The Resources

DVDActive

These guys are probably on every home entertainment film studio mailing list possible becuase they always get the cover art for the US and other region releases of a film far in advance of the film’s actual release. It is DVDActive’s niche after all. They have extremely large versions of cover/back art unavailable anywhere else.

Amazon

Their specs are basic, the cover art has to be edited (it usually has a white border around it, especially to the left and right) but the real gold of Amazon comes from the comments on their DVD/Blu-ray sales pages. The comments let you know if extras have been carried over from previous versions of a disc and what has not. Such information is very valuable when writing a DVD/Blu-ray review.

PR Firms

Get on the mailing list of a Film PR Firm advertising the home release of a film for a movie studio on VOD, DVD , or Blu-ray.  Once you do, you will receive details and pictures for particular home release consumption ad nauseam delivered right to your email box.

In Closing, a Tip

If you are trying to monetize your article on a DVD,  Blu-ray, VOD or some other home release format and you are using cover art, link the photo you are using in the post to a sales page for that film (you are affiliated with). Two sites that offer such affiliate programs are HKFlix and Amazon. More file website affiliate programs can be found here.

We will be posting more Resources for obtaining DVD/Blu-ray Cover Art and Specifications and also articles on How to Write a DVD/Blu-ray Review very soon.  To be promptly notified when these articles are posted, subscribe to us.

I made one prediction more than eight months ago and two days ago it paid off big time.

Here’s what happened and how I went from 4000 Page Views to over 16,000 in a single day.

I became aware of and posted the television trailer for The Phantom (2010) on November 5, 2009. I decided to post this television trailer on one of my websites because I knew The Phantom had a long history across comic books, television, and film and therefore had a large fan base. I labeled it: The Phantom (2010) Television Trailer with the year it would air in the U.S. as one of its title tags because of the wealth of other Phantom movies and television shows out there. That post started getting 4o to 50 page views a day after having been posted for some time. I was later able to view a copy of The Phantom (2010), a two part mini-series,  months before it aired in the U.S. After I watched the mini-series, I sat down and wrote two TV reviews for it, one review for the first half titled TV Review: The Phantom (2010): Part 1 and one for the second, TV Review: The Phantom (2010): Part 2. This seemed appropriate since the mini-series was in two parts. I also did this because if there was a lot of search engine traffic for The Phantom (2010), having two reviews posted would potentially mean double the search engine traffic for relevant searches.

As the air date for The Phantom (2010) started approaching (Sunday, June 20, 2010 @ 9PM EST), the daily page views for its television trailer I had posted began going up. On the Sunday of its premiere on the SyFy Channel, the trailer received nearly 600 page views. That was not the great part. The great part was that people were beginning to search for reviews of the new mini-series as well.

My Phantom reviews had languished with very few page views up to that point. Since my reviews were the only ones, or nearly the only ones, posted online, I got and continue to get a lot search engine traffic because of them. If you don’t believe me, type The Phantom 2010 Review into Google right now and see which website shows up first in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Bittorrent sites – the ones that post trailers and reviews with their torrent posts – also were linking to my trailer and my reviews. Forums began linking to the trailer and reviews as well. In a word, my three The Phantom (2010) posts had gone viral.

And you know what, I was almost ready for the traffic onslaught. I had the WordPress Related Posts plugin installed (I talked about that here) so site visitors could find other relevant The Phantom (2010) articles. I also went one step further and edited the bottom of the trailer post with the direct links to the two reviews (just in case, right above the trailer box itself). I hyperlinked the actors names in the posts to their tags on the site. I also linked to Phantom products on Amazon within the trailer post, as I talked about previous incarnation of the character in media available for purchase on that site. I had Google Adsense ads and other affiliate ads flanking my Phantom posts top, right (sidebar profit), and bottom.

I had typed in as many tag combination as I could think of that someone would type into a search engine to find The Phantom (2010) Television Trailer or reviews for the mini-series. Turns out I was right. Many of those tags were used by people in their searches. Remember when we spoke about proper keywords tags, their importance, and hammering search engine terms?

I had switched website host to a provider that could held a spike in traffic and deal with it efficiently without any down time (HostGator), unlike Bluefur and HostICan. I spoke about both of those hosts in these two posts here and here.

I had Google Analytics and the WordPress.com Stats plugin (discussed here, pictured in this post) installed so I could accurately chart the traffic.

I also dropped a few links here and there on appropriate posts on other people’s websites letting them and their site visitors know that I had The Phantom (2010) reviews and its trailer available for viewing.

Here is where I wasn’t ready for the increased traffic: my Email Subscription option. It was giving me trouble and people could not sign up. They began emailing me to ask for the link to sign up for Email Subscriptions. I was more than happy to comply but how many people got frustrated and didn’t even email me? This traffic deluge served to illuminate a hole in my subscription methodology. It also showed that I had been losing potential subscribers for some time. Do not ever let this happen to you. Check your subscription options, all of them. Make sure they are all functioning properly. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity – Seneca

Because of this spike in traffic, which increased, Sunday to Monday to Tuesday (June 22, 2010), home page hits for the site increased by a factor of four. I was already posting two to three times a day (the 5-11-4 Rule) on the site but now I made sure to post popular, mainstream items instead of art house or lesser known items that I might have. This traffic will not last forever so quickly cultivating new fans is crucial.

Conclusion

This traffic has been a great ride but it will eventually tapper off and end but there will also be residuals if properly leveraged: new subscribers via Email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter and more regulars visitors to the home page.

What do you think about this traffic spike? Are you prepared for your own? Having you ever accurately prophesied a film or TV topic in the form of a post that brought in a ton of traffic? Please share below. In any case, I have the concluding parts of the Movie Website In-Text Advertising series coming soon as well as Amazon Associate tips. Subscribe here so you don’t miss out.

You should also follow me on Twitter as well (my goal is to get to 100 followers by August).

Got something to say? Talk below.

5 AM

Post new content early in the AM so that when people wake up and check the web for new movie content and articles,  they find some on your website. This helps make visiting your site in the morning a habit, something you as a website owner want.

11AM

Having new articles posted before people go on break for lunch is an advantageous move. Many people go on the Internet to check their email on their lunch break and some check for new content on their favorite website while they eat at their desk, laptop, or on their PDA.

4PM

When people get off of work, sit down, and relax, some spend their leisure time in front of a computer monitor or a laptop. As they go on the web to search out the latest breaking movie news, your site will have some of it.

Site visitors will come to realize that at this and the above times you always have new content posted. This can potentially turn a one-time-a-day visitor into a three time a day visitor.

One way to effectively use the 5-11-4 Rule is to write articles in advance and set them to automatically post throughout the day. Ex. write three articles at 4 AM (or the day before) and set them to automatically post by using the Edit button above the Publish button on the Edit Post screen within WordPress. Set one article to post on 5 AM, the next to post on 11 AM, and the final one to post at 4 PM. Yes, that means you will have to write three articles a day but if you are serious about your site, especially a movie website, this will be no problem. You have to train yourself to do this and to follow the 5-11-4 rule. This works for those with a full time job that run a movie website on the side and the hardcore website owner as well.

Will you try following the 5-11-4 Rule?

1.) Automated

Properly naming and optimizing your photos means making them search engine friendly and making sure they accurately describe the content of the photos. One of the easiest ways to optimize your photos is the WordPress plugin SEO Friendly Images. SEO Friendly Images is

a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

I have never used this plugin as I manipulate alt and title manually but for the person with tons of photos already posted, they might want to give this a try to easily manipulate all of them at once. The neophyte that doesn’t want to be bothered with manipulating title and alt manually might also want to try this plugin. Remember, the more plugins you use, the slower your site loads.

2.) Manual Methodology

For the file name, if the picture contains a famous person, type their name – in all lowercase letters – as the file name of the picture and separate the different parts of the name with a dash. Ex. leonardo-dicaprio. If its a picture for a movie that you know is going to be heavily searched for, use that as the first part of your title or vice versa. Ex. shutter-island-leonardo-dicaprio or leonardo-dicaprio-shutter-island.

Once you have uploaded the image to your website, you will now see that file name in the title field. You can erase that and type in a something different. In this case I would type in Leonardo DiCaprio Shutter Island. In the Alt Text field I would do something similar. Hover over, click, and examine the Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island photo for working examples of the above.

Some very helpful rules of thumb when manually dealing with photos and SEO.

Whenever you insert an image in a page or post, focus not only on the appearance and placement of the image, but also on SEO. Here’s how:

• Stick with search engine preferred formats: PNG, JPG and GIF, in that order.
• Give image files recognizable names, such as volkswagen-beetle.jpg instead of something cryptic such as vwb1999.jpg. (Use a dash rather than an underscore to separate words, because search engines tend to treat dashes as spaces.)
• Always include keyword-optimized alt text in the “<img />” tag.
• If using the image as a link, include a keyword-optimized title tag.
• Correlate the words in your “<img />” tag’s alt text with surrounding text, the image name and the page title.
• Use width and height attributes to specify each image’s dimensions.
• Store files in a search engine accessible folder and insert them via the image’s URL rather than through your blog or CMS media library database.
• Use images sparingly on a page to maintain a high text-to-image ratio.

You can check the title text and alt text for a photo by right clicking on it and selecting Inspect Element.

3.) A Photo’s Surrounding

One site, Alternative Film Guide, always puts the name of the people and the film title directly underneath the photo they are using in a post. They also fully utilize title text and alt text for their images. I have seen their photos show up in quite a few Google image searches (traffic cha-ching) so they are doing something right with the way they present their photos. It might have to do with the bold keywords they have directly underneath their photos. As a personal practice, I always bold the film and the actors and actresses name directly under my header image, especially when it relates to the header image.

4.) Celeb Approach

Celebrity websites tend to use the actor or actress’ name plus what is being shown in the picture because the website owner believes that aspect of the image will be highly searched for. So if a female celeb is showing cleavage in a image for example or is in a popular magazine, they might write in the title text “x-cleavage” – x being the celebs’ name -  and in the alt text ” x cleavage”. Since that is their trade and Core Competency, they are probably right. Another explain, Doutzen Kroes, Numero Magazine Toyko Edition. The title text could use some or all of those elements and the alt text might be Doutzen Kroes Numero Magazine Toyko, Doutzen Kroes, Toyko edition of Numero Magazine or (a little ambiguous yet descriptive) Doutzen Kroes, Toyko, Numero Magazine, black lingerie. This would bring up image search results of Doutzen Kroes from the Toyko edition of Numero Magazine, images the website owner is currently hosting given the tags for the post containing those images are accurate and properly written as well.

5.) Tags

Tags for posts containing images are powerful because of the traffic they can draw. I usually use: photos, pics, fotos (for Spanish-speaking searches and traffic. Can be expanded upon for other languages and diversified traffic), pictures, photo, pic, foto, or picture, depending upon if its one image or multiple images. I haven’t come across someone looking for a picture that used the image tag to find it e.g. “The A-Team (2010) Image” but its possible. When a person is brought to one of my sites because of an image search, it is usually because of one of the above tags (not so much fotos) e.g. The A-Team (2010) Photo. Use tags that people commonly use to find images on the net, that you would use to find a particular image.

Conclusion

Image search image traffic can be very lucrative to your website in pageviews if approached properly. The first step in approaching it properly is naming your photos correctly (title and alt).  The second step is tagging your posts properly that contain them so that they can be spidered and included in the correct image SERPs.

Source: Entrepreneur

I have posted two images below to illustrate this point and a few unrevealed ones as well.

See how each one of the images has its own page and chances are you clicked on one of those pictures to see it in a larger size.

I constantly see movie bloggers posting one picture from a set of available pictures then sending their article reader to another site to see the rest of the picture set. Not only is that movie blogger missing out on potential pageviews, they are sending traffic away from their site to another site they have no affiliation with and which they do not own. Hello? Hello?…Think McFly, think. – Biff.

Keep your site visitors on your website and engaged at all times. Have them click to see the pictures on your website, not on someone else’s. Posting pictures does lengthen the prep time to writing and preparing your posts but the end result is worth it. A post that contains pictures has a lower bounce rate than other posts. People stay longer with that post and click the pictures to: see larger versions of the pics, save them to their desktop or copy their address for linking purposes. For any of these reasons, you win. You win in pageviews. This is why popular picture and celebrity websites are such pageview goldmines.

The big movies sites do it, so should you. Even if you find the practice tedious, and depending on how many pictures you are dealing with, it can be but your post and your pageviews for that day, month, and year will benefit.

The next step: 5 Ways to Optimize Images for Increased Pageviews and SEO

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