Article - Internet Promotion

By Ron Cotton - September 21, 2005

The Internet is currently the cheapest advertising vehicle for your film at the disposal of every independent filmmaker. This makes Internet promotion the most important and the first medium to exploit. You don't have the problems of it being cost prohibitive like newspaper listings or movie posters. Many of the tools available to promote are completely free or very inexpensive, if time is at your disposal.

Adopting the Internet as early as possible in your preproduction is paramount because Internet promotion doesn't happen overnight. There's a large amount of work involved. It becomes repetitive, but the results will develop and become worthwhile over time. If your content is widely desirable in a presentable state, your more apt to receive more traffic than something less savory. That's the nature of the beast. The best movies do sometimes go unnoticed, underneath the radar.

Websites

There's an entire science behind web site creation. Many different standards and browsers compatibilities to contend with. You can stifle yourself with all these standards. Many will also state that you shouldn't use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, because your web page will be inefficient. Images are processed, reducing colors, resizing, and compressing for optimum viewing with a quick loading time. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If your a stickler for perfection and depending on your knowledge level, this can take a great deal and time and effort.

This sort of “perfection” is the same type of perfection that halts most directors from filming their first movie. Just like the importance of getting your movie in the can, it's just as vital to hurry up and get your movie web page uploaded. Making an efficient page can sometimes get you ranked a bit higher on search engines, yet the results are often minimal. People who view your web pages in most cases will not know if you page is efficient or not.

At this time, let me point out that if someone in your crew is geek enough, give him the honors of producing the movie website and keeping it updated. This will save you many hours of headaches and troubles that you might otherwise experience. If money becomes involved in this venture, make sure you get a second to third opinion. A little bit of research can sometimes get you the same results cheaper or even free. If you still want complete control your own site, have your friend make an “unofficial” site and compete with him. This will be a valuable learning experience.

If you don't have the connections and you must rely on yourself, don't fret. First, get together ALL photos and promotional materials such as your trailer, photos, reviews, interviews and other information of interest. Get an idea of the look and feel you want your film to represent. Examine other web sites and take ideas and pieces of what you'd think will work. Don't duplicate or copy pages under any circumstances. Unless stated otherwise, this could quite possibly be a copyright offense costing you more than the production of your film, so don't do it. Just use this information to get a feel of how you want your film to be represented.

Now, once you've completely drawn out the plan and links of how your page will work and what it will involve, your set for web page creation. If a word processing program is installed in your computer, you might have the ability to create a web page with that program with minimal effort. Open Office comes with an HTML editor. Some browsers like Mozilla (free) have the capability to create web pages. You can pay for a program to do this or not, it's your choice.

Depending on your time, knowledge, and software you could even create a high-tech Flash page. With these tools, the effects available are limitless. Fortunately, most people who love movies also have broadband connections and faster computers to process this kinds of information. In most cases, the more advanced your page gets, the more users that you limit from your page. Cell Phones and Computers without the Flash Plug-In can't handle Flash pages, for example. Just another reason why keeping it simple can be to your advantage.

Hosting

Where are you going to place your page? Are you going to buy a “.com” or just remain as a subdomain? Are you going to use free hosting with banners? Are you going to host it on your own server at home? All these options are open to you.

Hosting a website on your own computer can be one of the cheapest methods yet has a couple of reservations. Your computer will be on at all times and your bandwidth will be shared with everyone connecting to your computer. You'll also be a target for hackers, making your computer vulnerable if not “hardened.” This isn't recommended by anyone who isn't a techie at heart.

Before hosting your site on either a free or pay hosting site make sure you read and completely understand the terms of service. Depending on the conditions in the terms of service statement, you may be unable to host your site there. Also, if you use free hosting, you'll probably have pop ups or banners. If this becomes a problem, in most cases you have the option to pay to rid of this. You can also move your site elsewhere later.

Myspace.com accounts and groups are becoming extremely popular for networking and promotion. Yahoo! Groups offers another option for free. These can also be secondary to your site. Blogs are another hot commodity. Not only can you leave up to date news, but you can also give RSS feeds that can be shared through-out the Internet.

If your paying, always compare costs and features! Bandwidth is the most important especially if you have a video trailer available on your site. If you go beyond your bandwidth, you'll need to pay the difference which can amount to a fair chunk of change. Uptime and Customer Service are features that you may sacrifice at lower cost hosting, so be careful.

Search Engines

Your site is uploaded and ready to be viewed. But if nobody can find it with a search engine, you limit the number of viewers to your site. Many search engines and submission companies offer free submission. Take advantage of this and understand that this may take some time before your even searchable.

Meta Tags on your web pages may help your site to get higher rankings. This requires a bit of understanding and research before your site can be optimized with these HTML tags. Check out the resources below for more information.

Promoting your site on other sites is the best option for getting higher ranking on search engines. E-mail webmasters of other sites to see if you can do a link exchange (offer to give them a link to their web page, if they give a link to your web pages). Post in public forums and communities throughout the Internet. Many users in forums put their web site in their signature. Don't be afraid to get the word out or rejected. There's always a new way to receive more traffic on your site.

Pay per click services for advertising is an option, depending on your budget. Make sure that you have a cap of how much you'll spend in a month. Remember, that pay ads are a final resort and that other avenues should be ventured first.

Hopefully this article outlined the basics to Internet Promotion and how this can increase sales dramatically without a great deal of capitol involved. Again, this is an effort that just doesn't happen overnight. Use every technique and method possible to get the word out about your independent work!

Other References:

Web Site Submission:
Google, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Search (requires Yahoo! ID), and Open Directory.

Meta Tags:
Philb and Submit Corner.

Free HTML Editors:
Open Office and Mozilla Suite.

Communities:
myspace.com, filmties.com, and Yahoo! Groups.