Sporting Goods Example

In a Nutshell

Hostanote provides a means for organizations to promote their name. Any company can become a Sponsor and a "Basic banner" is automatically created. The banner includes the Sponsors name and a link - back to either the Sponsors website, an email address. These banners are co-branded, meaning the banner also includes the name of a funding company which is responsible for providing this service free to the Sponsor.

For exclusive control of the banners content, Sponsors can purchase the Premium Upgrade. This upgrade includes a custom banner, 50,000 views per month and multiple links. The Premium Upgrade also entitles the sponsor access to email addresses of all opt-in members.

All Sponsors have access to administrative functions through the Sponsor portal. The portal Includes how many albums have been created, how many times an album has been viewed, and the ability to block an album from being viewed, which would be used in case inappropriate material was published.

A Short Example

Let's take a look at how this works using a fictitious sporting goods store, Instant Replay Sport Products (the Sponsor).

Meet Joe, the manager at Instant Replay who wants to increase traffic to his website, increase awareness of his company name and be seen as an organization supporting the local community. Joe is not interested in spending a lot of money on setup costs or ongoing fees, or signing up for any long term commitment. He is looking for a solid, practical real world program that will bring actual results.

Joe decides to take things one step at a time, so he subscribes as a hostanote sponsor, for free. By entering his company name, email address, a password and website URL, a banner is automatically created.

Joe is immediately ready to tell all of his customers (and anyone else he can think of), Instant Replay has a gift for them. The gift is a membership to hostanote.com for sharing digital photos online.

To distribute the hostanote gift Joe put a single link on his website, in the form of a button (shown below), which was automatically created and included in his Sponsor portal. (This button was also sent to him in the email confirming his registration as a Sponsor). A simple copy and paste is all that was needed.

So Joe's customer clicks on the new button on Instant Replay's website, and is taken to the hostanote service. With a few clicks he is sharing pictures of their semi-final game.

With his new hostanote membership, this customer is happy to learn he can make as many of these albums as he likes, can password protect his albums for privacy and can edit any previously created albums. Impressed, this customer tells a few friends to view his photos. They are impressed with the photo viewing experience and learn that they also can share their photos online for free thanks to Joe's sponsorship.

Meanwhile, Joe logs in to his Sponsor portal and sees over 250 people have viewed the pictures of last week's semi-final game.

This has turned out to be excellent exposure. Realizing there are hundreds of teams that Instant Replay deals with, including hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer and many others, Joe is now interested in projecting even a better image. He would like complete control of what is shown in the banner and would also like to have multiple links back to different promotions he is offering. So Joe decides to pay for the Premium Upgrade rather than remaining as a free sponsor. Included in the monthly subscription fee is the cost of building his initial custom banner so his new banner is changed to look like this:

The new banner includes the company's logo, colors, address, website and email links. From now on, this banner will be attached to all new albums, and will automatically appear on all albums that have already been created. As a Premium sponsor Joe can now access the opt-in email addresses of all people who published hostanotes using his banner, expanding the base of people for his next newsletter. Joe is thrilled he was able to take advantage of the power of the Internet and implement a strong viral marketing strategy, starting for free and expanding the hostanote service showed tangible results.