Franco Sacchi tours Nigeria’s booming Nollywood

http://www.ted.com/talks/franco_sacchi_on_nollywood.html

HOW TO SELL YOUR FILMS WHILE PREVENTING PIRACY

Creating an Effective Web presence for Creative Professionals

Creating awareness for your creative work means taking action to communicate your identity to a specific audience. Most average promoters think of Internet marketing, as putting up a good web site and then driving traffic to it using banner ads or a Google AdWords campaign.

Notwithstanding, that’s a way to promote your creative work online. The truth is, it is not that effective, that is my opinion anyway.

Another wrong school of thought thinks that online promotion for creative works is about search engine optimization (SEO). Yes, basic SEO practices are helpful, but it is not the be-all solution.

The key way to promote and sell your creative works online; be it books, films, music etc., is Thinking outside your website. That you need an attractive and well organized website is not the debate here. You sure do. But to make a real impact as a creative person, you Need more than a good website. You Need a Presence, a Web Presence! That needs optimization.

A Web presence optimization is the optimization of your ENTIRE web presence. In SEO (Search Engine Optimization), your goal is to optimize your website for search engines. In WPO, your goal is to optimize all organic results, everywhere – websites, social sites, news releases, emails, social bookmarking, and more.

Yes, I don’t need to tell you that doing well in Google searches for your ideal words and phrases are vital to having an internet presence. But there is more. You set yourself up for success when you make sure you can be found in multiple places where your ideal viewers, listeners, readers, buyers and fans hang out online. If SEO is about getting your website onto page one of Google, web presence optimization (WPO) is about owning that page.

Having a good web presence also means:

1. Have articles and sample of your works in prominent sites that cater to your ideal fans.
2. Your name should keep popping up in active discussion forums related to your ideal fans.
3. You also expand your presence when people find you on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and any number of other social networking sites.
4. It grows when people who subscribe to you forward your latest message to their friends.
5. You also establish your presence by starting your own blog, while also making comments on other people’s blogs, podcasts and vlog.
6. It expands again when you do text, audio and video interviews online.

The truth is, the number of internet users is about 2 billion worldwide .Yeah billion. It can be intimidating to think about connecting with all these people. Don’t get frustrated and feel overwhelmed when it comes to promoting yourself online. You don’t have to reach all these people. You don’t even have to reach all lovers of your kind of creative work online.  Failure will be your number one friend if you try to reach everyone.

Bottom line: To successfully promote your creative works, you need to start a relationship with only a small number of the total number of people online.

Sell

This is the idea: If you could reach just one-hundredth of one percent of, say 1.5 billion people, you’d have 150,000 potential buyers and fans.That’s a lot of people!

You don’t have to be a big time celebrity to make big time money promoting and selling your creative works. Just be focused, be organized and see the money coming as you get in the faces of your fans. I am wishing you all the best in your creative endeavours.

Africa’s Mega-City Lagos Launches Global Challenge To Revolutionize Nollywood Video Distribution and Intellectual Property Protection

Lagos, the capital of Nigeria and Africa’s second largest city, today launched a call for solutions to protect it’s thriving movie industry and secure its growth through new technology-based distribution channels and by fighting piracy. The City today announced that it is seeking solutions based on the latest available mobile and other technologies to secure its Nollywood film industry as part of the Living Labs Global Award 2011.

Check out our submission:
http://www.livinglabs-global.com/showcase/showcase/571/eggupcom-sell-your-films-while-preventing-piracy.aspx

Making Money As A Creative Professional

Hello Creative friends. This is my first post on  subjects that are very dear to my heart. I am a filmmaker; an Artiste. I want to share my ideas with every passionate Artiste out there who wants to make a living selling their creative works to the right audience. I mean, musician, singers, song writers, and with special emphasis on filmmakers.

If your dream is to be able to find a market for your product and sale your work, and you are looking for ideas on how to do so, you have come to the right place. Also if you are seek ways to improve your craft, you are welcome. I am claiming to know everything and that I have tried everything. But I am committed to finding what will work for you and for me.

And if you have any ideas as to how to find an audience, where to go to find them, engage them and make them buy your work, please feel free to share we me. I have written on the subject on how to build your business as a filmmaker. I will also talk more on that here. thank you for you time.