Streaming Audio Made Easy

by Quentin Brown

Internet streaming audio is the most prevalent form of multimedia on the Internet today according to Creative, one of the leading companies in the sound hardware field. Over the last few years, streaming audio has moved from being a curiosity to a business strategy that is adopted by many media organizations.

Streaming Audio has always been available to the big corporate sites and techies. Now every one can use simple software to produce their own streaming audio from a web site.

Marketers and business people have always known that a well-placed audio stream can increase sales and signups to their products and services. The problem has always been that the average person could not afford the high cost of special servers or programmers to be able to use this technology.

There have been a number of products around that provide streaming audio however as they have grown and developed so have the plugins required for listening to the streaming files.

With the new software available today anyone can add audio to their web sites without the need for any large plugins and complicated software. Simply add your audio file and choose a component to activate the stream and click go. These programs output all the necessary files, which you can then use to embed in your web pages with a quick copy and paste.

The web visitor can simply click and listen, even over a standard 56K modem.

So now that you're considering adding the sweet sound of audio to your site, where might you want to use it?

Depending on your website's content and theme, there are a variety of ways to incorporate your audio into it. For example:

You might place a welcome message on your front page, summarizing your site's highlights, informing visitors of what they'll find, and thanking them for stopping by.

If you have an "about us" page on your site, you might want to record a brief message to accompany your background info. This will help people feel as if they're actually meeting you.

Since testimonials are a great enhancement to any site imagine if you actually added them in your customer's own voice. If you use one of the phone recording services you could give them the number and they could easily record how they feel about your products/services.

If your site has been featured in an online interview or radio show, imagine including this audio in your site. Just think of it as your very own live press room.

Perhaps just adding some pleasant music for your visitors to listen to as they view your web pages.

There are many features that these new programs provide the user.

Produce as many files as you like.
No need for expensive programmers
Many allow you to host them on your own server - you're in control.
Greatly reduce the size of your audio file.
Streams over most modem connections
Easy to use interface
Added components for more variety

So now that you're actually thinking of recording something and adding it to your site, how do you do it? There are many different ways, some more expensive then others.

Your site has been sending non-verbal messages for years; now it's time to break free and let it send a message everyone can hear. Adding audio to your website is not only easy to do, it can help you gain the trust of your site's visitors, thus increasing your conversion rate. So stop wasting your time and money, and start getting the sales you may be missing.