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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Whew! I am still catch­ing up from a whirl­wind WEVA Expo show in Orlando two weeks ago, fol­lowed by some other engage­ments I had in Florida.

I had to hit the ground run­ning when I got home. As soon as I got back I had to spend some time learn­ing to oper­ate a new dis­tance learn­ing video set up (IP Video Con­fer­ence Recorder) for a job I’m doing for the Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing at Cal Poly. As much as I wish I was able to just pro­duce spe­cial inter­est videos (SIVs), we have a sud­den abun­dance of well pay­ing client work com­ing our way, so I can’t com­plain (but I still do).

My wife and I didn’t fly home as soon as the con­fer­ence ended since my folks live in Mer­ritt Island, about an hour out­side of Orlando. While there, I was able to accept a liter­ery award for my dad in St. Augus­tine. The rea­son I men­tion it here is that video I did on my dad is the prod­uct that launched me into sell­ing my videos over the inter­net, which led me to learn­ing how to design and build my own web­sites, inte­grate a shop­ping cart to process orders, work with Google and other search engines to get my sites found on the inter­net, etc.

Before that, I worked strictly through dis­trib­u­tors, cat­a­logs and direct mail mar­ket­ing, which is very expen­sive. Since I started sell­ing on the inter­net, my busi­ness has increased sig­nif­i­cantly every year, so much so that that lit­tle site ded­i­cated to my father’s DVD and books alone gives us a good annual income. Check it out at PatrickSmithOnline.com.

One of the impor­tant lessons I learned from that was why it is impor­tant to expand your prod­uct line. If I only sold the DVD my sales would not be as high as they are because once a cus­tomer bought the DVD I would have noth­ing fur­ther to sell them. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of my sales are now due to the books I added. I only make about 45% profit on the books, but then I just have to stock them for the web­site. I didn’t invest any time in pro­duc­ing them, so they give me a good sales boost for lit­tle effort. I always encour­age peo­ple to find related prod­ucts to sell along with their SIVs. As if to empha­size my point, as I wrote this a large order just popped up in my email that con­sists of a com­bi­na­tion of DVDs and books. That thrill never gets old!

I’m happy to report that even in this slow econ­omy, my busi­ness is up 50% from last year at this same time. One of the key rea­sons is that with the price of gas, peo­ple are shop­ping more online as a con­ve­nience. This applies to my con­sumer web­sites. My busi­ness ori­ented web­sites, like HowToSellYourVideos.com and oth­ers, are grow­ing because I work hard to pro­mote them, and peo­ple per­ceive that they are get­ting good value, and they are.

No mat­ter how great your prod­uct is and how cool your web­site is, you won’t sell much if you don’t spend the time to mar­ket the site. Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) is an indus­try built around get­ting your web­site found among the mil­lions of sites on the inter­net. I’ll have more infor­ma­tion about SEO in the future. It is an impor­tant and com­plex topic.

In the mean­time, I hope you are either think­ing about pro­duc­ing your own SIV prod­ucts, or per­haps are already in the process.

Until next time,

Rick Smith

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Often, when I’m speak­ing to groups of video­g­ra­phers about what I do — pro­duc­ing spe­cial inter­est videos (SIVs) — they get stuck at “what should I pro­duce?” I under­stand this ques­tion, but I can’t relate to it.

Yes, you do have to choose intel­li­gently so that your project has a good chance of being prof­itable, and I talk about how to do that in my DVD “Make Money Sell­ing Your Own Videos.” That is a very impor­tant aspect of the SIV busi­ness and I’ll be writ­ing more arti­cles about it soon. In all hon­esty, my deci­sions are based on research, expe­ri­ence and blind faith. I keep my pro­duc­tion bud­gets low, my expec­ta­tions real­is­tic and my eyes and ears open to feed­back from the mar­ket­place in order to max­i­mize returns from my video productions.

The sub­ject of this arti­cle, how­ever is how to get ideas for poten­tial projects, which has always been too easy for me. In fact, I drive myself crazy with so many projects on my plate that I get over­whelmed. Ideas for videos seem to just come out of the wood­work for me. The major­ity never come to fruition once they work their way through the fil­ter­ing sys­tem, which is as it should be, but enough do pass the tests to get to the pro­duc­tion stage.

Let me tell you how it hap­pens for me.

The other day I posted my gui­tar for sale on Craigslist. One inter­ested poten­tial buyer was a man who makes fine hand­made acoustic gui­tars but who recently felt the strong pull to take up elec­tric gui­tar. Now he may not decide to buy my gui­tar but when he found out what I do for a busi­ness, the wheels started turn­ing in both of our heads. The projects we ban­tered around were a video on how to set up a gui­tar (adjust­ing string, pickup and nut height; adjust­ing the into­na­tion, etc.). These are all things a seri­ous gui­tar player should know in order to take care of their instru­ment, so the poten­tial mar­ket is quite large.

Par­ties are a rich source of project ideas. At one gath­er­ing I met a yoga instruc­tor. Now yoga videos abound, so I would not pur­sue a generic yoga topic, but she has a unique spe­cialty of heal­ing injuries with yoga. Now that is a spe­cific niche that sets this idea apart from the sea of yoga videos out there.

At another party I was telling a land­scaper friend of mine about the video I’m pro­duc­ing on grow­ing cacti and suc­cu­lents. He said he was doing a com­plete new land­scape instal­la­tion with suc­cu­lents. I thought, “Hummm, I’ll bet a video on land­scap­ing with suc­cu­lents would go over well, espe­cially since out west where I live there is a water short­age and peo­ple are encour­aged to land­scape with drought tol­er­ant plants.” So that’s another idea on my plate.

These are just a few exam­ples of how I win­now out ideas. For me to con­sider an idea it has to be unique, but fit into a well defined niche. I need the abil­ity to clearly iden­tify the mar­ket and have a means of reach­ing them with mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­ity efforts, at a rea­son­able cost

Look around you. What is in the news, on tele­vi­sion, in every­day con­ver­sa­tion? The price of gaso­line is chang­ing the world econ­omy. Peo­ple are look­ing for alter­na­tive fuels and ways to reduce the amount of fuel they use. Peo­ple are con­cerned about global warm­ing and their own car­bon foot­print. Many peo­ple are look­ing for ways to be “green,” whether that is buy­ing local food or com­post­ing the yard clip­pings. These are all strong trends that are ripe with unlim­ited poten­tial top­ics for videos.

A key piece of advice I share and adhere to myself is to pick a topic you per­son­ally care about. If you are inter­ested in the topic you will have more moti­va­tion to stay the course through script devel­op­ment, pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing. Mar­ket­ing is an ongo­ing aspect of this busi­ness, and if you enjoy the topic then your inter­est will open many doors. You’ll read related mag­a­zines, join and post to online forums, attend and exhibit at trade shows, speak at con­fer­ences, meet the movers and shak­ers in that industry.

And yes I do enjoy grow­ing suc­cu­lents, I’m inter­ested in heal­ing with yoga and I’m far too inter­ested in gui­tars for my own good. I’m inter­ested in pro­duc­ing mul­ti­ple titles in these areas, and I’m def­i­nitely open to pro­duc­ing top­ics that help the envi­ron­ment. I’ve learned from expe­ri­ence that I have to enjoy the topic to really engage with the project.

A lot of how I’d sum up my approach is to develop a way of lis­ten­ing to peo­ple and the media in terms of “could I make a sal­able video out of that, and why would I want to?” If you have inter­est in the sub­ject, can define you topic fairly pre­cisely and iden­tify the tar­get mar­ket, then you’re on the right track. Your next step is to do some research to deter­mine the poten­tial demand for the pro­posed video and find out what the com­pe­ti­tion is like.

I’m just get­ting into this social net­work­ing, which I think will have an increas­ingly pow­er­ful cul­tural and social impact. I don’t know exactly how it will work for me but if you are read­ing this and want to see my pro­file on Face­book click here and/or on my LinkedIn net­work, click here.

Watch for future arti­cles on doing research before tak­ing that final plunge, and many arti­cles on mar­ket­ing, social net­work­ing and the specifics of pro­duc­ing spe­cial inter­est videos.

That’s it for now. I’ve gotta get busy pro­duc­ing my new topics.

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How much can you make with spe­cial inter­est videos? Like all things … it depends. Not the clean answer you’d like, but it does depend on many things.

How many copies do you think you can sell? At what price? What is your pro­duc­tion cost. These all fac­tor into your profit.

It is an impor­tant busi­ness exer­cise to do some pro forma pro­jec­tions before jump­ing into a project. You have to have a large poten­tial mar­ket, high sales price, or both, to make a sig­nif­i­cant profit. And then of course you have to fol­low through with mar­ket­ing to let your maket know about your product.

Here is an excerpt from the DVD, How to Make Money Sell­ing Your Own Videos that shows what the poten­tial gross sales from spe­cial inter­est pro­grams can be. You can make this spread­sheet your­self in Microsoft Excel.

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