Fuji Digital Camera

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Web Video...Your New Promotion Arm

Web video is here to stay and broadband is the vehicle that is fueling the boom. Just about every size and shape of digital camera that is sold today includes capability to take motion pictures. Depending on the magnitude of the camera, you can record both audio and video, ranging from a four-minute segment to up to fifteen to twenty minutes (and more!).

And what can you do with these segments?

Advertise your workon your own website, on a portal, on YouTube, Skidoo, My Space, and the many more spin-offs that are sure to come along.

THE PARADE EFFECT

And not only can you offer a slide-show of selected archived images, but you can include a section on your website such as Images from my recent trip to Oaxaca, Mexico.

Another feature: Self-promotion. Include a video of yourself, your surroundings; your opinions that you believe are relative to the stock photo industry and to your photobuyers.

And why is this important? Everyone loves a parade. We enjoy watching snippets of a parade. They last only a few minutes, and then another section of the parade comes along. It goes along with human nature to be engrossed for a few minutes in people-watching.

If that person is you on a web video, youve discovered a new form of public relations with your client list. Put the two together and you have helped cement a photobuyer-photographer relationship. To give you an example of how this works, you can see a clip of how I placed a short (2 minute) clip on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqZceQi3iSU

Web video's rapid growth will continue. In our industry, video will be the most important form of media on the Internet.

MOVING FAST

You probably remember previous attempts of web video technology. They were filled with static, flickers, and glitches. On regular phone lines, they were impossible to view. Now the technology is much better. Theres still some room for improvement, but for you, the time has come to start doing your homework and get ahead of the curve.

Thanks to earlier TV innovations such as Americas Funniest Videos, and Candid Camera no one expects Hollywood style lighting and precision with your web videos. If the message is clear, perfection can take a back seat.

Since Internet-savvy photographers and photobuyers populate the stock photography marketplace, there has been an increasingly rapid adoption of broadband with us.

In the general population, over 65 million consumers signed up for broadband service in 2006, according to the technology research firm, In-Stat. They report that worldwide broadband subscriptions now number 285 million. That number is expected to double in the next four years.

This is not to say that text descriptions or articles (like the one youre reading now) will disappear. But Web video will give an added new dimension to your stock photography business.

To learn more, check out web video on your favorite search engine and see how you can adapt this new idea to your marketing efforts.

Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of Sell & ReSell Your Photos and sellphotos.com, has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. For access to great information on making money from pictures you like to take, and to receive this free report: 8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer, visit http://www.sellphotos.com

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