Life-Hosting.com - Using Advertising during Podcasts: A Good Business Risk?

When producing a regular podcast, some podcasters wrestle with the fact of including advertising during their broadcast. While it may be necessary to advertise your business or service; sometimes, when done in a tactful manner, advertising during a podcast can actually help increase business while spreading positive word-of-mouth recommendations about your business or company.

The first step to advertising your business is to do it as inexpensively as possible. This means to find another podcaster who sells a related service (not a competitor) and offer to trade advertising. Each business agrees on a set amount of time for the commercial and writes a script advertising their business or service. After the scripts have been traded and approved, consider transitioning from the discussed topic to the commercial by mentioning your product or service and how you can recommend something to go with it. Then, proceed to read the commercial. Be sure to limit yourself to one advertiser per segment or else you will lose listeners who will think your podcast is becoming too littered with commercials.

Now that you understand how it is done, you may need to know how to find prospective advertisers. Compile a list of all relevant businesses and services that would work great with what you are selling. Compose a letter offering your proposal stating how your business is relevant to theirs and why an idea like this would be mutually beneficial. Next, perform an Internet search with the desired related business or service as the search term and include a reference in the search bar to the word “podcast”. This should provide you will all of the relevant podcasts to offer your proposals to. View their sites if possible to see if the site shares your company’s values and is truly not a competitor. Look for contact information, affiliate relationships and other relevant information before sending in your proposal. Keep a log of correspondence sent and whether a response was received.

If a positive result was received, be sure to randomly listen in to the other podcasts to make sure your business’ advertisement was mentioned. However, if receiving a response where the other podcaster is unsure, suggest doing a link exchange. Here, there is less of a risk to lose customers by entering commercials into the podcasts, but customers can click on the exchanged links to listen to the other podcasts of their own choosing. Even this less risky technique can still have positive results, as your podcast will be on a page indexed by the major Internet Search Engines.

In the end, whether exchanging advertising, links or other methods of promotion, businesses that rely on podcasts to supplement their advertising can benefit from other, relevant online businesses that are willing to participate with your company and enjoy the benefits for free advertising. Remember though, the key to operating a successful free advertising campaign is not to alienate your core listeners. This may mean putting a limit of advertising exchanges, because without a dedicated audience, the podcast is only as good as the people it reaches; so choose carefully and enjoy the rewards for your hard work.

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Using Advertising during Podcasts: A Good Business Risk?

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