It’s important to draw a distinction between activities that merely sell a DVD and those that help build a business over the long term. For those who pursue DIY, it would be a shame–with all the effort that goes into the process–to come away with only a sale but not a foundation for a long-term business. The former concludes when you hand a buyer the receipt, whereas the latter has no terminal point. A business survives only because of its customer base, for artists, its the fan base.
DVDs can be sold in many ways–on Amazon, in a video shop or even out of the trunk of the car. On the other hand, there is only one way to build a business: by building a customer base. Selling DVDs is a function of marketing, advertising, placement, and promotions. Customer base building includes all the activities of mentioned above melded with a whole other set of activities for finding, building, and maintaining a customer base whose loyalty you keep for life.
DIY filmmakers can take a few inexpensive steps to build the tool set necessary to reach out to a broader fan base. Developing a wide presence via website, blogs, write articles, a social network site, contribution to forums.. Read Brian’s post to see how you can set all this up for about $10. Much of this activity can be automated and maintained by an assistant.
It is also important to create product licensing and merchandising strategies that will enable you to sell to different type of customers (e.g. private individuals, institutions, libraries, and their international variants). With a broad product strategy, you can now implement some creative sales strategies to move the variations through different sales channels, such as wholesale, retail, reseller, affiliates, etc. By doing so, you leverage other people’s efforts to help you build your customer base.
As for selling DVDs, we encourage clients to put DVDs in as many online retail outlets as practical, such as Amazon, so they can sell incremental units to that company’s customer base. However, we strongly advise clients against sending any fans that come to your website away to some retailer’s website. When you send your buyers to a online retailer’s website to buy your DVD, you’re really building their business, not yours. If there is one company in the world that will survive just fine without your help to build their customer base…it would be Amazon.
