Randall Raymond
Forum Replies Created
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[John Nelson] “Just wanted to ask if something like this is in operation for higher income families and, if so, what’s being done about it, any ballpark pricings and what kinds of marketing is being done?”
High or low income – these often are initiated as funeral videos – especially for grand-parents. I have a friend who does them. Constant work, quick turn-around, ok pay for the time – he delivers a looped DVD. Check with your local funeral homes – do the first one for free and let your local funeral director see for themselves how much people love them. He gets $250 – for about 4 hours of work. Basically, just a slide show set to music – but he has developed a nice template.
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[Nick Griffin] “Randall, Randall, Randall.”
Nick, Nick, Nick, Have a Merry Christmas!
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[Nick Griffin] “First of all – lighten up Raymond. I don’t know how honed your skill set was at 17 or 18, but for high school kids these guys appear to be well on their way. Yes the web design is just OK, but Ryan isn’t representing himself as a cutting edge Silicon Valley design firm.”
At $4000 a web-site, that’s exactly how he’s representing himself! Look at his rate-card.
What are they ‘well on their way’ to?
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[Zane Barker] “Honestly the only thing I can see coming from playing the student card is potential clients will try and get you to agree to a lesser price, because by saying we are students you are also saying we don’t know fully what we are doing.”
I agree and he has admitted that. The first thing to do is pull down that wannabe-rate-card and get real. There’s not a single example of work on the site that says they’re worth it. Nick may complain that’s too harsh – but they’re not in his market. So they miss a valuable lesson by coddling to them. They’re not in my market either – but I’m reacting as if they were. See the difference, Nick?
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[Ryan Mast] “That IS part of the problem — I don’t know what exactly we should focus on.”
You’ll need weddings for the cash flow until you get some tight, professional work up as examples. Focus on weddings for now and get really good at it!
Why not offer a local business (a banquet hall who will recommend you for weddings?) a freebie 2 minute infommercial for their web site to get that side of your business rolling? If you can nail that one – the rest will follow. But you have to nail it! Keep your script direct and devoid of cliches. If the image tells the story – say nothing.
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[Ryan Mast] “Yes, I did encode for dialup and bad DSL… unfortunately, Lancaster DOES tend to lag behind the rest of the country in tech adoption. I’d love to post higher quality videos, but I don’t want to lose users’ attention to load times. What would you recommend?”
I would recommend catering to potential clients with a broadband connection – that’s your market. Forget dial-up cheapees.
“And what should we put on the “perfect page?”
Anything that won’t bore the piss out of me in 4 seconds. Shock me, astonish me, challenge me, but don’t bore me. i.e. do something brave and outrageous. Try it. All your copy now is trite and expected = boring.
Can’t reduce your message down to a ‘perfect page’ then you don’t know your message.
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[tangentidea] “how can we effectively market this suite of services to companies or individuals?”
Not with your existing web-site – it truly sucks. Too much copy and not enough show me. And when you do attempt to show me – you’ve encoded for what? Dial-up? The video is horrible to watch. Why not shoot yourself in the foot and call that marketing?
My advice is to reduce your site to one perfect page expressing what you better than anyone. One page – no scrolling. When you have done that – then a month later – add another perfect page. With all that talent – produce a 2 minute reel on the first perfect page and get (and hold) their attention.
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[Mark Suszko] “We will see another revolution in video codecs, one that will allow decent, lossless, full quality viewing and audio over dialup connections. Not if, only when.”
That boggles my mind! Digits is Digits. You seem so sure of this, what is it based on – some redefinition of ‘bandwidth’? Sub-digits?
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[Herb Sevush] “This is an interesting video to show in light of the previous “DVD sales” thread you contributed to. The film “It’s a Wonderful Life” lost it’s copyright in the early 70’s due to a clerical error and many believe it’s in “the public domain” and can be used in any manner whatsoever.”
Apparently, the JibJab people found that they could use it – it’s their template that I used.
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[Don Greening] ”
It’s called “Incidental” recording and is legally acceptable, at least here in Canada.”It’s not ‘incidental’ if they’re performing to it. An example of incidental music would be in a documentary scene where it’s part of the reality of the scene and not controlled as in a feature film.