Web Based Marketing for Videographers (page 2)

The Searchers

Josh has produced a feature length film with his DV equipment. Local audience response has been great, but he wants to reach a larger audience now. How does the Web help him? All day, all the time, the Web is marketing his productions. The Web, with its nearly infinite links, can connect Josh to potential buyers across the planet on a 24/7 basis. One very easy and effective way to make this happen is for Josh to list his productions with a search engine that specializes in movies and videos.

A good example of this is the DivX Web site (www.divx.com). Getting your video listed is easy: just follow the on-site instructions. Once submitted, DivX's Web spider application crawls through your Web site looking for and noting all the links to movie content. Once complete, your content is listed by the search engine and will appear in the hit lists of people querying that search engine for content. Going beyond that, Josh could submit his movie for inclusion in the DivX Featured Movie section.

Before going ahead with this, make sure that your movie is the best that it can be. Forget about submitting your videos of Davy the dog fetching Uncle Al's briefs. Stuff like this isn't going to cut it with the DivX crew. Beside quality, the DivX folks require that the production be encoded with their technology. Fortunately, DivX produces one of the most widely used (and highest quality vs. compression) video codecs in use today. There are copyright permissions to be gone through as well. For all his work, Josh gets a path to his Web site where people from all over the world can buy or rent access to his…