E-mail marketing is tough. A study by Forrester research shows that while 83% of companies attempt e-marketing less than 5% are successful.  What’s the secret?

There’s no secret, per se, but film and video distributors targeting license buyers need to be informed about all the potential pitfalls.  A good e-mail marketing campaign demands research, strategy, patience, a smooth follow-up process, and a little high-tech. It’s hard to know where to begin, and it’s natural to be afraid of making a major mistake and alienating your potential buyers.

On the other hand, a good e-mail campaign has proven time and again to be the most cost-effective way to market, and in the film and video licensing industry, it’s becoming a standard and expected practice.  Take some time to analyze what needs to be done, let your creativity and passion for your material inform what you do, and you will reach the film/video license buyers who are searching for the kind of content you offer.

To help get you started, we’ve put together a list of five easy-to-make e-mail marketing mistakes.

When most people talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) they tend to talk about getting more traffic to their website.  Everyone wants more traffic.  Right?

If you are like most film and video distributors, you care less about volume of traffic and much more about quality of traffic.  The goal is to get the right people visiting your site.  Can SEO do that for you?

Search Engine Optimization is about helping people who want to find your site, find your site.  Optimize your site properly, target keywords intimately related to your business, and the high quality traffic will come.

By making a few technical improvements to your site right now, you can help search engines like Google and Yahoo understand and ‘respect’ what your site offers and then pass the good word on to the thousands of film and video license buyers who use search engines every business day. 

Maybe a buyer only remembers a few words about a title they saw on the back of one of your sell sheets.  Good SEO practice makes it possible for license buyers to find you using even the sketchiest keywords.

We’ve put together a checklist of nine very basic things you can do today to make sure your website is search engine friendly.  Give your site an SEO tune-up, work hard posting keyword rich content, and you will be amazed how fast you can ‘own’ a set of keywords related to a film/video content category or genre.  This means that whenever, or wherever, a buyer searches for content related to your business, they’ll find their way to your website.

This checklist is just as essential for film and video distributors as it is for indie producers and film festivals wanting to boost their exposure.  Everyone can benefit from these best practices.

We covered a lot very quickly during our December 6th webinar on Search Engine Optimization. We talked about getting your old sell sheets online and the importance of catalogue titles, we talked about social bookmarking sites, web 2.0, and what it takes to use content fans to put pressure on license buyers.

For all those who asked, we’re happy to offer a PDF version of that presentation for download. It doesn’t have quite the same effect as hearing it straight from Mr. Jordi Duran, our SEO expert, but it’s a useful document nonetheless.  Stay tuned to this blog for many more hints and tips.

SEO for Film and Video Distributors PDF

And, of course, feel free to leave us comments.

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