How To Promote Your Movie With BitTorrent by Bojan Dulabi
I am in the middle of self distributing my feature film, Living Life or Waiting to Die. If you are in the same position as me, your biggest question is:
“How am I going to promote my movie without spending a fortune?”
A lot of us think social media is the answer.
You can share news with your followers on Facebook and Twitter and you will reach a certain amount of them.
But even if you have hundreds or thousands of Facebook followers, Facebook has changed their policy regarding the reach of organic postings. The truth is, unless you're willing to pay money, your Facebook posts will be seen by much less people than you think.
Twitter is still free, which is great. But the problem is, tweets get lost in the noise.
And don’t get me wrong, I am not saying ignore these platforms. You have to be on them every day. I know I am. These are essential tools for promotion…
But these are not the only tools for promotion. In fact, I recently found a new way to promote movies. And this is a service most of us don’t even think about when it comes to reaching our audience: BitTorrent.
You can now promote your movie with BitTorrent!
“Say what, you want me to pirate my own stuff?”
How To Promote Your Movie With BitTorrent
Yes, you heard me.
The same technology used to pirate all kinds of stuff can also become a major promotional tool. BitTorrent recently created an awesome free service called BitTorrent Bundles. And this allows you to promote your movie with BitTorrent.
This great service allows you to give away videos, music, ebooks, pretty much any files that can be downloaded. You can give your files away for free or you can ask for an email address.
Here’s how you can promote your movie with BitTorrent.
As I mentioned before, I recently finished my feature film Living Life or Waiting to Die. In order to get the word out, and get more people to subscribe to my mailing list, I decided to give away the following goodies away for free, in exchange for the user’s email address:
- 8 minutes of the film.
- One theme song.
- 20 pictures of the shoot.
- 3 high resolution posters as PDF.
- Behind the scenes video where I talk about the origins of the story.
The way I setup my BitTorrent Bundles page is that anyone can watch and download the trailer for free, but if they want all the additional content they have to provide me their email address and by doing so they subscribe to my newsletter.
Here’s my results.
I published my BitTorrent Bundles page on Jan. 2, 2014. And at the time of this writing, I have had 4691 views on my page. On average I’m getting 34 page views per day and out of those, one person per day is downloading the free bundle.
The technology is getting easy to use.
BitTorrent recently introduced a streaming feature where people don’t have to download the bundle using a BitTorrent client. Now people can just stream whatever video they want.
This makes the whole process a lot more streamlined, which encourages more people to watch the content. This feature has only been around for a little while, but I have already had 54 views in addition to the downloads.
I expect that number to go up and eventually surpass the downloads number.
One great plus is the home page where all bundles are displayed. This can generate a lot of traffic, especially, if you are in their featured section.
BitTorrent has also recently introduced a search bar and all bundles pages can now be tagged with custom words that describe the content. I have noticed a jump in my downloads number since they introduced this feature.
This service is still in alpha release, which means many more features will be coming our way – And that’s really exciting.
Because BitTorrent is a relatively small community, you get to have a lot of input in the product. When you sign up you get to be part of the forum where the creators ask for your input as a user and you get to chat with them.
I have submitted many questions and feedback to them directly.
Utilizing bundles is a great free way to promote your movie with BitTorrent. It allows you to build up your fan base, not just for your current movie, but all movies moving forward. I strongly consider that you promote your movie with BitTorrent as part of your strategy. Sign up for a free account and create as many bundles as you like.
If you’d like to check out my page go here.
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Bojan Dulabic is a Vancouver based actor / filmmaker and content creator at www.FilmmakingToday.com a blog dedicated to empower filmmakers to make their own projects by talking about ways to make feature films for very low to no budgets.
