Yet another bank holiday last Monday, so there was no video eNewsletter, but it gave me the opportunity to design and implement a little experiment. I've been wondering, you see, about how I might be able to add value to the videos that I make and also add value to the videos that you've been making yourselves. And I think the answer lies in promotion.

This morning, before sending out this newsletter, I sent out another to a subset of the engineering database that I maintain. The idea is to find stories about products and solutions that have an associated video, and then make it easy for anyone interested in finding out more information to watch the video and visit the relevant page on the supplier's website.

I think this is a bit different from the norm. Other eNewsletters flag up videos, but they tend to be general interest rather than videos that are genuinely useful. Of course there's nothing to stop magazine eNewsletters promoting the latest videos – my own magazine, Industrial Technology, runs a particularly good eNewsletter that highlights the occasional video – but these eNewsletters are editorial in nature, and rightly so. They highlight stories in an editorial fashion, and then guide you back to their own websites where you can read the story in full.

The eNewsletter I've conceived, though, is much more commercial in nature, and I think it should sit aside from the trade and technical magazines. Each panel highlights the key points about a particular product or technology, provides a link back to the specific product page on your own website, and provides a link for the video. That video might be hosted on the same page, or on a different page, or on YouTube – it really doesn't matter.

So what might it cost to be involved? Well, for videos that I'm making I could offer it free of charge as an added value service - all part of the package. For those of you who already have videos for products you'd like to promote, perhaps a charge of £150 for a panel would make it attractive. Perhaps there is also mileage in creating a portal to archive the newsletter issues.

I'll report back next week on the response I get to this first version that was just sent out to a random set of people on the list. I hope it'll make interesting reading. If you have any thoughts or suggestions in the mean time, I'd be interested to hear them.