As a filmmaker, your website is one of the most important tools on earth for helping you reach your audience. The problem is, most filmmakers are visually oriented, but not marketing oriented. As a result, most movie websites suck.
Here are 3 movie website tips to help you avoid common movie website blunders:
- Nobody cares about cast and crew bios – unless you are trying to get people to BUY NOW. If that’s the case, you can rest assured people won’t BUY NOW. They will spend all their time reading about your cast and crew… And after they read about your actors, they will exit your site.
- You have a bunch of reviews on your site with links to the review sites. You can now send your prospective paying audience to another website… Where they can not only read your reviews, but they can also read the reviews of other, competing movies and BUY THERE. Awesome!
- You decided that paying for a 3rd party email service is not worth the cost. So you decide to forgo all list building efforts. Because, after all – your list is your business. And without a list, you have no business. But somehow the $19 dollars a month for your Audience List is still too expensive (Audience List pays me to promote. But there are others, like Mail Chimp and Constant Contact and Vertical Response.)
- Google Analytics is too complicated. So you decided not to include it or track visitor data. As a result, you think people are coming to your site. But you aren’t sure where they come from, what pages they visit and most importantly – you have no clue which pages your visitors exit from.
- Instead of paying to have your site optimized for SEO, you decided instead to have your kid cousin create the site. It looks awesome, by the way. Full of all sorts of stuff that increases load time and confuses search engines. Nice work!
Obviously, I am taking on a satirical tone. But it’s for your own good. Working with several filmmaker clients, I see a lot of websites that look awesome. But they do nothing to entice someone to click the BUY NOW button.
Speaking of the BUY NOW button, every serious filmmaker should check out The Indie Producer’s Guide To Modern Movie Distribution. It costs less than a dinner and a movie, but it provides over a half-decade of movie marketing information. (OK. I’m biased. But it took me a long time to create it. And I think it’s totally valuable!) To find out more about film distribution guide, click this link.
Or not… Truth be told, not everybody wants to sell their movie.
About Jason Brubaker
Jason Brubaker is a Hollywood based Independent Motion Picture Producer and an expert in Video On Demand distribution. He is focused on helping YOU make, market and sell movies more easily by growing your fan base, building buzz and creating community around your title. He is also available for speaking engagements.