Re: Marketing Me

John-

Oddly enough early in my career, back in the eighties, when I was only in the ad agency business I needed a videographer for St. Croix shooting and the closest we could find was on St. Thomas. Next closest of course was San Juan. At the time we represented The Buccaneer, the VI Seaplane Shuttle, the largest local dive operator, St. Croix Marina/Island Marine Supply of St. Thomas and Tortola and various other smaller operations. We even had a locally-based account exec who, not surprisingly, brought in zero new business.

While Mark's ideas are good, as usual, your biggest problem is that you are on what is essentially a very small town. To get more business you need to expand your market. If you want the chance to do ads and or property videos you need to also become a presence on St. Thomas. If you want bareboat or other shipboard projects, you need to be known by charter operations on Tortola and, to a lesser extent, on the other BVIs. You should also look into ways of getting south to some of the Windwards. Unfortunately, like STX, these are also very "small towns" until you get to places like Barbados and Trinidad.

You could venture into Puerto Rico, but that's likely a saturated market as it does have a city. Being a short plane or ferry ride away from Tortola you might want to let The Moorings main office in Florida know that you're available in the area to inexpensively get footage for them. (They'll be looking for real beauty shots though and demos of local commercials and weddings will just turn them off.)

You may be able to locate US and European charities who want fresh footage of the sad (and oh, so slow) state of recovery in Haiti. It's much cheaper to send someone over from another island than it is to fly someone from Miami or New York, so that can be your angle. (They'll be looking for serious doc-style footage, again no local commercials or weddings.)

You mentioned "diving without a tank" which brings to mind the fact that you probably are, or easily could become, an experienced diver. Many SKYdiving schools offer a service where you can pay for your first jump to be video taped by a skydiving videographer. With a small camera and housing you could offer a similar service for "resort course" divers. Two or three of these a day could be a decent supplement to your business. Make it a "donut" with island footage and Buck Island B-roll of fish and coral as the intro and outro and the DVD will be worth more. Offer to one-off as a file upload-able to smartphones / iPads, etc and worth more still.

On both the charter and dive operators be sure to build in a "commission" for them and avoid stepping on their toes if they're offering anything similar.

Anyway, just a few ideas based on a small inkling of knowledge left over from my past life.