The Ins and Outs of Internet Film Distribution

The Internet is by far the most powerful marketing tool available to the independent producer. It goes without saying that independent productions are hopelessly outgunned when contending with a Hollywood marketing campaign that involves TV, magazines, radio, billboards and newspapers. The Internet is proving to be the one form of media where your production can compete on the same level as a major studio.

Especially in light of the recent productions such as The Blair Witch Project, web campaigns have taken on a new significance. Fortunately, creating an effective Internet presence does not necessitate having an immense staff or a mammoth budget. The greatest advantage of the Internet is that a single individual can create the same footprint as a Fortune 500 company with a cleverly designed and executed site. Jacques Thelemaque, President of Filmmaker's Alliance and member of the Board of Directors of The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, believes that the Internet levels the playing field with its extremely low barrier-to-entry and unlimited distribution. "Where digital production has democratized filmmaking opportunities, the Internet has democratized distribution and exhibition opportunities," Jacques said.

However, it is important to remember that although your site can be built in a matter of days, it takes months for it to grow into an effective marketing tool. For this reason, your site should go up as early as possible. If you wait until the film is ready to distribute, you've missed the boat. As a general rule of thumb, web sites take six months to mature. In your first three months, you will see very little traffic. In each of the following months, sharp increases and bursts in activity are typical. Somewhere in the six-month range, traffic begins to become consistent and visitor averages are roughly the same from day to day. This is a sign of maturity and a result of word-of-mouth and other online marketing techniques that I will address later. This is why it is so important to have at least a few brief pages up as soon as you know your film is going to production.

The first step towards building your site is to obtain your own domain name. Always get a ".com" extension (i.e. www.bighit.com). If you get ".net" or ".org" extension, you will lose untold numbers of visitors to whoever has bighit.com. Do not use a hypen or "the" in your domain name. This is a common mistake, even with the Hollywood studios. Although you would normally want to be consistent in branding the name of your project, don't be afraid to truncate your domain names. Instead of the full name thebighit.com, it should be simply bighit.com. Always make domain names as short as possible so your visitors can easily remember and enter them.

Providing users with a means to submit their e-mail addresses for updates on your film should be top priority when your site first goes up. The email list is more powerful than your web site, because you can actively reach those people, instead of waiting for them to visit your site. You must frequently provide updated content to those on the list to keep interest up and encourage repeat visits. It will serve you to great advantage to address the list as if it were going out to a single individual rather than giving the appearance of a mass mailing to hundreds or thousands of people. This personal touch encourages a feeling of camaraderie between fan and filmmaker. The members of this list will be your most loyal following and the core group that will generate the buzz you need for your film to be successful.

A word of caution about email lists: Do not include other members of your list in the message header. This not only ruins the espirit de corps you are cultivating but also provides spammers with a list of targeted email addresses. Plenty of software programs exist to assist you in managing email lists-- they are well worth the expense.

The initial content of your site should be the biographies and pictures of your principals as well as the premise and possibly a treatment of your script. There is a plethora of sites that thrive on news about in-progress film productions, or projects in development. Many of them invite updates and reports on productions. Providing information on your project, along with its URL, is a great way to bring traffic to your site and generate some crucial early interest. If done properly, you can generate a certain amount of excitement over your "hot new project" in development and possibly draw the interest of equity investors.

The next step in the process is submitting your site's URL to the search engines. Although much ado is made about "spoofing", a technique aimed at boosting a site's rankings with the search engines, it is a time-consuming process and doesn't always prove effective or productive. Your best approach is to be certain that your page titles and meta-information are sharp, concise and relevant to your content.

At this point, pursue exchanging links with other web sites. A sincere compliment and a polite request are highly effective. This serves four functions.

The obvious one will be attracting traffic directly to your site. The second is that, if you have thorough coverage, it will create the impression of omnipresence. Although a surfer may not click on the link the first time he or she sees it, after encountering it on a dozen other sites, assumptions will be formed about your reputation and popularity. The third function is similar to the second but in a more mechanical way. Search engines like Altavista (which will bring you the majority of your traffic) will give you more favorable positions in their rankings based on your "popularity", determined by how many sites are linked to yours.

Most importantly, you have made an initial contact with all the site administrators, whom you will need to know later on in your campaign. In an industry that thrives on networking, this is your means of gaining essential support. As an avid user of email, Joel S. Bachar of Blackchair Productions in Seattle and founder of the Seattle Independent Film and Video Consortium, knows this law well. "When used effectively, the Internet can be the best tool you have to promote your film," Bachar said. "And to make important connections both locally and globally."

Traffic Monitoring software is your most valuable ally in determining how to build and expand your site as you react and adapt to your market. Webtrends software is the industry standard for Internet marketers to analyze server logs, which contain detailed information about the users that visit your site. Webtrends crunches that data and provides you with information about your users geographic and electronic origin, your site's most-requested and least-requested pages, busiest days of the week, busiest hours of the day, entry points, exit points and a slew of other data compiled into three-dimensional graphs. I cannot imagine maintaining a web site (or business) without this tool.

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