How To Promote Your Film Online
If you are a budding film producer and wonder how to become rich and famous promoting your work online, I hope this little guide will get you started.
First of all you still need to work the good old-fashioned way by submitting to film festivals and stuffing DVDs into people’s pockets. Secondly get yourself a free website from Blogger.com and add crew and cast profiles, screenshots and anything else that is interesting to other film folks and potential fans. Then find a free or low cost film host. InternetVideoMag.com have done the hard work for you by scouring the net for suitable providers.
Be aware that those free hosts are limiting size and bandwidth/traffic, so only put a small (previews or trailer) versions online and encode it using the DivX codec for quality and compression. If you want to take things further and don’t limit yourself to size and in quality I suggest using Bit Torrent, which helps distributing big files to many people.
What you’ve got so far is a place where people can find out about you, your film and can download it. But how do you get the right audience?
This one will probably require the most work and may take some time to fine tune. I would submit my website to DMOZ.org, the world’s largest human edited directory, for starters. Then Google for message boards, websites and Usenet groups that have an interest in the content of your movie. Usenet is especially useful because it is widely used by people looking for cool new films and with the right Usenet provider (such as easynews.com) you can upload and download your stuff nicely. Most ISPs offer newsgroup access as part of their Internet access package but are quite limited.
Delirium Vault is also a nice place for people with a keen interest in Art House, Film Noir, Japanese and other indie specialities – even Silent films. Where ever you choose to go, make sure to observe the house rules and don’t just spam the sites with meaningless advertising messages! This is extremely counter productive if you want to make a good name for yourself and get people talking.
Which leads us to the main factor in promoting your film successfully: word of mouth. What most people without much Internet experience need to understand is, that the Internet is the best WOM medium there is right now, because it’s ultra fast, reaches the largest possible audience and combines delivery of goods and services.
To participate in message boards and newsgroups is one thing but you can go further by taking time identifying leading people in them that can help build your profile and promote you. This isn’t a quick thing to do and probably takes weeks or months as you first need to build trust between you and them, get them excited about what you do and give them something in return. That may be tickets, mention on your website and film credits, to getting a part in your next venture or what ever they want. Be careful here because building trust between people thousands of miles apart from each other is difficult and requires finesse. Also, if you piss them off the whole thing might backfire. But then again, this whole shebang isn’t much different to what you would do offline, just bigger, faster and probably a lot cheaper.
Once you have connections to a few selected leading people, they will start bumping up your messages. Be it a creation of a separate forum, making announcements or sticking posts so they show up on top, what ever they do it will help get people look at your site and watch your movie. Once that happens and people like it, the whole thing will take on its very own momentum. When you’ve build it, more and more people will visit, come back, discuss, spread the word and bump up your websites popularity with search engines at the same time. Which leads to more people visiting and people start wondering why they can’t see your film in their local cinema or demand high quality DVD copies.
Bingo, you are there. Now you can start talking to cinema operators and distribution companies with the backup of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Lobby them safe in the knowledge that you already have an audience and a product that sells. You can start recouping money by selling DVDs and other merchandise and have a strong position to negotiate distribution and other deals from.
For your next project you already have an existing base audience, your own distribution channel and people to help market your film for you. You can replicate, add and go even further this time, although how much you succeed depends entirely on you and the quality of your products of course. Good luck and let me know how things are going.
