There are tons of services out there that will happily take lots of your money to produce a web commercial for your product or your business. One of the most popular forms of this is the “book trailer.” Just like a movie trailer, these little videos tease the book. You can easily share them around the web and drum up some publicity.

In the same way, it’s easy to make a little commercial for your online business or a product of yours that can be as simple or as fancy as you want. Once you generate it, you can share it all over the web and hopefully bring buyers to your stuff.

But unless you can find someone that can produce something cinema quality for very little cost, paying more for mediocre isn’t going to do you any favors and it’s really easy to go overboard. People have very short attention spans on the web anyway. If you can get your point across inexpensively or, better yet, free, why waste the money?

Me? I’m a firm believer in keeping it simple. When I made the book trailers for my award winning novella, The Author, I went with just simple text and a voice over. (In case you’re wondering, the voice in the Julianne trailer is me while the Eugene trailer is my brother.) It’s super simple but it gets the job done and cost me nothing. I’ve got this video all over the web and it’s racked up lots of views across a variety of platforms. Instead of stressing over whether I’m getting my money’s worth out of my expensive commercial, I’m pleasantly pleased whenever it opens a door for me.

Think less Micheal Bay, more Monty Python. You don’t need a big budget to get your message across and sometimes simpler is better. What kind of simple but effective commercial could you create for your business, book or website using just text and audio?

What tips would you share for making effective but inexpensive commercials and book trailers?

In other news, The Author is free on Amazon today only so please feel free to help yourself to a copy. Not only will you be helping to increase my sales rank which will lead to future sales, you’ll also be helping to give me interesting data for me to share with you in a future blog post. 😉