10 ways to promote your video business without advertising.

It’s a fact, Jack. (Or Jill.) You need customers; customers need your production and duplication and packaging services. It’s definitely a win-win situation. But -if your potential buyers aren’t aware that you exist, or they can’t find you…you’re certainly not going to have a roaring success on your hands. People won’t benefit from your services, and you’re not going to be collecting any money from them. No doubt about it that marketing is an absolutely necessity to keep your name on the tip of their tongues, and at the top of their minds. And don’t worry if you’re on a very limited budget -or even a very very very limited budget. There are still quite a few ways for you to promote yourself and your services. Here’s a dozen ideas you can use to get started.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

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YouTube is actually good for your business.

Seth Godin recently commented that YouTube has, quietly, become a significant force in business learning. He stated that “people who would never read a 200 page book would happily watch a three minute video.”

Like it or not, people are turning to YouTube and other video aggregator sites in order to learn things…and they’re using the compelling power of video to get their instruction. Instead of gnashing your teeth about having to compete with rank amateurs (and I mean that in both senses of the word) and poor production values, embrace the new trend in learning! Focus your marketing on people and concerns that need to get their message on video and out to their audiences. Anyone who publishes books or printed instructional matter is a good candidate for your video production skills, both for repurposing their training materials into video, and for getting it onto the Internet.

And yes, we practice what we preach. For the past six months, we’ve been repurposing our earlier books, special reports and live seminars into video courses that are now available online on the Video Business Advisor website anytime of the day or night. We’ll tell you how we do it quickly and inexpensively in a future article.

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So…how do you like the new look?

Whew! That’s over!

We’ve finally moved this blog onto a WordPress platform.

If you’ve been following the blog talk recently, you know why I like WordPress so much -it provides a huge selection of plug-in ‘widgets’ that give you uncommon flexibility in design and optimization…not to mention awesome latitude in templates.

At any rate, please note that our new & improved blog, now dubbed “Video Success Secrets,” is residing right here at www.VideoSuccess.com

I’d appreciate it if you let us know what you think. As always, your comments are appreciated, and darned easy to post. And while you’re here you can easily add Video Success Secrets to your RSS feed, or you can sign up for the email alerts and we’ll let you know when new material is posted. While we’ve been redesigning the site, a lot of good stuff has been piling up, so expect to see quite a bit of activity around here in the next few weeks, too.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Is advertising at the crossroads?

Some interesting statistics in the current issue of Business Week point out that advertising has become a smaller part of our economy since it peaked in 2000. Internet advertising is rapidly growing -over 25 percent higher this year than 2006, which translates to $21 billion.

…but ad agencies are still relying heavily on :30 TV spots for their income. With the explosion of new media advertising in recent years, the traditional production model catering to advertisers simply no longer works. Each passing month clients spend less money on television spots -(budgets are down 1.5 percent from last year, to 46 billion), want their TV ads to tie into larger marketing campaigns or even turn completely to the Internet to get their message out.

This is going to be an interesting situation for the very high-end ($600+/hr.) post-production houses, as pretty much everything they do can be emulated in a tricked-out desktop computer. How are they going to compete with the $150/hour post houses, anyway? The word “dinosaur” comes to mind…

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Happy Birthday, Mp3Man!

The MP3 player -well, this one -is already ten years old. For about $250, the mpman and its 32MB of flash-based storage would hold about a dozen songs of average length. And of course to make things even more inconvenient, songs were loaded in via your computer’s parallel port.

Thankfully, the Diamond Rio came along shortly thereafter and gave you everything the mpman boasted, and tossed in track controls, a four-position equalizer AND a smart card slot for $50 less.

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If your demo looks like this…close your video business.

Thanks (we think) to ebaumsworld.

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WordPress blogging made easy. Very easy.

Video dudes and dudettes, are you tired of trying to figure out on how to get a blog installed and running on your own server? We just uploaded a brand new, 10-part video training series to the Video Business Advisor members area that will show you how to get your own WordPress blog set up quickly and easily.

The series includes a video that details the steps to manually install WordPress on your server. This covers the whole process of installation, including how to create the necessary MySQL databases on your server. (It’s much easier than it sounds.) Another video walks you through the steps of installing WordPress, using
Fantasitico on your cPanel hosting account. This is the fastest and easiest method to get your blog set up.

Lesson 3 in this 90-part series covers the ‘admin’ area in general. This is the place where you configure all your blog settings, the sites’ feel and look, posting of messages, managing posts and the like.

There are also three lessons on design, including a walk-through on how to work with themes, one on showing you how to replace the default header of the theme to your own desired header image, and another on how to work with the theme editor. This typically involves a bit of work trying to figure out a few lines of code. This video will make editing your theme a breeze!

Finally, there are complete lessons on working with plugins (including the installation of two plugins), working with widgets, search optimization via permalinks, and a final big lesson on how to deal with posts, pages and categories.

Easy to get the online training you need for your WordPress blog; just join the hundreds of other smart videographers who rely on the Video Business Advisor for their marketing and promotional help. Click here for details.

Popularity: 18% [?]