services that are already going to be included in the biggest web to TV technologies are obviously a great place to put your music so that it is taken to the audience beyond the web.
The other technology that is now starting to the appear in the real world is web to radio. Pioneer is now streaming web radio to cars through their high end GPS units and Pandora. I think that's a really fascinating development because it uses satellite transmission without a monthly fee and without the reception drawbacks of cellular based web to radio devices (PDAs).
I looked to the websites of the TV manufacturers themselves in order to identify the web channels that are most commonly featured by them since those are going to be the highest profile sites and the one’s you need to be on. If you want to check out the manufacturers’ pages which talk about their web offerings for yourself here they are; Samsung, Sony, Vizio and LG.
Pandora is the obvious winner, as it is featured on almost all TV and radio applications, in terms of where your music needs to be placed in order to have exposure to the widest audience. But when I ask bands if they have their music on Pandora most of them don’t and aren’t aware of how to go about doing it. In fact most of the bands I know are not on any of the services I’m going to talk about with the exception of YouTube. Why? Don’t people realize that having your music on only one or two of the less popular players is like having your song played exclusively on one rural radio station and then wondering why you don’t get discovered by more people nationwide. Plus all of these destinations are FREE to put your music on (with the exception of two).
So let me list the best places to put your music and videos right now for the greatest web exposure AND where they need to be in order to take advantage of the web to TV and web to radio transition that is happening NOW.
a. Pandora.com: The number one streaming music site on the web and the number one station to be featured on all the web enabled TVs listed above as well as the Roku player, etc.. Artists can submit their songs for free to be included in the music catalog through this URL:
http://submitmusic.pandora.com/ Of course just submitting to Pandora doesn’t guarantee you inclusion into their catalog but it’s certainly worth a shot.
b. Last.fm: Number 2 according to Alexa. This site is part of the CBS Radio network. Artists can submit their songs directly and add concert dates. Last.fm is also a popular featured application on web to TV boxes and sites like Microsoft Media Center.
Submission URL: http://www.last.fm/uploadmusic
Add concert date URL: http://www.last.fm/events/add
Let me say something about CBS. CBS Radio, CBS Interactive and CBS Digital seem to own the radio on the internet for the most part. Yahoo! radio and aol radio are the number 3 and 4 destinations on the web for people who want to listen to music and BOTH are powered by CBS Radio so it is CBS that controls their programming. Having a door into the 150+ “real” radio stations owned by CBS Radio as well as Yahoo and aol radio would seem to be a great opportunity and since last.fm (above) is also owned by CBS Radio and is the one station in their huge network that allows artists to submit their music directly it seems like everyone would be lining up to submit their music to last.fm.
c. Grooveshark.com: is user uploaded music. They link songs that are on their site to iTunes and Amazon for download purposes. All you need is a free account to upload songs. Grooveshark is a bit like Pandora in that they also play random songs for you based on similarity to the first song you choose so it is a good site for music discovery.
d. Blip.fm: Submit your mp3 or video url to their database so it shows up in their search engines and users can play and share the song over their social networks such as facebook and twitter. A very cool concept and a great way to work the word of mouth, social media concept.
e. Mp3.com: Another part of CBS Radio. They have music videos and mp3 streams and downloads. Another CBS property where artists can submit their own music.
URL to submit music: http://www.mp3.com/signup?tag=login;signup
f. Play.it: Another CBS Radio property which is popular with listeners. It allows user “stations” as well as featuring CBS, Yahoo and AOL stations.
g. Playlist.com: VERY popular site for streaming music. They pay royalties. Search engine based discovery across the web. Like Blip, song URLs can be added.
h. Deezer.com is the number four music site in the world according to Alexa but hardly anyone in the US seems to have heard of it. If you want to put your music in front of the world audience it is a destination you might want to consider. Submitting songs to their site costs 19 Euro and is done through a third party site called Zimbalam. Info on that process can be found here: http://www.deezer.com/en/#legal/labels-artists.php
i. Slacker.com: Also a popular music destination and included on yahoo web to Tv apps. Songs can be submitted through hellomusic.com and through most aggregators.
i. CDBaby: Distributes your music to important web stores along with mobile content providers. Includes; Rhapsody, Spotify, etc. $9/song $35/CD
If you have your music on some or the majority of these sites you will potentially be exposed to a huge audience and will make it much easier to get together a serious promotion plan for you.
Music video placement seems obvious. YouTube is free and the number one site on the Internet for videos of all sorts. In addition it is going to be included on every web enabled TV and every web to TV box so being on YouTube is a given. Getting your product noticed on YouTube is a different story. There is something like 6 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every 2 minutes. It is possible to get your video noticed but just uploading it and then letting it sit there is not the way to do it.
All of the video sites on the web that you might immediately think of to put your video on are free and since each has it’s own audience there is no reason not to put it on all of them,. Some suggestions would be; MetaCafe, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, Vimeo, VEOH, etc. The number one site on the net for music videos is aol music. Did anyone know that? I didn’t until I started checking into all this on Alexa. Yahoo music is also one of the top three sites on the web for music in general. Another little tidbit of information that might be useful is that TiVo has their own music video channel. Yahoo, aol and TiVo all utilize their own pool of videos for their channels and don’t draw from other sites. This would exclude anyone who doesn’t know how to get their music onto those sites. They all will accept music video submissions (this is yahoo music not general yahoo videos where anyone can upload). You just have to know how to do it, so here is how;
aol: Free music video submission through Truveo.
Yahoo: Artists can submit music videos by mail for inclusion. For the address click on this link.
TiVo: Videos from Music Choice. Here is how you get your videos on Music Choice.
It might seem daunting at first but if you spend a couple of hours doing it the results will be well worth your time. Like I said though, that is just the first step but the one you have to make yourself since most sites require the artist to submit. After you have all that done give me a call or email me and I’ll help you get to the subsequent levels…
This is an amazing time for the entertainment industry. The transition to digital media has opened up scores of possibilities for almost anyone to become a “star” at some level. Of late I have become fascinated with the development of web enabled TV and how it could empower independent media in new ways.
In a previous post I pointed out that it will be crucial to independent artists to be present and available on sites of the obvious leaders in the web to TV transition. Those leaders being the web portals who are creating “channels” (youtube, roku, netflix) that will be featured on web enabled TV’s and set top boxes. At the same time though, the challenge will be how to stand out from the crowd on those web to TV portals just as much as it now is on the web. But those portals are in reality just vast data storage libraries and the web audience is used to having to search and search and search for content that they want to watch while the TV audience is not.
From that line of reasoning came the realization that the indie world needs it’s own cable TV channel. Think about it, how many people in the TV audience don’t already surf the web? Quite a few, the majority actually and for most it is by choice. If I look at myself as an example I see me using the computer for one set of activities and the TV for something different. While I will pick through hundreds of videos on the computer in order to find 3-10 minute clips I actually want to watch I won’t do that on TV. The TV audience may enjoy the interactive aspects of web to TV technology, especially social media capabilities, but I don’t think that it will really help media discovery any more than the web already does except for perhaps increasing the total “potential” audience.
With TV I want to put on a channel and watch for at least a half hour to 2hrs to all day (depending on the programming). TV (and radio) have always been the engines of discovery for many people in terms of finding new music or video. They never had to search through vast libraries in order to find something to watch, the channels and their on air personalities did that for them. I think that independent media needs this kind of channel on TV to bring back good old fashioned discovery the way it used to be (on MTV for example).
I think that the same is going to be true of web to TV programming audience. The audience is going to want channels to watch. Channels with actual shows and films and a timeline they can tune into every day, all day. With that in mind I started thinking about how difficult it might be to set up such a channel. One that would be essentially indistinguishable from any other cable network. In the end it seemed to be much easier than I thought it would be so I set up a model of such a channel and write this blog explaining it. Here is a link to my mock TV channel in case you want to open it in another window while you read the rest of this piece.
I set the channel page up like most cable networks have their websites. It features a player and links to channel specific shows as well as general featured videos and upcoming movies. The player itself is live and it contains a stream that is a few hours long and has music videos, a talk show, a game show, a concert and a movie. It isn’t exactly the way I would want it but it illustrates the points I wanted to make.
The first thing I thought about was content. It takes a LOT of content to fill up 24 hours of air time, much more than most indie producers can generate. In addition it takes a lot of time to edit a pre-recorded show and even more time to get all of the necessary permissions to show other people’s work (music videos, film trailers, etc) in a pre-recorded show. However there is sooooo much content out there, hundreds of thousands of hours on various web video hosts that artists are happy to allow you to share and embed on your site for the exposure it gives them that it seemed like there should be a way to utilize the content without all of the work of a pre-produced show.
I started thinking about using a Flash based player to stream shows through the channel. It makes sense because the videos used play from right where their owners have them hosted and so no specific permissions are needed. I searched around and found a program from embedr.com which is at least in the ballpark of what I want. It allows you to use the url or embed codes of videos to create a playlist that you can put on your website.
I loaded the playlist with several music videos, then a few commercials, after all to keep it free to viewers such a channel will have to be supported by advertising (just like TV). Then I added one of my own talk shows, then a concert I taped, then a game show from blip.tv then a feature film from youtube. I kept putting two commercials (from classic commercials search on youtube) in between each show and within a half hour I had a stream of content that pretty much mirrors what you would find on any TV channel.
To actually set up the channel you would have to get a web host, and set up the site. I think that something like a blog would work best. Then you simply upload each new days programming as a single entry each morning and it plays all day. In addition you would have to get real video advertising to put between shows and some money to advertise the channel to build a viewer base. But it really is that simple.
To take it to TV you would have to also create widgets for the services you wanted to appear on like Roku or Yahoo!. Right now I think Yahoo! has the best thing going in web to TV. They have their service set up like channels via their widgets and I think that their channels distribute to TiVo as well as the top 4 TV manufacturers products. Google is building GoogleTV around search and, as I said, I think what the viewers are going to want it channels…
I’m going to be experimenting a bit in the next week or so with a new show format and with some ideas on how to make the channel profitable for independent filmmakers through shared revenue from the advertising. I think this is a really cool project and I welcome any comments or suggestions. In the meantime check out the channel page and watch the show stream and see what you think.
We are currently in the midst of an amazing time for independently produced media of all types. The Internet brought with it the ability to distribute music, film and books to the world audience, or at least that part of the audience that is connected to the web. The opportunity's are endless and the potential becomes greater as the web becomes incorporated into television sets themselves and factory supplied radios in cars.
I've been thinking about the potential of web to TV for a while now in terms of how it can be best capitalized on by independent media. The impending launch of google TV and the fact that web to TV capability is now going to be built into new TV sets at the factory crystallized for me the various ideas that I have been playing with into a single model which takes into account all of the facets of what I think will ultimately be the future of entertainment.
Web to TV started out as being a way for the digital audience to put computer based programming onto a bigger screen. Then services like Roku, Tivo, Boxee and others created set top boxes which started the process of bringing web media to the larger TV audience (those who weren't particularly into computers). The final step is the current inclusion of Internet based media and TV sets themselves so will be available to the entire U.S. television audience.
I think that there are obvious comparisons between what is going on with digital media now and how cable TV evolved. Television started out being free. All you needed was a TV set with “rabbit ear” antennas on top of it and you could watch your local TV station(s). The programming on your TV was totally paid for by advertising. Then came cable TV and with it a much wider range of choices in channels but also a monthly bill which went to the cable company for providing that service. Then came subscription channels like HBO who charged an additional fee that enabled the viewer to watch recent movies commercial free. This involved an additional bill on top of the basic cable subscription. For those who didn’t want to pay the monthly subscription for premium channels pay per view was an option that allowed viewers to pay to watch specific movies on a one-time basis.
Consider the similarity between the evolution of television and the evolution of digital media. Computers started out as simple information storage and data manipulation devices. Then the personal computer came along and with it operating systems that allowed users to share all sorts of information over a globally interconnected network and the World Wide Web was born. All that users needed to have was a personal computer and a connection to the Internet which involved a monthly bill much in the same way you paid your cable bill.
In the last 10 years or so that basic platform has evolved to the point where all of the information and programming that is available on TV can just as easily be stored and distributed via computer and can be created by anyone. The web, just like TV, started out with all the content being free and to some extent supported by advertising dollars. A lot of the problem is that a set amount of available advertising dollars are now being spread out across millions of sites. The big media like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations used to essentially control all of the media and were the sole beneficiaries of all that advertising money. Now everybody from CNN down to small bloggers like you and I have to fight for a share of those advertising dollars (or just work for free) and free media also competes with paid media.
While the U.S. internet audience is a huge one the general American television audience is exponentially larger and one that has been unavailable to independent media until now. I think that web to television is going to change all that. What matters most to independent media producers at this point is to very carefully watch how the web to TV and web to radio technologies evolve in the next two years so and to position themselves so that they can best take advantage of what develops.
As an example, look at Roku. Their featured channels are Netflix and Amazon video on demand. If you think about it from the perspective of television Netflix is very much like HBO, a subscription channel that allows you to watch movies for a flat monthly fee. Amazon is like PPV. Both delivery methods already exist on TV and have been successful so there is no reason to believe that these channels won’t continue to be successful as web to TV channels.
Both Netflix and Amazon, unlike their predecessors on TV are accessible to independent film but (also unlike their predecessors) both offer more features than traditional TV channels ever did. Netflix will send rental dvds to your house and Amazon will sell them to you.
Just these two channels alone may be the death of many subscription cable channels because they don’t restrict you to the same 10 movies all month long. So why bother with three or four different subscription channels just to get a variety of movies where you can have everything they offer and more from one or two sources?
For these reasons I think it's crucial for independent films to be on both Netflix and Amazon. More so Amazon perhaps because they offer open access to anyone through their “Create Space” division. From this perspective indie filmmakers don't really need distributors anymore as Amazon gives you the tools to essentially do it your self in many ways from within their catalog for about half the commission of what a traditional distributor gets.
Additionally I think that netflix and Amazon are going to be the choices across all all of the Web to TV platforms that are coming out now. The main ones are going to be google TV and Yahoo. Yahoo already has position on Samsung, LG, Sony and Visio television sets and are (probably) going to be the second major provider after google. It is crucially important for indie media producers to have their products prominently available on these channels and services which seem poised to take over television.
“Channels” is probably the most important word to consider. Both google and yahoo are presenting their web to TV offerings as specific channels. This is undoubtedly smart marketing because the TV audience, or lease that portion of it who isn't particularly interested in the web, will probably accept web to TV programming more readily if it comes in the form of channels as that is most similar to what their accustomed to on TV. So obviously indie media has to be available on the right channels from the very beginning.
Right at the outset we see that web to TV is going to be very much like traditional TV. Netflix and Amazon will probably be available on all the service providers and, as I already pointed out, Netflix is pretty much like a souped up HBO while Amazon is a pay per view channel. That only leaves out one type of TV programming, the free kind that comes with a basic cable subscription.
The Internet has hooked every one with the idea that consumers expect everything to be free. That has always been the case with basic television but on the web "free" has been interpreted in a different way. Even though television was always free to the consumer the broadcasters and the content producers still made a very nice living through advertising. On the web though the advertising revenue available to the indie media producers has yet to equal that which is available to television. This is what needs to be changed and I think that it can be changed fairly easily with the right approach.
The first thing we have to do is to differentiate between media that probably should be free and that which shouldn't. For example, if I want to sit around all day long and watch videos of somebody's wedding or vacation or uncle Bob’s unfortunate face plant incident when he tried to ride cousin Timmy’s new skateboard, that should be free. I can already do that at home if I want to and I don’t have to pay a thing for it. Advertisers see those kind of videos as low value and don't invest very much per view in advertising on them.
Independent film is different though. Independent film requires a substantial investment of time and money to create and should be rewarded accordingly. So the problem is developing a new sort of web channel (which will become a web to TV channel) that allows viewers to watch films free, like basic cable television, and at the same time makes enough money from advertising revenue so that both the channel owner and the filmmaker can make an amount of money that is fair and reasonable based on the audience that is reached by the film.
I think that YouTube is the obvious candidate for being this third type of channel. However I don’t think they have the right model in place to do it yet. Most everything on YouTube is free but they also are experimenting with movie rentals. Where they fall short is in the rental vs. free concept. It isn’t an either/or proposition. Movies can be “free” to the audience, just like on TV and still make money (just like on TV). If YouTube does this kind of a “free with commercials” concept then the future of TV is Netflix, Amazon and YouTube.
Traditionally advertisers paid for TV time based on the size of the audience. Neilson compiled figures on each channels’ audience size demographic makeup and assorted other things. But those figures were always somewhat generalized and based on an audience sampling of limited size. Internet-based programs have the ability to provide a much deeper analysis of their audience across the entire spectrum of available information. They can give the exact numbers in relation to audience size, demographics and even how much of the audience actually watches the entire movie or half to movie or a quarter of the movie.
Based on these facts I can pretty much see what the potential is for web based “freeview” TV. If if I were to set up such a channel the angle I would take on it would be to approach advertisers with the proposition of paying a set amount of money per viewer to run their commercials on the film. The data on which to base my figures would come from a third party metrics provider.
As far pricing goes I think $2 - $3 per viewer is pretty fair. Out of that the filmmaker gets a dollar, the metrics provider gets paid, the hosting provider gets paid and everybody wins. To refine the concept a bit further I would have the pricing on a sliding scale based on how much of the movie each viewer watched. If you had three sets of commercials throughout the film, one near the beginning, one in the middle and one just before the end and base the advertiser costs on how many of those commercials each viewer watched it might be something like; 30¢ for viewers who watched through the first commercial, and additional $1.20 for every one who watches to the second commercial and a final $1.50 for each viewer who watches to the end.
That is perfect for the advertisers' perspective as they will not be investing a ton of money into a film which doesn't get any viewers. Plus they don't have to pay full price for “channel surfers” who drop in for 10 to 15 minutes of the film and then leave (except for the portion of the film that they actually watch). Such a model would really challenge traditional TV from the advertisers' perspective and allow web based media to compete head to head with traditional TV channels based solely on the quality of their content and the actual size of their audience.
The only thing the remains for the filmmaker at that point is to make the audience aware of their film. That one thing though is going to be what determines the success or failure of the film from a financial perspective. Finding ways to promote independent media and ways they compete with the methods that indie media has at their disposal is the challenge and what I've been working on the last year or so. So there you have it, the future is wide open for indie media success for those who learn how to take advantage of the opportunity.
I think that the title of this chapter summarizes the intent of social media as applied to its role in the distribution of your product. Seeing it that way brings to mind walking through Times Square and running into people selling CDs by a local hip hop artist. Isn't that pretty much the definition of a street team? People who are willing to get out there on the street to sell your product?
The dream of being able to utilize social media programs to enable an artist to build a street team of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people who will actively purchase and promote your products is a valid one. Best of all the whole process is supposed to be free! My question is how well does that concept really work? Or more precisely how well does work for everyone? Just about anything will work once, the hard part is finding something that work every time for every artist.
Obviously the concept of free only goes so far and ideally only goes one way. I mean, you want people to buy your CD or DVD right? But you want them to provide their promotional services to you for free, right? Ah, in a perfect world… We all know that the Internet has gotten consumers into the habit of expecting to get things for free. Everybody in the industry bitches about that, from the major labels down to the local bar band, but did you ever stop to think about the fact that you expect the same thing? You expect advertising platforms such as MySpace, facebook and twitter to be free for you to use to sell your products. You expect companies, like Amazon for example, to essentially work on commission when they manufacture and distribute your product.
So that is the problem isn’t it? You set up a virtual storefront for free, your new products are being manufactured and distributed as needed at no upfront cost to you, you’re getting free advertising from your fans, now how you get them to pay for your products with real world money? I'm going to try to find ways to enable you to do just that, I just thought that a little reality check might be in order before we get started.
There are people out there trying to sell various methods that are supposed to grow your fan base on social networks by hundreds or thousands of people in a short amount of time. Some work, some don't but the easiest way to do it is probably just to go through the friends list of other bands and filmmakers and send individual friend requests to all of their friends. If you have a half decent product and are willing to put some work into it then you should be able to have a large number of followers in a short amount of time.
In a lot of ways I question the value of having such an artificially large number of friends. Yes, the practice of random befriending has created some stars (if you count Tila Tequila as being a “star”). When it comes down to it though how many of her 1,000,000 or more friends actually read any of her posts or buy any of her products? The reality is probably only a few hundred, so what is the value of having a million friends? Probably just vanity more than anything else.
You could make the argument that Tila’s large number of followers was what got her noticed and got her jobs in reality TV and you would be right. Think about that though, for her, the web and all her followers were just a means to an end. That and being to gain enough and notoriety to make money in the real world. I think that the media companies are getting wise to that though and are ascribing less real world value to Internet stardom.
Ideally you already have a solid core of supporters across various social networks and finding ways to capitalize on their support could be very beneficial. There are two ways to do this that I see being marketed to independent artists. The first is to build a network of 1000 supporters that will spend $100 each on you and your products every year. The obvious outcome is that you have $100,000 a year income. The idea involves giving those 1000 supporters extra value in exchange for their willingness to support you financially.
The second method is to sell products with various levels of value. The last two CD releases by the band Nine Inch Nails are cited as examples. Their various value packages range from free downloads only up to a $300, signed a special edition. For NIN the model worked very well.
If in both of these examples at the operative word is value. With that in mind I thought I would look into creating another way for indie artists to involve their street teams in promoting their favorite artists which would provide financial value to both the artist and the fan. An idea came from the first paragraph of this story. Why not turn your online street team into an online sales team? It seems to work well enough for independent artists in the city so why couldn't work in the global community of the Internet?
I mean we are all very familiar with affiliate marketing at this point, right? What if, instead of having 1000 fans that were willing to spend the $100 of their money on your products each year, you have 1000 fans who could earn $100 for themselves by selling your products each year? If we assume those 1000 fans are making a 10% commission and that your CD or DVD is selling for $10.00 then, each of your 1000 special fans would be selling 100 of your CDs or DVDs each year via their own blog or website. Your gross income from those 1000 fans would then be one million dollars.
If your cost for manufacturing those CDs or DVD's is $2.00 per unit (not at all an unrealistic figure) and you're paying commissions of a dollar per unit to your affiliate fans (customers are paying the shipping and handling) your total cost to produce and distribute those 100,000 units would be $300,000. Subtract $300,000 from $1,000,000 and your profits for the year are $700,000. Obviously that's much better than having 1000 fans will spend the $100 every year on their own money on you.
I wondered how hard it would be to set up an affiliate Marketing Network so I did a little research. In its simplest version I suppose you could just ask your fans to advertise your product for you. To do that all you have to do is create some type of ad for your product along with an embed code with a link back to your product sales page and ask your fans to place the ad on their own blog or website for you. As an illustration please note this page of ads that I created for the Haynesville movie. Since I created these ads myself and host them on my website there are no third party fees to pay. This is obviously the cheapest way to turn your street team into a sales team however there is no real reward for your street team other than the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from promoting your products and you do need to have some kind of online store or distribution service for your products for the ads to link back to.
Admittedly, while it would be possible to create your own commissioned sales network entirely by yourself, the day to day operation of it would really be kind of daunting for most people and would eat up a lot of valuable time. An alternative is to make use of networks that are already set up specifically for this purpose. I'm going to give you some examples of existing services along with an idea of the cost of each.
If you want to keep your costs as low as possible but still have someone else do most of the work then Prostores (an ebay company) may be what you are looking for. For $59.00 a month you can open a web store and create affiliates who get paid a commission for each sale that they make for you. Prostores does all the hard stuff like creating a unique link for each affiliate for free (I know a filmmaker who is paying $180 to his distribution provider for EACH unique affiliate link they create for him!), monitoring sales and even distributing commission payments through Paypal. Like Ebay, Prostores can figure out the sales tax and shipping and handling for each product so all you have to do is mail out the products each day. If you have an eBay seller account you can even link your Prostore to it and have your products listed in front of ebay's huge consumer market as well. I like the potential of this concept enough that I got my own Prostores account to test this out. This is probably the second cheapest way to go. You pay a fixed monthly fee to have the store with affiliates and you decide on the commission amount.
Another obvious resource is Amazon .Com through their CreateSpace service. Amazon does pretty much everything for you that you would need done. They manufacture your product, add it to their huge catalog, distribute it to your customers and, your fans can get affiliate accounts through Amazon and earn a 10% commission on sales they make. Amazon provides the ads, collects the money and pays the commission's out of their own percentage of the product’s price. I think that Amazon is a great solution for independent artists for many many reasons which I will go into in greater depth in future blogs. One thing that Amazon doesn't do, just like every other similar site out there, is promote your products and that is something that you really, really need to remember.
The last example I’m going to give you is something I hadn't even thought about before I started researching the potential of affiliate sales. Have you ever seen any of the Internet riches infomercials on television which promise to show people how to get rich by selling stuff on the web? I'd never really given serious thought to those kinds of services before but when you think about it they have to get products from somewhere to advertise don’t they? As it turns out I found one of them, Pay Dot Com that is looking for products for their network of sales associates (all 400,000 of them) to sell.
Their pitch:
“Sell your products and services through our online marketplace, and let PayDotCom take care of the rest. All while getting paid instantly to your PayPal account. Get an army of affiliates selling your product and getting you massive website traffic.”
“No Waiting 30 Days to Get Paid: With our patent pending service, you can now get paid instantly to your favorite payment processor like PayPal account.”
One nice thing about the kind of service is that it doesn't limit you to affiliates that you create from your own fan base. The service charges a one-time $29.00 activation fee and per sale fees on top of the commission that you pay to the associates. According to the page on their website which describes their fees they go on a sort of sliding scale based on price and on a $10.00 DVD or CD the fee would probably be about dollar. That really doesn't seem too bad considering everything you get for the price.
So there you have it, an entirely new way for the indie film/music community to market their products. It's kinda weird that, will all of the people out there selling all kinds of different ways for independent artists to sell their products, no one is focusing on this concept especially since it's already available and fully developed. I guess it's just that no one has applied it be independent music and film industry. Until now…
After listening to people talk endlessly about specific, somewhat limited, promotional methods such as working your social network like an encyclopedia salesman to achieve whatever it is you achieve through that I thought I’d kind of step back and start from the beginning. If you want to be realistic about it the major labels/studios found the “secret” to the successful marketing/promotion method that works long ago and have spent years honing it down to near perfection. So, I thought, rather than flail around blindly in the (crowded) world of web based promotions, why not first think about simply finding ways to copy what already works?
Promoting a band or film like the studios/labels do makes use of 3 basic tools. I created this nifty illustration to lay them out:
The easiest place to start is to simply consider the methods used by studios and record labels to market their products. The challenges that they face are the same as those faced by independent artists. The goal is to make the buying public aware of the product. Or, more importantly, to make them want the product. To accomplish this majors make heavy use of advertising. Advertising serves as both a promotional tool and a direct sales channel. In addition they make use of their easy access to the press. This combination of advertising and press exposure serves to create a social buzz about the products.
Much of the advice that I see being offered to independent artists focuses solely on various aspects of social networking and essentially ignores advertising and the press. However, tools do exist that allow independent artists to utilize both advertising and the press in addition to their social networks to promote and sell their material. Of course independent artists don't have the same “star power” to throw around so you probably won't be able to get a review in the New York Times or have your photo on the cover of Rolling Stone with just a phone call. But that doesn't mean that you can’t make use of the same methods.
I divided the job of promotion/marketing into three basic areas; press, advertising, and social networks. I then divided each of those three areas into subsets representing the goals that could be achieved by utilizing each. It became pretty easy at that point to tackle each of the three individually in terms of finding existing, affordable tools that will enable you to use all of them were in your DIY marketing campaign in whatever way seems most appropriate for your individual product.
I decided to use real world examples when writing this blog, so from this point on I am going to describe my own experiences working with various web based services in promoting actual independent films and musicians. After all, anything can be made to look good on paper but it's what works in the real world that counts. Besides there is nothing like hands on experience to enable you to discover the tricks and the mistakes that are inevitably present in any web based platform.
Additionally I think that part of any successful marketing effort has to focus on both the web audience and the larger audience and the rest of the world. After all the web based audience is only 1/6 world population. While 1.6 billion people on the web is a huge audience why be limited to that audience if you don't have to? The majors unlimited and you should be either.
At the moment are working with a film that has just come off the festival circuit. It was released on DVD on March 16. Two months prior to that release date I sent out screeners to about 10 of the largest web based and real world publications who had expressed interest in seeing the film after receiving an earlier e-mail from me. Those screeners laid the groundwork for press coverage at the final film festival. So there is an easy example of using a web based tool (email) to reach out to the wider market beyond the web.
The web by its very nature is a great starting point for a marketing campaign that is aimed at a wider audience. I say this because most of the important people in the media industry whether their focus is news or entertainment are all on the web. So if you want to contact the movers and shakers in the information industry the web is where you start.
The filmmaker that I'm working with now has decided to limit his distribution model to DVD's and public performances at this time. Within those limitations I put together the best promotion/marketing campaign that I could. On the day that the film was released on DVD I began sending emails to every newspaper the country. I'm not advocating this course of action for every film out there. This film is unique in that it is a Documentary which is pertinent to issues that are in the news at the moment and therefore can be perceived to be of enough general interest to justify the emails to newspapers, radio stations and TV News shows all over the country. It feels like the right film to right time to be able to experiment with shooting for distribution on a much larger scale that might otherwise be advisable.
An immediate return on those emailings has been several offers from TV stations for local broadcasting of the film along with several interviews on major AM radio stations. Today I had a call from a Fox affiliate to do an interview for their news show. Not bad for an indie film with a $200,000 budget.
On the advertising side I utilized google ads. Google ads are not expensive to use but I have learned that you have to know how to use them correctly or you can get burned a little bit on the money side. Not deliberately but simply because you might be advertising to the wrong part of the world on too big of a budget. I can help you avoid those pitfalls.
I was running text, graphic and click to play video ads for the film. Google ads allows you to set your per click price and determine your daily budget. For the most part I have the ads bid at 10¢ per click with a $10.00 a day limit. The total expenditure to date for those ads has been $55.00. For that money the ads saw over 775,000 page views and received around 3500 clicks. In terms of exposure, using graphic and video ads to grab the attention of viewers can’t be beat. I think that 3/4 of a million views is well worth the $55.00 investment.
Because the filmmaker wants to stick with limiting distribution to DVD sales and public screenings for the time being the entire sales and marketing campaign is being focused around those two forms of distribution. Let's face it, trying to create a series of public screenings for a film on a national basis with zero budget is not an easy task. Not impossible, but definitely not easy.
I also sent an email to every theater chain and independent theater in the country. From that mailing I have received responses from about five theaters so far who expressed an interest in showing the film. That made me realize that it is possible to take any film for a national theatre run. After all this is America and everything here is for sale including the screens on your local theater. With the right approach and a sufficient budget you have every bit as much ability as a Hollywood studio to put your little indie film up on the big screen in theaters across the country or the world.
I think that in the last two weeks since the release of the film I have successfully utilized both the press and advertising to position this film for national run. In addition I contacted grassroots and business organizations who would obviously have an interest in the subject matter of the film. Several of these organizations have gotten firmly behind the film and then made their members aware of it and how to purchase it. The total number of members of the groups that I contacted is around seven million people. That was the first major outreach that involved the social aspects of my marketing plan.
Next I’m going to start breaking down each of the three areas of the successful promotion/marketing campaign as outlined above. I want to go into a great deal more detail on each. I have a lot more ideas, both proven and unproven, to share with you.