WordPress for Film Production Companies, Authors and Small Businesses
Here’s my first quick post for the How to Market Cheaply and Effectively Using the Internet For Starving Artists and Other Small Businesses. It’s a quickie, and comes from an email I had with Alison Humphrey, who is working at Sarrazin Couture film production as well as at Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a multi-talented artsy gal!)
Here is my big time and money saver for companies in industries with notoriously small marketing budgets: use WordPress blog software to build your web site.
You will get more bang for your buck.
Here are 2 sites I put up for tv/film production companies using WordPress. These are using free WordPress themes to dress up their site a bit.
- Streely Maid Films producers of Diamonds in a Bucket
- PWK productions producers of Puppets Who Kill
WordPress themes, or templates, are kind of like “skins.” It’s the same WordPress engine underneath, but the theme can make the site look quite different. It’s kind of like dressing up Barbie.
There are also fancier WordPress themes called Premium Themes. These make WordPress sites look more like a magazine site. For these sites below, we used the wonderful WordPress WordPress Revolution Magazine theme by Brian Gardner
- Author Paul Quarrington
- Moving Stories Film Festival. Watch for the June 15th big announcement at BookExpo.
You can also do an all out customized original WordPress with your own design.
Production costs gets more expensive as you go from top to bottom of the above list, but looking at the Canadian TV scene, I think the top ones are fine. There’s little point spending thousands of dollars on a site if no one comes to it – or worse – when they get there, it really wasn’t worth the effort.
So – build your site using WordPress, then take that extra money and build a WordPress site for each of your film productions. Audiences are starting to expect this.
By using WordPress for each film’s site, you can start your site early and build hype and Google authority. You can cross promote the site’s existence during your promotion and publicity, and then invite fans to come to the site, interact and leave comments. You build fans. You can also grab their emails so you can send them news about the show, or other upcoming shows.
With the money you saved building your web site, you can now put more money into other marketing initiatives – like building really cool EPKs or electronic press kits. These will have all the necessary things up on your site ready for press and journalists to download. The easier it is for them to gather their information, the more likely it is that they will write or talk about you.
The more I do this for clients (and myself) the more I think this is smart.
WordPress is still becoming hotter and hotter. With a monstrously huge fan base that keeps developing for it, it’s become a huge Lego for web sites, allowing you to add really cool functions and plugins – like send to a friend, or forums, or notify me.
I can go on and on – but this is enough to get you thinking. I will write more about WordPress in other posts
I love lurve WordPress.
19 Comments so far
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thank you
That Revolution press is just about the best there is. I use it all the time. Some of the magazine themes also come in handy.
Revolutionary press certainly is something.
I specifically like the WordPress Thread Comment, This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.
thank you very much
Cool word press themes you link to. thanks!
This was fantastic information. Thanks for the tips!
Don’t forget to check some of WordPress’ great plugins that can help you automate your marketing as well!
hi
can i know if i just take the cool theme to plug into my wordpress? can Mr duck teach me a hand or two?
thanks !
Excelent comment and very good blog. Thanks and best regards from Germany Private Krankenversicherung
Wordpress is without a doubt one of the most versatile platforms on the planet. I am just now really getting into WP, being a Blogspot maniac for so long…it was hard for me to open my mind to WordPress, but now that I have another site with WordPress installed, I am truly excited about learning more.
Great article and informativ. I have this bookmarked. Thanks
hi, I’m new to this whole webdesign thing and have been trying to get a nice looking blog setup forever was googling around and found your site… It may sound silly to you since i’m older but, i had no idea you can buy templates for wordpress. i thought i was going to have to hire some expensive designer to handle this for me… and after getting a few quotes it was far out of my price range. so basically i just want to thank you for saving me a ton of money! now i can start searching for a template and hopefully save a few hundred bucks!
Hi Nancy,
yes there are free themes – and there are themes to buy. Generally the themes you can buy are premium themes, and as such require some wrangling in order to set up properly. That means you may have to go into the code to change attributes or assign values and that can be a little intimidating. If you are new to this, it could be a steep learning curve that takes some time.
You might just want to start with a theme that is straight out of the box…that will be faster, and you can start writing posts right away, and building a web presence. You can always change your theme later – which is another great plus for WordPress.
What’s more important is to make sure you set up your site with a proper permalink structure, and some anti-spam and SEO plugins. This will all take time if you are new, so you may find that paying someone a few hundred bucks is actually a smart investment, saving you many hours of labour.
Of course, if you enjoy that kind of stuff, it can be enjoyable.
Good luck with WordPress!
That was fantastic information. This is a must read.
Thanks thats awesome
Interesting
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