To better understand whether or not you can make money shooting video tours for the real estate industry, you must first understand the customer. Real Estate agencies are comprised of multiple realtors who are nothing more than independent contractors.

The Realtors give up a small percentage of each sale to the agency in exchange for name brand recognition and administrative services such as office space, secretaries, sales seminars, technology training, etc. The individual realtors are responsible for funding their own marketing efforts. (i.e. virtual tours, newspaper listings, magazine listings, personal billboards, etc.)

After presenting our product to several Real Estate brokerage firms, the top executives all made it quite clear that the agency will not pay for virtual tours. Knowing that you will not be successful in marketing your product to the various agency executives, it is important that you learn more about the individual realtor.

The average realtor is a 43 year old woman who makes around $40,000 a year. Those stats tell you a lot about your prospective customer. First, how well does this demographic use technology? My experience has been that there are very few in the real estate industry that are techno literate.

You end up not only trying to market your product, but training the realtors on how use their computer as well. Not fun! Second, she only makes $40,000 per year. Now I’m sure that’s after all expenses, but you are still dealing with an individual/company that most likely grosses about $65,000 per year, if that.

How many companies do you work with or hear about that take advantage of professional video services if they can’t even break the 6 digit mark in gross income? The bottom line is that the average realtor can’t afford your services unless you want to charge them less than $100 per video tour. (That’s what IPIX used to charge and seems to be all realtors will pay for these services.)

Some of you might think that $100 per tour would be fine if you had enough volume. If that’s the case, let me break down how long it takes to produce a high quality video tour.

I’m first going to assume that you will not be adding a voiceover to the tour. (If you do, it will take about an hour between writing the script, getting it approved, and recording the voiceover. If you had a professional do the read, you would have to pay them as well.)

Okay, so you receive the order from Joe Realtor to produce a video tour of his lake side property in Anytown, USA. The first thing you have to do is schedule a time to meet the realtor at the home. It will usually take an average of 20 minutes to get to the property. Once on location, it takes about an hour to shoot the interior and exterior of the home.

After producing several tours, our team got it down to about 45 minutes. Add another 20 minutes to get back to your studio. If you are efficient with your non-linear editing system, the post process takes about 30 minutes. Once you have completed the edit and added music, it will take you about 10 minutes to encode the video to flash or windows media.

Then you’ll spend about 10 minutes uploading the files to your video host. Once the files are ready to be viewed on-line, you will want to test them to make sure they look okay. That will take about 10 minutes.

After you are satisfied with the quality, you will forward the “url link” to the realtor and their web designer, and I would recommend burning a copy of the tour to DVD for the realtor as well. That takes another 10 minutes or so.

So, to produce one video tour, encode to an internet video file and burn to a DVD, it took 2 hours and 35 minutes. If you divide that by $100, you’ve grossed roughly $40 per hour before expenses. Now let’s look at what you actually take home in profit.

Income per video tour: $100

Expenses per video tour:

tape stock – $3 (3 homes on one tape)

6 months Streaming – $20 (Assuming you pay competitive rates)

Postage for DVD – $2

Total expenses – $25

Net Income per Tour: $75

After all expenses, you take home about $75 dollars each tour. So, you produced the video tour for about $30 per hour. Is it worth it? Maybe so, but it’s hard to grow a successful corporate video production business on $30 per hour.

The times I gave above were what we were hitting after streamlining our shooting process, working out all the details with the web designers, trained our clients on the benefits of the product and how to use it, mastered the editing and streaming process, and found an affordable streaming provider. (Take into consideration a substantial learning curve if you are not familiar with the process of streaming video over the Internet.)

If your thinking about getting into real estate videography, my overall recommendation is to spend your time finding a more viable market. If you haven’t had the chance already, it will take you months just to figure out how the whole real estate process works and how you can best serve their needs. (It took us about 9 months of R&D and networking just to get in good enough shape to make our first sales presentation.)

If you still believe there is money to be made in real estate videography, my recommendation would be to forget about residential realtors and only focus on commercial realtors and major contractors. The best way to see if a company is a good candidate for an on-line video tour is to look at their website.

If they have a high quality website, they will probably have the budget for a video tour. If it looks like their site was put together by a high school kid, they probably don’t understand enough about web video to even consider your offer.

I have produced several video tours for commercial realtors and development groups. The average tour was priced at about $1000. It takes a little longer to produce commercial tours but the hourly works out to be about $100-$150.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3830895

Personal trainers start a personal training business because they are passionate about fitness, want to help people, and also enjoy the freedom of working for themselves. These are all great reasons for starting a personal training business. Fitness trainers are mainly individuals who enjoy teaching fitness, owning their own business, and scheduling appointments whenever it is convenient to them.

If you are a fitness minded individual who enjoys health, fitness, and exercise, and wants to make an excellent income with the freedom of working for yourself, then follow the personal training business tips I reveal below. I have already reached a high level of success in the personal fitness training business, and so can you.

The fact is the fitness business is booming! As a result of the aging baby boomers, and the will of the aging population to live a great quality of life, there are more and more opportunities for personal fitness professionals to make an excellent income. The baby boomers quality of life quest, and the obesity factor will surely drive a huge amount of personal training clients your way. Therefore, the potential of running your own personal training business is financially limitless. However, the time to seize this fitness training business opportunity is right now.

After working in the personal training business trenches for over 20 years I am pleased to reveal some of my very powerful fitness training business building tips that will help accelerate your fitness earning potential.

1. Treat personal fitness training as a real business – Most personal trainers just focus on the education of exercise physiology. This is where a typical personal trainer makes a huge mistake. Anatomy, and physiology knowledge is very important, but it is the business, sales, and marketing knowledge that is going to allow you to benefit financially.

My recommendation is to not be a one dimensional personal trainer, but to invest a considerable amount of time on personal training business courses. Remember, it is the business, sales, and marketing wisdom that will bring new clients through the door, not specifically your physiology, or nutrition smarts.

Treat your personal training business as a real business. It is not just something temporary until you find a new job. It is a real income producing business opportunity that can easily yield you well over $100,000 year in and year out. A real personal trainer business means you must have a business plan, and be willing to investing in sales, and marketing continuing education.

2. Invest in personal trainer courses to continue your education. Since you are running a professional personal training business it is important to say on top of the latest research, and techniques which will help your clients. They pay for your expertise to help them. As mentioned above, I also recommend investing in the educational material regarding business, sales, and the marketing of a fitness business.

3. Be professional. Since you are going to be commanding fees equivalent to that of other health care providers, it is important for you to conduct your personal fitness training business with total professionalism. You must show the client excellent value for their investment. Clients don’t want to pay someone top dollar when they act in an unprofessional manner. Being professional also means having a personal trainer certification to back you.

4. Be a good listener. You should also listen more than you speak when consulting with your personal training business clients. Fitness training clients want to be understood, and listened to. The more you listen to them, the more they will rely on your services, and the more they will tell their friends about you.

5. Don’t have the cheapest personal training rates on the block. It is a fact that if your rates are higher, the clients perceived value of you is better. With that said, when starting a personal training business you should not have the cheapest rates around. People generally feel they get what they pay for. By elevating your clients perceived value of yourself, and your fitness business, they will not complain of higher rates. You should always portray a higher perceived value in relation to your personal training session price.

6. Be a leader. Professional personal fitness trainers have to be leaders. You should not waffle, or look confused when training a client. Instead, act confident, and well in command as you look after your fitness training clients best interests.

7. Always be networking. Everyone that is within 5 feet of you should know about your personal training business. The more people you tell, the more money you will make. It is that simple!

8. Carve out your own niche. Don’t be a jack of all trades. Pick a segment of the personal trainer market, and specialize in it. Whether it be the post rehab market, the baby boomer population, or pregnant women, make sure you are known as the guru for a particular segment of the personal training market.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/801690