Webcasts -- It's not just a buzzword, but an excellent way to transmit valuable messages to a variety of different target audiences. Best of all -- the cost is very minimal.

When it comes to profits, most of it boils down to communicating the advantages of your goods and services to the marketplace. Also, it relates to managing your employees effectively, by communicating the proper instructions to them to best utilize your resources. In both of these cases, webcasts can be extreme and beneficial.

First, let's look at how this technology can be used to communicate with your prospects and customers. With your prospects, this can be another tool in your marketing scheme. For example, instead of just handing them a plain old trifold sales brochure, you can also instruct them to visit your website where you have webcasts that answer all their questions. Not only is it cheaper than a pretty brochure, but is also more personal and interactive.

With people who are already your customers, you can use webcasts to further educate them on complementary goods and services, as well as how to best use the products and services they have already purchased from you. Many people prefer to watch video instead of read literature, so it is easier for them to follow along with your message.

Also, let's look at how you can use webcasts within your own organization. Here, if you're a large company you can broadcast company meetings to your investors, to keep them in tune with what is going on in your business. Or, you can now conduct your meetings without having everybody physically present in a conference room. When done properly, this can make your meetings much more effective as well as take up less of your time.

Webcasts can also be used to open up communications with potential vendors and to set up alliances with other businesses. Here, you can conduct a web conference live video meeting with potential profitable business partners, without anybody having to get on a plane to meet face-to-face.

The biggest benefit to webcasts is that they are very inexpensive. All you need is the ability to capture either an audio or video, and upload it to the Internet to be viewable. It is extremely cost effective and simple to achieve, once you understand how to do it.

There's no denying it -- webcasts are the future of almost all corporate and small business communications.