If you asked me how to get press to cover your movie projects ten years ago, I would have told you to hire a publicist and rent a hot air balloon. The old mandate was to always have something newsworthy to say or refrain from sharing with the press.
Thanks to social media sharing, what is now considered newsworthy varies depending on your audience. And as a filmmaker, the reason you share your movie news isn't necessary to get on the national nightly news, although I am not discounting that as a viable press vehicle. It is just a little old school.
Unless you are totally new to indie filmmaking, you probably know movie promotion is evolving. As a result, your success for getting movies seen and selling depends on your ability to:
- Get your movie into popular marketplaces.
- Drive targeted traffic to those marketplaces.
By now you should know that there are many ways to enter the movie marketplace. That's not difficult. Note: If you are having difficulty getting your movie into the marketplace, visit: How To Sell Your Movie.
But once your movie is live in the market, how do you drive targeted traffic to your point of sale? More importantly, how do you achieve this inexpensively?
One easy answer is online press release distribution.
Thanks to something called real simple syndication, or RSS for short – You can quickly spread news about your movie to any website configured to aggregate information from RSS feeds. These sites then re-post your “news,” complete with backlinks to your movie website. And doing this can improve your online search-ability and help your movie stand out from all the noise.
In other words, you can get traffic to your website, for free.
The service I use for all my press release submissions is PRWeb. The site allows you to compose a release and see how it will look as you write it. And depending on what package you pick, you can also choose to embed a video of your movie trailer and photos right into your release.
From there, your news will be distributed to bloggers and websites all over the world. To find out more about the service, click the ad below – yes – they do pay us to promote. But again, we use PRWeb for all our releases:
Happy filmmaking!
