Internet Marketing For Small Business

Looking for Free Stock Video Footage? Here are a few sources you might like to try.

Here’s a new site site that is offering Free Stock Video Footage with no catch. You can use the footage for personal use or commercial use – there is no stipulation. stockfootageforfree.com

Istockphoto also offers free videos every month that you can use. Make sure to check the details to see if you need to buy an extended license. Free Video of the Month Archive.

Archive.org has creative commons licensed video as well as video in the public domain. Here is a list of videos tagged with free stock footage.

Video in the public domain is becoming easier to find on the net. Here is a list of 9 public domain video sources put together by WebTVWire.com

Bingobango has gone through the internet archives and put together a few autumn clips available here, some Halloween clips, a nature assortment  here.

What’s your favourite source of free stock video?

Tags: Free Stock Video Footage , Free Stock Footage

3 comments

As you know by now I love WordPress. It’s not just the best blogging tool but it also makes great websites for:

• filmmakers (PWK Productions, Down to the Dirt)
• authors Nino Ricci, James McCreath, Paul Quarrington, Moving stories Film Festival)
• and artists (Rachel Peters)
• NEW! videoblogging sites or web series (Funny hockey series, Ripper Hockey)

What I am wondering is why there aren’t more bands using WordPress to drive their web sites. Especially indie bands who are low on cash and can’t afford the fees to get their Flash-based web sites updated.

There are great WordPress Themes for bands here. Here’s a WordPress site I built for the Toronto Blues Band Porkbelly Futures.

When I go poking about different band sites, I keep seeing nicely designed sites that haven’t been updated in months. Their tour schedule is behind, there is no way to get updates either from RSS or email, and it looks deserted. What a waste.

In this day and age you can’t afford to do that. In the ever-changing landscape of the music industry, your relationship with your fans is what counts.

Now, I know how difficult it is to keep your site updated. I am guilty of this myself. But that’s why WordPress makes so much sense. Anyone in the band can update it even if you are a techno phobe. Best yet – you can do it from anywhere on the road as long as you are connected to the web. No fancy software programs necessary – just a browser and your Login password.

With the right plugins, you can even use your mobile phone to make updates. How? You can use for phone to send a message to Twitter and the Twitter for WordPress plugin will make it appear on your sidebar.

Here are more reasons why WordPress for Bands makes a lot of sense.

WordPress is cheap.
It’s way cheaper to set up a WordPress blog for bands than to set up a regular web site. I know start up bands don’t have much money – so don’t go throwing it all into a web site that looks good but never gets updated, or doesn’t serve your fans. Build a WordPress site – save the extra for some other promo work – like proper press kits, EPKs or even a publicist.

WordPress has lots of tools to help you build a loyal fanbase.
Here I go again talking about the great community of developers that build plugins for WordPress that really allow your site to work hard for you. You need to communicate with your fans, and you need them to engage with you. This builds loyalty.

WordPress is built on a MySql database, which means you will be able to do things you can’t do with a regular HTML site. Powerful useful things. Not to mention you can update the look of your site in the future very quickly, easily and economically, so it makes long-term sense too.

Your fans can interact with you – or at least your site.
Do a “From The Road” series and let your fans comment on your web site. Add a guestbook or WordPress forum plugin and let them go at it. Write special blog posts where you ask there opinion on which album cover they prefer.

Google loves Wordress
Google loves web sites that are updated frequently and that’s exactly what blogs are built for – frequent updates. They also publish RSS Feeds (read my cheat sheet on RSS) and ping google too whenever they are updated (you don’t really need to know what that means other than it is a good thing and WordPress does it automatically.) If you comment on another WordPress blog you may get some traffic back to your site, and possibly even a backlink. And Google loves backlinks.

Here are a few WordPress Plugins that make your blog a ridiculously wonderful band web site.

• Discography 0.1. Every band site has a discography page. This plugin makes it easy for bands to store and display information about their songs.
• Gig calendar. Makes it easy to manage and display a calendar of your gigs within WordPress. It’s meant to be as easy as possible for both the musician and the fan. It even manages venue data complete with mapping and ticket links. UPDATE Jan 09 – just got a comment from Dan – he’s updated his plugin and it’s now WordPress 2.7 compatible. Go crazy.
• GigPress. Easy to use, intuitive. And very pretty. Automatically posts to your sidebar, though I wish the sidebar link went to the main post rather than the venue web site. Your post may have more info on it, like time and address and ticket prices, than the venue’s page.
• Event Calendar is another plugin that you could use to display your Tour Schedule. They are set to release a big upgrade.
• The Upcoming plugin from Yoast.com works with Yahoo’s Upcoming web site.
• Get a Twitter account and add Twitter Tools to your blog. The plugin will post and archive your tweets – so you get 2-in-one PR and an easy way to update your blog. What to tweet? Thoughts from the road, from the studio, last minute gigs, chats with other musicians. You can also get widgets that will allow your tweets to appear on your MySpace and Facebook pages – so with one tweet you’ve updated several sites. Remember – you can do this from your mobile phone.
• The MySpace crossposter is another time saver. Any posts to your blog will be immediately crossposted to your MySpace page.
• Play your music on your blog – or your podcast – with Audio Plugin.
• Sell your SWAG with this shopping cart plugin.

Here are some cool WordPress premium themes that are easy to customize and image heavy, so will work well for a band site:

• StudioPress Church – That’s right, the Church theme is one of the coolest for a band web site. Think of it as the church of rock and roll. But most of these themes will make great wordpress sites. Formerly called Revolution themes, these designs are upgraded constantly and come with support if you buy. We can customize them for you too. You’ll want the Viva Thumbs plugin to make adding the home page thumbnails a snap (especially if you’re on the road, this will save hours of time, otherwise you have to fiddle with custom themes and photoshop resizing…)
• WordPress Remix – This was one of our favourite WordPress themes for corporate web sites, but with the recent upgrades there are some great looks for bands. Try home page style 4 or 5. Has integrated galleries and events pages.
• Tribal Music by Gorilla Themes will need some graphic work to swap your own logo and background into the design, but you will get a cool site with built in music player from Mixpod so that you can stream your music.

More Best WordPress Themes for bands here.

To build a custom site like this would normally cost many thousands of dollars. With WordPress, not so much.

Why don’t more bands use WordPress? Why? Why?

Tags: Internet Marketing For Bands, wordpress for bands, cheap web sites for bands, web sites for musicians

21 comments

This is a great deal from An Hosting, one of the more reliable hosting companies out there.

Thinking it’s time for a site or blog? No more excuses – now is the time to jump in because $4.95 USD is a great price for hosting, and this package is hot. It even has One-Click Installs Of WordPress – the best blogging software out there.

Here’s what you get for $4.95 US a month with their AN Hosting “One Size Fits All” Plan

• 999GB of disk space (up from 250GB)
• 9,999GB of bandwidth (up from 2,500GB)
• Host 999 domains on one account (up from 20 domains)
• Free domain for life!
• Free site move!
• 30 day money-back guarantee
• Free website builder
• 24/7 phone/e-mail support
• Free scripts library
• Only $4.95/mo with no setup fee!

To put this in perspective, let me explain what it means.

Most of the web sites I have built for clients come in under 5 mb, unless they have hefty media sections with a lot of press ready art.

7 years ago, 100 MB was considered a lot of hosting space.

999 GB of storage space is 4 times more than the average computer holds…so that’s a huge amount. I can’t think of how you can use that up unless you actually host 999 blogs on the site.

9,999 GB is a also a huge amount for bandwidth. Bandwidth means how much data is allowed to be downloaded from your web site. It’s a way of measuring your site’s traffic. Some hosting companies put caps on the bandwidth, meaning if your site is super popular, and lots of people are going to your site, hence downloading images, text etc from your site, and you hit the limit, you may have to pay a surcharge.

With shared hosting, this number can be deceptive, but the short answer is the more bandwidth the better. You’d have to be very popular to hit this amount of traffic, so I wouldn’t worry about it. The long answer is that your hosting company may still put a cap on you…but that’s for another post.

Host 999 domains on one account? Wow! Are you a filmmaker with lots of films to promote? Then this package is a great way for you to set up a site or blog for each one of your films. Or how about a blog for everyone in your family. It’s easy to do with one click installs. If you want your own blogging empire, this would be the way to do it.

You only get one domain name free for life with this package, so you will still have to pay for the other domain names every year. But domains start at about $6 USD, so you’ll save at least that much. Some companies are still charging (or rather, ripping people off) $34.95 a year for those people not in the know. Now you know not to pay that much.

You don’t want the web site builder. They build awful sites. Better to put up a WordPress blog and use that as your web site. If you want it to look less “bloggy,” switch the home page to a static page, and title your blog section as News. I did that here on my writer/director’s site.

All the rest is standard. No one dare charges set-up fees anymore, so that’s nothing special. 24 hour support is another standard practice, though if they actually provide that is another question.

I just sent an email to these guys and it was responded to in under 5 minutes, so that is impressive.

All in all, a very good deal. Sign up before Nov 22, 07, when the price goes back up to 6.95 USD a month.

Tags: web hosting, one-click installs, specials, sale, AN hosting

2 comments

Get it now before September 1, 2007, as this is a good deal.

The Avid Free DV video-editing software is geared towards students and those just starting out making videos. It is meant to introduce, and then hook people to the Avid interface and software, so that they upgrade and buy the pro video-editing tools which have a lot more functions and power.

It’s got what the new or casual user needs to start with. The Avid Free DV includes basic video and audio editing capabilities, up to two streams of real-time effects and support for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X platforms.
Avid’s professional line of products include the Avid Xpress DV software and Avid Xpress Pro systems. You can compare Avid’s products here.

Avid was the standard video editing software in the industrly until Apple’s Final Cut Pro came on the scene.

2 comments