Tag: movies
Today's Entertainment Encompasses Digital Videos, E-Books, and Audio
Today, we can get virtually of the information and entertainment we need with a few clicks of our mouse.
The digital revolution has transformed the way we receive information and indulge in entertainment. We no longer have to listen to the radio, watch TV, go to the movies, or pick up books at our local bookstore. Instead, we can get virtually of the information and entertainment we need with a few clicks of our mouse.
Digital videos, e-books, and audio products are appealing for two primary reasons: they’re affordable and they’re instantly downloadable. Because there is no manufacturing process per se, you don’t have to pay for tangible goods or packaging. Plus, those providing informational products and digital entertainment don’t have the high overhead costs of a brick-and-mortar retail outlet, such as leasing a storefront and paying salaries of sales associates. As a result, digital downloads are a fraction of the price of the similar items you’d buy at a store.
Similarly, digital information and entertainment offers the ultimate convenience. Because digital products are instantly downloadable, you can easily find what you want, pay for it, and download it in a matter of minutes. You never have to traipse to the store, face online backorders, or wait for your books, music, and videos to arrive in the mail.
Because the technology to create digital videos, e-books, and audio products is widely available, you have a greater choice than ever before. Indeed, you can find excellent sources of information and entertainment that mainstream publishers might overlook. Moreover, many sources of entertainment and informational products allow you to sample the wares before you buy, by enabling you to listen to a portion of the audio or read a few pages of the ebooks.
That’s not to say that, for example, bestsellers aren’t available on audio. You can find audio versions of James Patterson and Michael Connelly crime novels as well as non-fiction bestsellers like “Freakonomics” and “Preacher and the Presidents.”
But you can also find e-books on a wide range of topics written by experts who may never publish a bound book. For example, perhaps you love to garden and want to learn the secrets of bonsai gardening or how to do companion planting and design an organic, sustainable food system.
Because of the lead-time involved in publishing a book, e-books also allow you to get up to the minute information on timely topics. Take the current housing market, for example. If you’re a homeowner who wants to sell or an investor looking to take advantage of the increase in foreclosures, you can’t afford to wait a year or two for a book to be published to learn the best strategies for reaching your goal. E-books allow you to get the information you need right now.
Perhaps the best feature of downloadable products is flexibility. For example, you can download audio books without any special software, and then either listen to them, transfer them to an MP3 player, or burn them onto a CD.
Digital videos, e-books, and audio products are the wave of the future – and the future is today!
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A Guide To Advertising In The Media
The media is a powerful thing — the average person spends an enormous amount of their life consuming it in one form or another, and will spend a significant percentage of that time looking at, listening to or watching advertisements. If you want to use the power of the media, though, you need to know what you’re doing.
Advertising in Newspapers and Magazines.
There are two kinds of advertising you can get in newspapers and magazines: classified and display. Classifieds are the small ads towards the back of the publication, while display ads can be almost any size, from a small corner of a page to a massive double-page spread.
If there’s a publication you’re interested in advertising in, either go to its website (the rate card section) or call its advertising department to find out the rates it charges. Now pick your jaw up off the floor. Yes, advertising in the print media really is that expensive, and for most home businesses it probably just won’t be that economical.
There is, however, an exception: niche and trade magazines. If you’ve ever looked around in a newsagent, you will have seen just how many magazines there are out there, filling every conceivable gap in the market. You need to find the magazine that people who are interested in your services might read. For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, look for a magazine called ‘Your Wedding’, ‘Bride’, or something similar. Advertising in these magazines will be far cheaper than placing an ad in a general-audience publication, and far more likely to actually get some responses.
Advertising on the Radio.
Wherever you are, the chances are that there’s a local radio station. Once your home business grows to a decent size, you might consider buying some time on it.
Really, though, the only kind of home business that can benefit enough from radio ads to justify the cost is one that does anything to do with cars. Since radio is almost entirely limited to use as in-car entertainment now, you know that almost everyone your ad reaches will be a car-owner, and so might be interested in what you’re offering. If you offer something that people need cheaply or even for free, you can get a big response.
Unfortunately, that response could be a little too big — thanks to the time-sensitivity of radio, you’ll get mobbed the next day, and then everyone will forget you again. Radio advertising offers the listener no opportunity to keep your ad and refer to it later, or to find it again in the future. You will find that any ads involving a phone number are spectacularly useless.
Advertising on the Television.
Unless your business is getting pretty big, this would be quite a bad idea. You’d have trouble producing and airing an ad even on local cable channels for less than $10,000. Of course, if there’s a market for your product and you’ve got the budget for this, you could take a gamble and make a mint. The home businesses that tend to do best out of TV ads are ones that have a ‘unique and useful invention’ product with easy-to-demonstrate benefits — think infomercial. Research shows that you can sell almost anything given a 60-second ad, a free phone number and a price point of $19.95.
Advertising on Billboards.
Here’s one that gets overlooked pretty often, but can be very effective if you do it right. Billboard ads are relatively expensive, but they do generally stay up for a long time, and they can be very specifically targeted to an area — the one where they’re physically located. You’ll have the best results with this if you can put one near enough to your business that it could say ‘turn left at the next junction’, or something like that. Phone numbers are, again, pretty useless, although you could have some luck putting a website address up there.
Advertising at the Movies.
Finally, here’s one that often gets overlooked. If you turn up to the cinema early, you might have seen that before the big-budget ads, ads for local businesses are run. This can be a great place to advertise relatively inexpensively in quite a high-profile way, and it works especially well for takeaway food businesses.
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