This dis­cus­sion was started as a post in my Spe­cial Inter­est Video group at LinkedIn (Click here to join) and I thought it was a good one to share here.

From Dan–

I attend a large church and had some oppor­tu­ni­ties to work on their video team doing cam­era work and cre­ated a cou­ple of videos. I learned so much from the direc­tor of that team. Not only did he know the video side of things but he is one of the best at cre­at­ing the sets on the plat­form. I’ve been to smaller churches and see how they attempt to do the video func­tion. Most of the time it’s just get­ting the lyrics up on a big screen or cam­era shots of the pastor/minister. So, I would think you have a decent idea for a SIV. I think there is mate­r­ial out there but most churches can’t afford to jump in too fast and if you can pro­vide inex­pen­sive ways to get started, then build on it, it would cer­tainly have value. Maybe Rick should teach us how to get off the fence and just get some­thing started. Sounds like you’re the same as me-just haven’t made that first attempt yet.

My Reply: I think what Dan says deserves repeat­ing: “Maybe Rick should teach us how to get off the fence and just get some­thing started. Sounds like you’re the same as me-just haven’t made that first attempt yet.”

I refer to that clas­sic say­ing, “A jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step.” You will never get started until you take that first step. I have not met a video­g­ra­pher who couldn’t come up with good ideas about a spe­cial inter­est video they’d like to pro­duce. How­ever, very few, and I mean prac­ti­cally none of them, ever do it. What stops them is the process of research­ing the topic and not know­ing how to mar­ket it once it is produced.

So what is the first step? It begins with select­ing a topic you are inter­ested in and for which you think there is a need. Then you need to find out if there are already exist­ing prod­ucts that serve the need. Google search is a good way to do that.

If you go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in a word or phrase describ­ing your topic, you can see how much search vol­ume there is for that word. For exam­ple, I just typed in “motor­cy­cle.” There were 11,100,000 searches for that word last month! Obvi­ously, there is a lot of inter­est in motor­cy­cles. You can look down the list and see more spe­cific searches deal­ing with morot­cy­cles and how much search inter­est there is in each term based on the search vol­ume. (There are other excel­lent tools for doing this which I’ll dis­cuss in future posts).

If you had searched a word and there was very lit­tle search vol­ume, then that means that may not be much inter­est in the sub­ject. For me, I’d rather fish where there were lots of fish bit­ing, and would use this tool as a first gauge of interest.

By the way, if you don’t have a topic in mind, this is a good tool to help find some­thing that may spark your inter­est and have a high poten­tial for suc­cess. I usu­ally rec­om­mend that you pick a topic you are inter­ested in, but if you’re draw­ing a blank, this may get you started.

Com­pe­ti­tion is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. If there are sev­eral peo­ple pro­duc­ing on a topic, then it must be a good topic. Find your own niche within that topic area and con­tinue to do research.

For those of you who want more infor­ma­tion than I can give here, I do have two DVDs on pro­duc­ing and sell­ing spe­cial inter­est videos at http://HowToSellYourVideos.com .

I just com­pleted a nine-week course on some pretty deep Google Adwords and pay-per-click mar­ket­ing strate­gies and am already into another course, so you’ll be see­ing a lot of my mar­ket­ing thoughts in this blog.

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Just last week, I received this email mes­sage from a fel­low video­g­ra­pher. It’s a good ques­tion so with his per­mi­sion, I am shar­ing his ques­tion and my answer with you.

Rick, I have pro­duced a really unique video with a local biologist…been out for about 3 months but have not hav­ing too much luck sell­ing it. Got great reviews and tes­ti­mo­nial but not too many sales.

I know you are a busy man, but, any help would be appreciated.

If inter­ested, you can view the prod­uct at
http://www.createspace.com/254385

thanks!

Vince Shay

Vince, I have a whole web­site ded­i­cated to that very sub­ject: http://howtosellyourvideos.com. In your case, hav­ing only one video on a niche topic, I would rec­om­mend that you 1.) deter­mine who your tar­get mar­ket is, and 2). try to find a video dis­trib­u­tor that is already estab­lished in and serv­ing that mar­ket. I’ll build web­sites for just one of my own niche prod­ucts, but I’m fairly pro­fi­cient at it and have the shop­ping cart soft­ware, mer­chant accounts, and web server space to do so. If you don’t have the web design skills or other nec­es­sary things, I wouldn’t really rec­om­mend going into the mar­ket­ing field for this one prod­uct. You can search online for dis­trib­u­tors, there are plenty of them. If it is a school ori­ented prod­uct, the price can be higher than for a retail product.

I hope that helps. Good luck.
Rick

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