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How to make $1,000,000 producing funny short films? What’s up with not making viral videos? No job hunting, no fundraising for production. And that’s how…

29 Oct
2009

Film industry these days doesn’t spoil talents with opportunities, does it? Therefore the best everyone can do is to create opportunities utilizing your existing resources, knowledge and creativity.

Among resources there might be your equipment (hey, even IPhone could do), connections or earlier produced unused footage.

The challenges for many filmmakers who see viral marketing as a great avenue to express their creativity and do what they love and what they are good at, are following:

It takes sales skills to find advertisers that are willing to spend money on viral videos
It takes even more skills and time to convince that you are their best choice as there are thousands of other filmmakers in your city know at advertisers doors.

Much easier solution is to engage in affiliate marketing and work with a network that provides you with advertisers and campaigns to market. The only challenge is, they will never “show you the money”. You will not be able to estimate your return on investment if there will be any.

The only way to go about affiliate marketing is to forget any CPM (cost per impression), CPC (cost per click) or any other models that might bring you few bucks here and there. Your efforts might be never justified. Instead go where the big fish is. The only place for it as a Pay Per Deal advertising network with extremely high payout to its affiliates, since the product that they sell have very high price and therefore high commissions.

So here is your action plan.

You signup as an affiliate with Pay Per Deal advertising model that provides you with advertisers that are looking to market their highly priced business-to-business or business to consumers offers. It’s obviously free to signup.
The network will run by you campaigns that pay from $1,000 to $10,000 (some time higher) in affiliate commissions. You are paid per each deal closed by advertisers.
Our network will provide you with login information to your Predictive Reporting System™, so you always know what happens with sales leads that your ads will generate.
You put on your creative hat and start working on ideas for fun videos to be distributed on Youtube and other social networking sites, as well as via email.
Advertisers’ sales teams will contact newly generated sales leads to close deals.
You collect your commission and live happily ever after.

Here is some math for you.

Let’s assume:

You produce 5 viral videos a month – 30-180sec ads. Total videos: 60.
5 of your videos in total generate 100,000 views per month (20,000 impressions each), and the other videos will fail. Hey, maybe each of your videos will generate millions views, but let’s average our expectations. You definitely should push your videos through all channels you can – friends of friends and beyond.
Advertisers, as a result of video marketing, will receive 100 leads (0.1% conversion from view to lead) per month. A lead is generated from a link embedded in a video description that leads to advertisers’ web site, where a sales lead is captured via contact form.
Advertisers close 40% of their sales leads which results in 120 deals a year.
Your compensation is 120 deals * $10,000 commission = $1,200,000 a year.

If you partner with other filmmakers you can produce higher volume by leveraging rexsources, as well as better quality ads.

The key is in tracking all leads that clients receive as a result of your creative efforts, and we have taken care of this. Check out how it’s done.

So, what can you produce quickly and at no cost that can go viral?

You can find plenty of hilarious viral ads that you can’t help but will share with your friends. I wanted to post some of the best ones, but due to time restrains I have to settle for making a quick selection on Youtube and sharing a few of those that you can produce with a very little or almost no budget, by engaging friends and their resources of any kind.

You will say, I need to invest money in making my video viral. Well, it will all depend on the video.

Look at this one. It’s not an ad, but nobody expected it to become a hit either. 35 mln views – insane!

And here are some ads. Nothing complicated, just a great idea that makes one smile.

I am not known for being politically correct, so if my selection burns your eyes, go wash them and never come back. Otherwise keep watching and dream of better future then sitting in front of your computer, looking for a job.

… and this one doesn’t even have an original script – it’s based on a very old anecdote, which gives you another idea if a sense of humor is not one of your gifts.

And of course this one…

So, as you see there is always the way. Just stop doing the “same old” expecting different results. Find ways to express yourself, share your talents with those who can appreciate it, millions of people… Don’t wait things to come to you, go get’em, tiger!

If this article was useful, you might also be interested in these articles:

How-to and case-study of viral marketing that can not coreside with greed. Learning the methodology of building brands from the bottom from legends of social movements

Voice-over artists call. Work for yourself marketing CPD affiliate campaigns on Youtube. Alternative ways to monetize your talent without relying on voice agents and inconsistent work flow. Free yourself from a need to search for voice over jobs ever again
…
by Olga Kostrova, CEO of IdeaMama Group:

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