The Business of Video and Photography – How to find your First Customer
When I discovered I had a passion for video I learned everything I could about video and putting it into practice became a religion. I dedicated myself to learning the craft and traveling around the world and filming video helped me ramp up my skills very quickly. I had just finished 2 years in Business school and $31,000 Canadian to get my MBA to realize I wanted to start my own business. I didn’t have 4 years and thousands of dollars to go to a film school to learn video. I’m glad I didn’t. Some of the information you need to figure out how to film great video and take good pictures is on the Internet. It just takes time and practice to figure out the experts you can trust and very rarely doesn’t one person explain everything from gear, shooting, editing, and publishing. The quality also varies with free resources. That is why I created my first course “The Art of Travel Video”. To fill the gap.
When it came to making money from my creative talent it was hard to figure out the Business of Video and Photography. This wasn’t something I was taught in photography class or my MBA. It became more challenging as I was traveling in Australia, Singapore, and would eventually spend some time in Taiwan. I had to figure out how to create business opportunities in destinations I didn’t live for long periods of time. I dedicated months of study on the Internet to figure out how I figure how I could rank my pages high on Google search. I was using a WordPress website so I searched for plug-ins and came across the Yoast Seo plug-in.
Figuring out how to rank a webpage on google was key in helping me find my first customer.
This plug-in was key in allowing me to build pages on my wordpress website that ranked well. What I found out is even after creating a web page it took about a couple of weeks before my page would rank well. I knew I would be living in Taipei, Taiwan for a while so I created an introduction page that you can see here. In this page in English I basically explain that I was now in Taiwan, who I was, my service, and some sample videos. It wasn’t long before I had the top ranked web page on google. One day I got a phone call from a company in India that asked me if I did video and if I was in Taipei. They were contracted by Intel to find someone to put together the video, but needed a local person who could do a corporate video shoot. I was the lucky guy they found because of my high ranked website. After the phone call we worked out the details and once I got the shooting date and they paid 30% of the invoice I knew this was legit.
Since then I’ve gotten several more opportunities for business based on this page. Of course I didn’t rely just on this page for finding future business. I had to use a number of approaches that I will talk about in detail in my new course “The Business of Video & Photography”. I’m going to talk about ways to find new customers for video shoots, but also introduce you how to make money from your videos passively on the Internet.
How you can apply this advice to yourself?
Create a strong portfolio of your best work.
Publish it to Youtube
Create a WordPress website and install the Yoast Seo plug-in
Create an Introduction page that ranks high for “Video production citythatyoulivein”
Make sure your contact information is on that page
Link your video reel back to the this page.
The Business of Video and Photography – A practical course that will teach you different ways to find your first customers and more
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