Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

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.