If I had my druthers I’d take a year to just film fest. Not a difficult thing to do with a world-class festival running every month of the year. Here’s where you want to be from March to June.

March 7–15: Austin’s South By Southwest
The film component of SXSW has been growing every year and this year looks to be one of the film fest’s finest.

http://2008.sxsw.com/film/screenings/date/2008-03-07.html

April 17–27: Toronto’s Hot Docs
Hot Docs has become one of North America’s premiere documentary film fests. Every year promises a who’s who of current docs and a state of the union for the industry as a whole.

http://www.hotdocs.ca

May 14–25: Cannes, Festival de Cannes
Every year about 100 000 people cram into a 3 block radius by the sea and celebrate the full-out glamour and cheese of the International film scene. The festival for seeing and preening.

http://www.festival-cannes.fr/index.php/en

June 16-21: Toronto, Reel Heart International Films Festival
4th year for this TO newbie that wants to get away form “niche” festival and cover a broad spectrum of films, genres, languages and all. Could be interesting to watch this fest grow.

http://www.reelheart.com/

The first session of our latest webinar, SEO Strategies for the Film and Video Industry, with guest speaker Jordi Duran i Batidor, just finished and we’re sorting through the feedback and questions.  Thanks again to everyone who attended. 

We won’t have the presentation ready for download until tomorrow, but in the meantime, we did want to answer one question right away: how do you submit your site to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

As Patrick pointed out at the beginning of the webinar, only 7% of sites are actually visible to search engines.  There are a number of things you need to do to make sure that search engines first know you exist...then you can start worrying about Page Rank.

The first thing to do is to submit your site.

Here are the links to the submission page for four major search engines:

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl/

and make sure you checkout other great Google tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

dmoz
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

MSN Live
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

If you have a blog (and Jordi’s offered many compelling reasons why you should) make sure you submit your blog to blog specific search tools like

Technorati
http://technorati.com/

and blog post promotion sites like

FeedBurner
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/blogs

The votes have been tabulated, and based on the results from our last webinar we’re happy to announce our second webinar.

Title: Search Engine Optimization for the Film and Video Licensing Industry
Date: Thursday, December 6th, 2007
Morning Session: 8:30 AM EST (UTC/GMT -5)
Afternoon session: 5:00 PM EST (UTC/GMT -5)
Duration: 30 minutes
Cost: Free

This webinar will explore the benefits and challenges of Search Engine Optimization: the art and science of drawing qualified traffic to your website. Search engine expert Jordi Duran i Batidor, will offers tips, tricks, and hints to help film and video property rights holders expand their web presence.

Click here to register

More than a few participants of our November 15th Webinar asked us about e-mail marketing software, particularly that very attractive variety: the free kind.  Top drawer tools like Listrak and Campaigner aren’t exactly cheap, but give you the peace of mind of technical support (though, for example, Listrak does not offer it 24-7). 

If you are adventurous enough to trust your campaign to free ’Open Source‘ software, you’ll be intereted in OpenEMM.  Our CTO is really excited about it, and claims it’s very powerful and very robust.  I’ll let you know what we discover.

One of our participants was also nice enough to direct our attention to another free tool called PHPList, which looks worth checking out.

E-mail me at info@ipextv.tv if you have any comments you’d like me to share, or better yet, if you tried any free tools out and you have a story—cautionary, or otherwise.

Thanks to everyone who attended our online seminar “E-marketing Strategies for the Film and Video Licensing Industry.” It was truly our pleasure to host the event, and your feedback has been extremely positive and gratifying.  We will be announcing the next webinar, and our guest speaker, next week. Stay tuned to this blog...and for those who missed the event, check back regularly: we will be posting some of the tips, tricks, and analysis we discussed in Thursday’s webinar right here.

Please note: Webinar participants will be receiving an e-mail this weekend with a PDF summary.

We’re very happy to be hosting a webinar on Thursday, November 15th, 2007.  Everyone is invited.

Title: E-marketing Strategies for the Film and Video Licensing Industry
Date: Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Time: 8:30am EST (UTC/GMT -5) and 1:30 PM EST (UTC/GMT -5)
Cost: Free

The first in a series of webinars examining the online opportunities available to the film and video licensing industry, this webinar explores the buzz around ‘holistic’ digital marketing and how it applies to a B2B industry like ours.

We’re hosting two sessions, one for Europe and one for North America.  The webinar will be in English, and we invite you to pick whichever session is most convenient for you.

Click here for more details and for instructions on how to register. 

IPEX TV had a very successful trip to MIPCOM 2007 this year.  It doesn’t seem possible that people can be so busy yet so eager to be friendly.  It was a crazy week in Cannes (video is forthcoming).

In the mean time, we wanted to offer you a link to some of the titles currently on IPEX TV which were showcased at MIPCOM and which you may have missed.  Happy browsing.

Click here for the MIPCOM 2007 list.