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Advertising can get expensive. Obviously, there are many ways to spend wisely, such as trying your best to reach your target audience. Market research, case studies, and focus groups can definitely help to get the best bang for your buck, but what about putting your assets directly in front of your target audience?

The most common way of finding information on the Internet is search. Google Adwords, and Adsense, are an extremely successful example of putting your advertising precisely in the laps of your target audience. But ads, being what they are, are only marginally successful. There are other ways each and every company doing business on the Web can utilize their own assets, to help advertise their company.

I recently did a small project with a client that sold books. They had snippets of audio for each book available online. They were thinking of allowing full digital downloads of each book, in audio form, at some point in the future, but for now they had small segments of the book broken down into MP3 files. Those files, could be the key to a portion of their success online.

Podcasting is gaining steam with each and every day. How long it will last, what podcasting will become in the future, and how much value is in actually advertising within indy podcasts – are issues that will be debated for some time. Nevertheless, there is huge potential here for almost any company to parlay off of its success.

My client, had the files (enough to publish a podcast once a week for well over a year), and just needed a way to publish them. Although this specific project is not completed (hence no link showing you how it was implemented) I’ll tell you what we did. Using Expression Engine, or WordPress, or Moveable Type, it is possible to schedule posts. Setting up 52 posts, with 52 enclosures, scheduled to publish themselves each Monday at a specific time – and you’ve got yourself an automated advertising service. A 1:30 audio clip, that links back to a way to buy the entire audiobook, or physical book, is really a simple way to generate revenue.

To see something similar in action, take a look at Wine Library TV. The Wine Library is an online, and offline, “wine store”. Wine Library TV is a video cast where the owner of the company takes a few minutes to taste test a few wines. It has built up quite an audience (I have been one since very early), and has made their business go from successful, to booming, online.

Does your company have any assets it can use, online, to help advertise your business?