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.

Steve "podcaststeve" Lubetkin of Professional Podcasts was a panel presenter at La Nueva Frontera Digital conference at Temple University on Saturday, 31 January 2009, sponsored by the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. This short video report contains scenes from the conference including excerpts from presentations by Ju-Don Roberts of washingtonpost.com; Bill Rowland of the Philly Food Guys Podcast; Dan Levy and Nick Tarnowski of the On the DL Podcast, and interviews with Sarah Glover, staff photographer of the Philadelphia Daily News and Regina Medina of the Philadelphia Inquirer, co-chairs of the conference.

These days, almost every Internet marketing professional uses a blog as their main base of Internet operations, for the ease of updating their information, an interactive way to keep in touch with their audience and to increase their branding worldwide. Done right, blogs are also a powerful targeted traffic magnet that can bring in prospects then funnel them to the desired product, service or affiliate link.

What many are missing, though, is the added targeted traffic draw of podcasting on their blogs. A podcast is simply an audio version of some information, usually an article or blog post. This additional format is an important accessibility aid as well, for people with poor eyesight and for those who speak the language but aren’t cognizant with it in written form.

Preparing a podcast is simple – just read your post into your microphone or headset and record it. For the optimal ratio of file size to quality,  try recording it at 44.1 Khz in 16-bit mono and saving it as an MP3. Those suggested settings are somewhat arbitrary though, so if you’re not familiar with the technology just record your post or article at your computer’s default settings.

For use with a WordPress blog, look through the various podcasting plug-ins in that section of their site. One important concern is whether the plug-in creates a separate RSS feed for your podcasts – if it doesn’t, you’ll want to set one up manually. If you’re setting up the podcast RSS feed yourself, there’s a great tutorial for it on the iTunes website – look for the ‘Submit Your Feed’ link.

And that’s the other purpose to using podcasts – listing your RSS feed in directories like iTunes, PodcastAlley and PodcastReady will expose your work – and your site link – to a much wider audience. Millions of people use these directories to download MP3’s to their players, their phones and their computers each day, and you want to tap into that upscale market right from the start.

As a side bonus, the plugins will usually also add a player to your blog post itself, giving your visitors the choice of reading the post or listening to it. For those who choose to listen to it, hearing the words in your voice, with your inflection, will help them connect to you as a person, as opposed to an author on yet another Internet marketing blog.

However, it’s important to remember it doesn’t NEED to be your voice – you can just as easily outsource the reading of your articles to a professional ‘voice’ – voiceover talent that specialize in that well-known radio type of broadcast voice. Numerous sites offer this service, so a search for ‘voiceover talent’ should get you started in the right direction.

Overall though, the benefits derived from greater accessibility and the greater potential targeted traffic you can appeal to make podcasting a well-worthwhile addition to your Internet marketing arsenal. Start adding podcasts to your blog today!

Internet marketing is becoming incredibly more strategic as more and more businesses take their operations online in a bid to increase sales and profitability. Internet marketing is an important tool to incorporate, and we at Click Consult have many measures that can help your businesses attract visitors and traffic. Some of our methods include affiliate marketing, SEO copywriting, email marketing, pay per click advertising and, of course, search engine optimisation.

Search engine optimisation is crucial in internet marketing, as a well optimised website can get your website high up search engine rankings, such as Google and Yahoo!, and give your website more exposure. There are many forms of internet marketing that can help get your message across in ways of advertising. Podcasts, for instance, are a personal way to expand your company’s voice, as are blog posts and audio/visual ads.

When dealing with us at Click Consult, we will sit with you and discuss the various forms of internet marketing that will be relevant and most effective to your website. We will help to target an audience for your internet marketing campaign and streamline the focus to these areas.

Although targeted areas can be very specific, internet marketing is easy to implement into a business as it is very flexible. The variety of methods that can be used ensure your internet marketing campaign will always have variety and personality, which will be eye catching to customers.

As such, internet marketing is always an ongoing and evolving process, meaning that your campaign can always attract new clients. The data we collect during your internet marketing campaign can help analyse your client base and the kinds of clients your website should be targeting.

Best of all, internet marketing can be a cost-effective success for your business if applied correctly. Visit us at Click Consult to see the range of internet marketing measures we can offer your business.

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Occasionally an invention comes along that makes a big impact on your daily lives, but isn’t really an invention at all, but rather the convergence of existing technologies, processes, and ideas. Podcasting might be the perfect example of that idea – and it’s changing the relationship people have with their radios, music collections, books, education, computers and more.

Podcasting is generally considered to be a spin-off of another communications boom: Blogs (or personal Weblogs). Blogs have sprung up right and left, providing non-programmers and developers a clean, elegant interface that left many on the technology side wondering why they hadn’t thought of it sooner. Everyday now has the ability to chronicle their lives, hopes, dreams, and fears, and publish them online to anyone who cared to read. Oddly enough, many people did care to read – and still do.

Podcasting combines the instant information publishing of blogging with audio files that can be played on a computer or MP3 player. When you make your podcast publicly available on the Internet, you are exposing your thoughts to anyone with a personal computer and an Internet connection. To put that in perspective, the global online population toped 1.2 billion users in 2006 and portable media players (diven largely by the popularity of the iPod and iPhone) are continuing to surge in popularity.

Popular podcasts like the ‘Ricky Gervais Show’ which started in late 2005 have become hugely poular and influential on a global scale. It entered the Guiness Book of Records in 2007 as the most downloaded podcast having gained an average over over 261,000 downloads per episode during its first month.