In today's Brain Storm! Business Podcast, we are going to discuss Co-Promotion as a way to self-promote.

There are many ways to promote yourself, but you wouldn't automatically think that promoting something or someone else could bring attention to you. However, that is a valid way to market yourself. It has been done with Diet Coke, Mentos, Firefox and the iPhone, to name a few.

When you promote another "hot" item, you can draw traffic from people searching for that item.

If you are talking about or promoting (in audio, video or text format) something that is popular in culture, when people are Googling those terms, your promotion could come up. This is the trick with keywords in general - find out what people are searching for and then talk about it.

If you take the time to praise someone's service or product, they may put you on their website and show you off.

That can't hurt your traffic either, especially if you talk about how you use that product to help your own clients (and what your service does for people). A good testimonial can't hurt the company, and they don't even have to pay for it. It's good for both businesses.

Use someone's product in a video and it is called product placement, and can get you 15 minutes of fame as well.

The Diet Coke and Mentos episode which we discuss in the podcast is on example. You'll have to listen to find out what else we discuss, and the things you can do to do some co-promotion for self-promotion.

Another reminder about the upcoming April 18-19, 2008 Online International Podcasting Expo.

Attendance is free and online, so there's no excuse not to be able to attend for most of you. We will be talking about why Physicians should podcast, how to get advertisers that don't "get" podcasting, and discuss whether or not the Podcasting arena is becoming segmented, instead of being all-inclusive as it was originally intended to be. Of course, there will be more...

So, until next week, put some of your ideas into ACTION, and tell me if you know of anyone who successfully used co-promotion for self-promotion.

Penny Haynes, 1st Podcast Publishing & Online Community Magazines