Selling Video, Podcasts and Other Multimedia Advertising Space on Your Website

Internet marketing and advertising is getting more dynamic, and the tried and true offline model of multimedia marketing is making deep inroads into the Internet - the information superhighway is now even more high tech and interactive.

Articles and other text methods are great for advertising your products and services on the Internet and they allow us to share a certain level of our creativity with people who are always happy to read. However, such formats as the Podcast, Audio E-mail and Video are already sweeping over the Internet marketing world, and has the advantage of capturing our attention through high quality sound and images.

Video has always been a powerful marketing device because we are predominantly visual creatures, and a picture is worth 1000 words. There is no doubt that in this high paced world in which we live, we are becoming even more visually oriented and open to new formats and technologies. The current marketplace allows for videos to be made and uploaded cheaply and posted for free at places like Video Jug as well as the heavily trafficked YouTube. If videos are served on these
third party websites, anyone can embed a bit of code and show them on their own website for free.

This is why it is now so simple to give your visitors what they want to see, as well as pleasing your advertisers with offering them formats they can use to be creative and to get an ideal message across.

Then, we move onto Podcasts, which are perfect for people who never sit still but want to gather information. The always-on-the-run person and the multitasker love podcasts, and they can be made to be very dynamic. And, again, they are el cheapo to produce and can be an excellent way of "going viral", just like a well-tagged YouTube video can be. Podcasts can be used similarly to videos as well. Some market research professionals have estimated that by 2012 there will be 65 million people who listen to podcasts, up from the current approximately 20 million.

If you have a blog or website that receives a high amount of traffic, one way you can make a lot of advertising revenues is through the direct sale of sponsorships. This is where you sell an advertiser the right to have specific posts made that directly pertain to his product, thereby making it easier for him to target that market. Traditionally, the sponsored content appears as a sentence with a hoplink, either before or after the post. Do make sure that you make it clear that this is a sponsored section though. There is a lot in the press about certain search engines penalizing website owners for adding paid links to their sites, for the sole purpose of the payers improving their link popularity. If you do sell anchor text links on your pages for a fee, just make sure that you highlight that area as a sponsored section. You don't want Google knocking down your page rank as a result.

So, with audio and the visual advertising formats rising on the Internet, why not sell podcast and video sponsorships? Since these media are more dynamic and on the rise, you can charge higher rates than for a text-and-picture post, and your advertiser enjoys the benefits of the multimedia marketing approach.

One thing to keep in mind: if you sell podcast or video sponsorships to make Internet advertising revenues, you'll want to be sure the advertiser sells a product or service that ties in with the usual content of your site. It would be glaring and garish for, say, a video about women's lingerie to appear on a site about Christian theology.