How to Add Audio to Your Website

Is your website grabbing your visitors' attention? There are now more than a billion people online, but the competition for their attention is this age of short attention spans is as fierce as ever.

Web experts estimate that you have 10-30 seconds to capture the attention of your visitors. That's it. And since you want to get across a whole lot more than anything that can be communicated in that short amount of time, you better make an effort to keep them for longer.

There are several powerful methods for engaging visitors right off the bat. One proven angle is to add audio to your website. This can be done in a number of ways:

- Add audio testimonials rather than just written statements. This both increases the credibility of the testimonials and makes for a more interesting user experience.

- Add an audio greeting that plays automatically or by pushing a prominent button. Get started right by offering visitors a warm introduction to your site. It will feel more personal, and visitors will be more interested in reading what you have to say.

- Add an audio version of your guarantee policy. When you actually say it out loud in your own words, the policy will have more credibility in the eyes (er, ears...) of your visitors.

- If your site is a blog, make an audio post now and again to mix things up for your loyal readers. Theyll thank you for it!

Quite simply, audio adds an extra dimension to your website that text can never get across. Some internet marketers even have websites that are almost exclusively audio, with nothing but an audio message, a bit of text, and an opt-in form to capture email addresses. Why would top marketers be doing this? Because it works!

You certainly don't have to be a top gun to get started. There are a number of free programs that you can use to record audio. One great piece of software that is distributed as freeware is called Audacity, and is available for free download at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ It is very intuitive and allows you to easily record and edit audio clips using the microphone on your computer.

To play audio on your website, it is advisable to employ a solution that let's you run streaming media, which means media files that play immediately rather than waiting for the entire file to download. A low-cost example is Web Audio Plus. This program let's you choose sound quality and fully customize the look of the buttons that will be on your site. You can even play audio clips automatically (right when a person opens the page) if you so choose.