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.

Email marketing and newsletters are a practical and economical way to keep in contact with your clients and fans. That is - if your emails are being read.

The business of sending newsletters or email blasts is tricky. Spamcatchers are everywhere and your emails may be getting caught and trashed before they even reach their destination. Viewers all use different email software, so you have to make sure they will end up seeing your email the way they intended, instead of a broken tangled mess.

Then finally there is the writing itself. Is your newsletter compelling people to read it? All the way through? Geez - are they even being opened?

One way to make sure your email marketing campaigns are working is by thorough testing. That’s why companies that specialize in email marketing tend to get it right. They have plenty of time to test, refine, then test again. Not to mention keep up with all the tech changes in the industry.

So, when these smart companies put out their own newsletters full of tips and advice, I say we should listen.

Here is a list I have compiled of industry best practices, strategies and resources for email marketing campaigns by some of the most reputable or popular email marketing service providers or experts out there.

Following the advice of these guys should mean a very successful newsletter campaign:

• Email Strategies from Thindata this Toronto company has been handling the campaigns for some pretty highfalutin’ companies. Sign up for their free newsletter.
• Constant Contact Learning Centre and Live Webinars - Constant Contact became one of the most popular email marketing companies because of its free service for mailing lists with less than 50 members. They continue to stay in the lead by offering these handy resources.
• Best Practices from Email Labs offers a most comprehensive list.
• Email Marketing Tips from Email Address manager is a nice collection of articles written across the web.
• Top 21 email marketing information sources is a grandaddy of lists of some hardcore Email Marketing gurus and experts. Prepare to go deep.

Remember, “out of sight, out of mind,” so make regular contact with your clients through an email marketing campaign a part of your marketing strategy.

Tags: email marketing tips, online marketing, newsletters, best practices

I’m attending Podcamp Toronto this weekend and the first day has proven to be a blast as well as a gold mine for great ideas and information. I have gotten loads of really hot tips and advice from each session I’ve attended, and so have decided to share some of the best ones here.

If you don’t know what a Podcamp is, it’s a BarCamp style meetup for podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, and web types. What’s barcamp you ask? Well, as explained on the Official BarCamp web site, it’s an

“ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment…with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp…“

And so the Camp phenomenon goes. And grows. There are even CaseCamp’s for marketing case studies.

Podcamps have been hosted in seven cities so far, and this is Toronto’s and Canada’s first. The presenters are generous and have come in from places like Boston, Indianna and Montreal. The atmosphere is friendly and warm. And to make it all just perfect, registration, coffee, donuts and even lunch - are all free.

And so, onward to the Top Tips.

Numbers 1-3 are from the session “Giving Your Podcast A Google Presence” with Julien Smith of In Over Your Head.

1. You need to use text to speak to Google.

That’s the language Google speaks, and so you will need to deploy it to get a good Google ranking. Your page title is most important for SEO. Make sure you choose your page title wisely and compose it so that your most important keywords come first - Google has a tendency to cap the amount of words in a title that they will index.

2. Use the free SEO for Firefox plugin.

Once installed, the SEO for Firefox plugin allows you to check up on other people’s web sites so you can do a little snooping about their rankings. Just surf to a competitor’s page, right click on it, and you can choose “Highlight Keyword”, then type in a keyword to see everywhere it appears. Or choose “Keyword Density” to view and assess why other people are ranking higher than you.

3. Giving things away for free can drive people to your web site

Wonder why giving things away for free can be good for business? Because everyone starts talking about you and your product and linking to your site from their blogs or sites. For example, Aaron Wall created this SEO plugin, and if you go to Alexa.com and type in his site’s URL, www.seobook.com, his web site is the 993rd most popular web site on the Internet. And that’s pretty damn good.

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