Local public access TV stations may be the best kept secret in America. Where else can you get free access to training, equipment, support and the local airwaves all in one location? For small businesses, local access TV is an opportunity to produce your own TV show, become known in the community and build your reputation as an expert in your field. Local access or community media, is also known as “PEG” access, as in:
1. Public – Stations open to the community for local programming
2. Educational – Stations dedicated to educational or school-related programming
3. Government – Government access channels for town meetings and city business
It’s the “public” channel that offers the most potential, and here’s how to maximize it:
Check your local listings
Not every town has all three “PEG” outlets, but with over 3,000 community media centers across the country, chances are there’s one near you. Check your town’s Web site or contact your town hall. Another misconception: You do not necessarily have to live in the town to utilize their community access station. Most access centers are eager for new producers and new programs. FYI: The Alliance for Community Media is a national, non-profit organization that promotes and supports public access TV. They maintain an extensive database and links to local access centers. Look for your town there.
Get free training
Most community media access centers provide frequent producer orientations, equipment training and studio instruction. The focus is typically on getting you up and running in one or two sessions. Volunteers and producers are the life blood of public access, so you’ll find plenty of accommodating help.
Go make TV!
As long as you’re armed with an idea, you’re ready to produce a show. If you’re not quite ready for your close up, start by assisting with another show, or by being a guest on another’s producer’s program. There’s no shortage of opportunities in front or behind the camera, so just dive in. The Alliance for Community Media’s online bookstore also features books and videos for additional training or inspiration.
Fix it in post
You can produce your program “live to tape,” if you’re doing a talk show or just want to do your show “on the fly.” In most cases, you’re probably going to want to edit your tape. Post production is where you can make your program look more professional by editing mistakes, inserting graphics or adding music. Most home computers now include basic editing or movie-making software, and those starter programs are relatively easy to master. iMovie is ideal if you’re on a Mac; Windows Movie Maker is adequate if you’re on a PC platform. When you’re ready for more professional editing, bump up to Final Cut Pro for the Mac or Adobe Premiere for the PC.
Promote and distribute
Once your show is complete, find out from your public access station when it’s going to air so you can promote your premiere! You may find that they run it several time per week. In addition to the local airing, you should definitely consider expanding your distribution. One way to extend your reach is to ask your channel to “bicycle,” or share your show with other access centers. A more direct approach is to upload your show to free video hosting sites such as YouTube or VideoEgg.com. Most video sites restrict uploads by file size (100MB) or length. Yo go beyond the obvious sites like YouTube and Google Video, and upload your video (or shorter clips) to Blip.tv and Veoh.com. These are very-user friendly, free video hosting sites with lots of great features.
Here are a few more suggestions to keep in mind:
• Public Access TV need not be cheesy. The technology and equipment have come a long way – so take advantage of the resources available.
• Expand your video from local public access to the Internet. Web users are downloading 7 billion videos per month!
• Be sure to save your video as an electronic file for the web, such as a Quicktime movie (.mov), or a Windows movie (.wmv). After you upload your video, many video sites will provide the HTML code so you can embed your video on your own website.
• A study by the Wharton School of Business reports that video can be 600% more effective in communicating a message than print. Tap into that power!
Lou Bortone is an award-winning writer and video producer with over 20 years experience in marketing, branding and promotion. As an online video expert, Lou helps entrepreneurs create video for the web at www.TheOnlineVideoGuy.com. In addition, Lou works as a freelance writer and professional ghostwriter, with a ghostwriting site at www.GhostwriteForYou.com and a blog at www.GhostwriteGuru.com.
Category: Business Ideas
There are a lot of businesses out there that are competing for the customers. You are looking for a way to attract a loyal few customers for your small retirement business. You are also trying to attract them with some unique feature of your business instead of doing a large amount of advertising and the billing that comes from advertising. This approach of specializing will keep your business small, which is one of our goals, but will differentiate you from the pack.
An example is auto repairs. There are hundreds of shops in your area that will work on almost any type of car. They stock some frequently used parts and work with auto parts dealers to get immediate delivery of common parts for commonly owned vehicles. But it is not so easy if you have a 1960’s Porsche or Corvette. People taking these cars in for repairs may have to wait a long while to get some parts shipped in and some of the young mechanics may have never seen the insides of these vehicles.
Specialize in repairs of one of these vehicles and you can gain a loyal clientele if you perform good work, have many of the common parts that they use on hand or at lease on overnight delivery from a specialty auto parts dealer, and you have experience in problems with these older cars. You may also have an inexpensive advertising media in a fan club for one of these vehicles since you will only be paying for exposure to people who own the vehicles. Each of these specialty cars has web sites devoted to them where you can do advertising.
Think of your hobby. Look on-line or in catalogues for tools of that hobby. Everyone is carrying the low cost, mass produced tools. But there is always some specialty hand made tools that are available if you know where to look for them. You can specialize in selling these or produce your own like of tools that are more specific to your hobby.
The secret is specializing your business to keep it small and to grow your business through word-of-mouth advertising.
This new weekly column, 101 New Business Ideas for Retirees, is compiled specially for GetEntrepreneurial.com readers by Stan Spector. View all articles in this column by Stan Spector.
Stan Spector is the author of “Baby Boomers’ Official Guide to Retirement Income – Over 100 Part-time or Seasonal Businesses for the New Retiree”. The book’s website can be found at StanSpector.com.
Most people think that working at your hobby would make the best retirement business that they can think about. While I concur with this thinking there are a few warnings that come with this option.
Think about your hobby. Are there supplies that you regularly have to buy? Are these supplies easy to find locally? Can they be cheaply shipped by parcel, which would allow you to sell the items on line and not require you to open a storefront with the associated rents, utilities and staff? This will also allow you to run your business during different time of day at your convenience. If you need storage space, you could rent inexpensive storage areas. If there is a lot of competition for selling supplies, look at carrying specialty items that local stores do not carry. Are there customer made products available for you to sell. The large chain hobby shops, do not like to carry a lot of these specialty items. They go after the mass produced items and the items that sell the most.
Is the product you make from your hobby a sellable product? Everyone thinks they are but I recommend that you buy a booth at a festival and try to sell some of your product. This will give you a change to meet and talk with some of your potential customers. You’d be surprised on how frank they can be to you about your quality, pricing and design. If you are able to sell large amounts at a festival, you have a chance of having a good supplemental business. But don’t go too far until you have proven you can sell enough to make a business from this.
Now for the warnings.
The market frequently is not prepared to spend the cost of your product if there is a (lower quality but functional) product made in a low cost production company that is less than half of the price of yours. If the market is there they will probably demand the highest level of quality and may not consider your work of that level. Remember you are competing against others who have probably been doing this full time for many years.
Don’t even think of renting large amounts of space with all the costs involved, unless you know you will have the sales. This is the quickest way to taking a very big risk with your money.
Don’t think that your hobby equipment will hold up under high demand put on it by you using it for a business. It is probably fine to test the market with it but you will have to buy heavy duty commercial equipment for it to last long and to turn out the highest quality work.
And remember that you have started a business. You are no longer doing this for just fun.
But good luck, this can be the happiest way to make supplemental income during your retirement.
This new weekly column, 101 New Business Ideas for Retirees, is compiled specially for GetEntrepreneurial.com readers by Stan Spector. View all articles in this column by Stan Spector.
Stan Spector is the author of “Baby Boomers’ Official Guide to Retirement Income – Over 100 Part-time or Seasonal Businesses for the New Retiree”. The book’s website can be found at StanSpector.com.
During the summer months, every large city in America is filled with hundreds of festivals. If you are an entrepreneur looking to get into a retail business, these festivals can be an inexpensive way to test out your products to see if it will really attract a large enough customer base to warrant a year around business. But remember when you are writing your business plan; you have avoided a lot of the costs of a permanent location by having a festival business.
You pay a small fee to the festival and have not encountered rent and utilities, which are some of the high expenses for a fixed location. You have also not had to do much in the way of advertising. The festival had done advertising and has a client base that will show up. You only need to have an attractive booth to entice the customers over to your location. Make sure your signage looks professional and is viewable from major traffic centers for the festival.
But many people get into festival sales as their business instead of a trial for their business. With a number of calls you will find a listing of the festivals in a newspaper calendar or an on-line calendar of the festivals for the year. You will see that you can find festivals going 30 weeks in some of the northern climates up to every week of the year in some of the moderate climates. You can work as much or as little as you want or whatever season you want to work by starting a festival business.
There is a lot of work in these businesses that everyone should consider. With a store, you just open the door each morning. But with a festival business, you will have to unload and set up your merchandise every morning and put it away every night. Make sure all of your display methods are bought with this in mind. Items on wheel that you can move along a rough terrain are great. Make sure you have an adequate vehicle to carry all of you set up and merchandise and that you have an easy way of loading and unloading it.
Unsure if you want to get into this business? Go to a festival in your area. During some of the slack time, ask some of the booth owners a lot of questions about their business. Also you may fine one that is willing to hire your for a nominal fee or as a volunteer to help them with the next weekend’s festival. Work a few festivals unloading and setting up each morning with the owner to make sure your really want to do that many weekends during the year.
This new weekly column, 101 New Business Ideas for Retirees, is compiled specially for GetEntrepreneurial.com readers by Stan Spector. View all articles in this column by Stan Spector.
Stan Spector is the author of “Baby Boomers’ Official Guide to Retirement Income – Over 100 Part-time or Seasonal Businesses for the New Retiree”. The book’s website can be found at StanSpector.com.
Categories
Caller Tune Advertisement
“Caller tune Advertisement” is all about publishing advertisements as caller tunes on user’s mobile phones, so that the callers will listen to the advertisement until the user picks up the phone. In a nutshell, this idea is all about the mobile users trading their ringtone airtime for monetary benefits, which can be used to publish advertisement.
This concept is all about publishing advertisement as a replacement for caller tunes or in-conjunction with caller tunes in user’s mobile phones. In return, users will get monetary benefits like free recharge coupons, discounts in bills, partial reimbursement of bills, free talk minutes, free value adds like free SMS, etc. These kinds of freebies will attract users to allow users to give up their ring tone airtime to place advertisement. Gaining publisher base will be a challenge. A good publisher base means a huge market potential. The success of this advertisement medium will be determined by the publisher base.
This new business idea is patent-pending and its owner, TarryOnline is looking for interested investors.