Videos On Spec

I'm with Zimbezee. As an offline business owner, I would not appreciate you using my business name and logo in something I didn't approve of. It is presumptuous and you really have no right to do so. Create a generic and ask me, and I might be open. Put my name out there in a way that I might not like, and I can see where a business owner might threaten legal action. I had an experience like that once where someone made a website for me (I had one already) with my name on it and tried to shove it down my throat. It was removed, but legal action had to be threatened.

Don,

I have done something kinda similar in the past. What I did was have a nice 2 minute "talking head" green screen video created for a specific type of business, and then I used a nice looking "virtual set" for the background (so that it looked like a really expensive video). The guy in the video simply described the top benefits that this kind of business could offer to a typical customer, and it used some powerful copywriting triggers to really "sell" the need for that business to the person watching the video.

Although the video used phrases like "we can do x for you.... etc etc", it did not mention the specific name of any business. So what I did is upload this video to my website, then wrote a jQuery script that overlaid my prospect's business name and phone number in a nice looking font in the lower third of the video, in real time (so that it looked like it was actually part of the video).

What that allowed me to do was create a video that looked like it was customized for each prospect, in literally about 5 seconds per prospect, by pasting each prospect's business name and phone # in a form on my site.

Then I contacted each prospect in this niche via email and told them that I had created a nice video that described the best benefits of their company to their prospective customers, then gave them the link to the video, and asked them what they thought about it (I didn't mention anything about price at this point -- I simply asked them what they thought about the video).

Then for the ones who replied with interest, I told them how I created the video, and that I would only be selling the video to *one* business in each city (each video customized with the businesses name and phone #, and if desired, also their logo). And I told them that I had contacted a handful of other prospects in their city, and that the video would go to the first business that was interested in it ("scarcity" is a powerful motivator ). And I kept my word... I only sold the (customized) video to one business in each city.

I simply picked a city then emailed 10 businesses in that niche in that city. And if no one out of the 10 were interested, I would email 10 more, and repeat the process until I sold one video in that city (it normally didn't take more than 30 or 40 emails in each city to make a sale). Then I would repeat the process in another city. I experimented with a handful of different price points between $150 and $295, but if I recall correctly, I sold most of them at $175. And I would help them embed the video on their website, if they needed help with that (only takes a couple minutes).

I could have also offered to upload their video to YouTube, and get it ranked, etc., for an additional fee, but I didn't want to mess around with any of that stuff, so all I did was just sell the video to them, and they could do whatever they wanted to with it.

I did pretty good with that for a while, and had a killer ROI. The first 2 sales I made paid for 100% of the production costs as well as the "virtual set". Then every video I sold after that (which only took me a few minutes to customize and render, because I had already created the "template" in advance), was pure profit.

I did that until I had all of the big cities in the US in that particular niche covered. I've thought about repeating the process with a different niche, but haven't done it yet, as it requires a LOT of emailing to make a full-time income with this business model. And I'm not a big fan of spending half of each day sending out and replying to emails. I may do this again though... and outsource the email / order fulfillment part.

Anyhoo... just wanted to share a pretty good business model that works well if you do it right.

I agree with zimbizee and umc though... NEVER use a businesses logo, website images, etc., without first asking their permission to do so. What I did is only put the businesses name and phone number (in plain text) in my prospecting videos, and those prospecting videos were only seen by the business owner, and no one else. Big difference.