Streaming Audio

As a company that sells streaming media services for a living, we get questions everyday about what needs to be done to make an audio or video presentation that will stream well over the Internet. Most of these inquiries come from small businesses with limited budgets for marketing and advertising. They are always pleasantly surprised when we tell them that they can do it themselves!

Let’s start with an audio only presentation:

Write out your script first! Focus on two to three points that you feel are essential to explain your products or services. Keep the script simple. If your site offers a wide variety of goods or services, you might consider several different messages with each one keying in on one or two important areas.

Have someone who is not familiar with your business review the script and your site. Be sure that they understand your message. If they don’t, rewrite it!

Practice reading the script until you feel completely familiar and comfortable with it. (You can hire professional voice talent for reasonable rates if you’d prefer not recording the audio yourself.)

Use the best quality tape recorder available to you. A cassette recorder is fine.

Use a high quality brand name audiotape.

An external microphone that plugs into your recorder is preferable to the one that comes built-in. They are very inexpensive and produce a better recording.

Do your recording in a quiet place with as little background noise as possible. (That one seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?)

Speak naturally! It can help to have a friend or colleague act as an audience to give you focus.

Record your presentation several times. Select the one that will sound the most natural and inviting to your site visitors.

Send the tape to the encoding (streaming) vendor. They’ll take it from there!

A video presentation takes a little more time and effort, but you really can do it yourself. Your home video camera will work just fine! All of the same rules you used to make your audiotape apply here including the use of an external microphone. Good quality videotape is essential. The following suggestions will help you prepare a video presentation for your site that should stream very well:

Keep the camera steady! Put the camera on a tripod or brace it against something solid like a table or a wall. If you must pan or zoom, do it very slowly. (Too much motion can cause a “blurry” stream.)

Simplify your frame. Think about where everything is going to be. People coming in and out of the frame can create movement that may cause confusion.

Stay focused. A lot of auto-focus cameras can’t focus properly if you are too close to your subject. Five or six feet away is a good distance. Don’t try to shoot through a window; the camera will focus on the glass.

Good lighting is essential. Try to light your scene from the front. Don’t stand in front of a window; the backlighting will cause you to be in silhouette. Try shooting outside if possible.
Use the fastest record speed. This will insure the best video quality.

Record in a quiet place. Hold the mike close to your mouth to cut down on external noises.

RELAX AND ENJOY YOURSELF! It really shows. Practice until you feel comfortable.

If you have additional questions or concerns, your streaming vendor should be ready and able to assist you.

Early adopters of Rich Media techniques, streaming being one of them, have already started to reap the rewards of higher click-through rates and increased conversion rates. If your message is meaningful and relevant to your site visitors, your streaming presentation will add to their enjoyment of visiting your site and encourage them not only to buy but also to return and buy again!

As our elected officials try to see how much money they can print to spend us out of the current economic doldrums, smart business owners know that the solution isn’t coming from the capitol…it’s coming from us. We have to do what small and medium-sized business owners have always done…get smart about spending our money in order to expand the reach of our offerings.

There are always a few recession-proof industries, such as auto mechanics, plumbers, electricians, crime-prevention, etc. Then there are the industries that see growth in hard times, the ones out-of-work people turn when they’re looking to improve their skills, their image, or explore other options in employment. Who are they?  Coaches. Life coaches, sales coaches, business coaches, and speech coaches are all in demand right now as the unemployment numbers rise and people look for ways to stand out and get hire

At the same time, coaches are looking for ways to help more people without having to add more hours to their workday. That’s where using audio teaching tools can be of use to both the coaching community and to the unemployed, making for a win-win situation.

There are many quick ways to make audio teaching tools available to coaching clients. One solution is to take coaching articles and turn them into audio e-courses available to individuals or to businesses wanting to upgrade their staffs’ skills.  Another is to offer a series of weekly audio tips for job-hunters and send them out to anyone who wants them via auto-responder, in exchange for their email address. This is a great way to build a newsletter subscription base and a loyal following of potential clients, and to remind them to re-visit the coaching site for more good information. Some coaches are even building secure log-in areas to their websites and offering online audio/PowerPoint training, with weekly or monthly telephone coaching as an addition to the offering. And coaches who’ve written books can quickly have audio books produced, meaning even more people can be exposed to their training and helpful information.

All of these are methods that coaches are using to re-purpose existing tools, increase the number of clients they can help, and increase their bottom line…all without adding any hours to their workdays.

A few things to keep in mind if you’re a coach and are thinking of adding audio to your offerings:

1. Deal with a professional, and make sure that they’re recording and saving your work at a high bit rate. For a mono recording, a 32 bit record rate and a 160 kb per second save rate will result in a very high-quality piece of audio. The lower the bit rate, the worse the audio will sound. For instructional audio, it’s important that the quality of the audio doesn’t distract the user from being able to learn the intended message. You want audio in mp3 format that sounds nearly as good as if the person was in the room with you, and a high bit rate is the way to accomplish that.

2. Use music if you feel it’s appropriate, but do use it in the opening and closing segments of each recording. It makes the presentation sound polished and gives the listener confidence that the coach is one of the top in the field.

3. Never ever offer any piece of audio that doesn’t include a way for the listener to find you and your website. It must always be on the cover segments, and can in the opening segment, too. audio products you should always contain your brand and contact information, or you have wasted resources.

The above suggestions are just a few ways that extend the reach of their coach during this difficult economy. There are many more because there are creative people to dream them. Happy creating!

You may be wondering what it takes to add audio to your site. You may be surprised to find out how little it takes to get started. You probably have some of what you need and the rest can be acquired for little or no cost. Here is a setup designed to get you going without a whole lot of costs.

Computer: Most any computer made in the last few years should be sufficient to get you started recording streaming audio.

Microphone: The mike that came with your computer will be enough to start with. As you get more experienced you will most certainly want to upgrade to a better mike.

Software: You will need to get several different kinds of software to put streaming audio on your website each serving a different purpose.

Recording Software: This ranges from the free recording software Audacity to programs that cost hundreds of dollars.

Editing Software: After you are done recording you will need to edit your recording. This can be done in your recording software but you may be happier with dedicated editing software.

Mp3 Conversion: Your software above may save your file in the MP3 format depending on what program you choose. If not you need to get something to convert your wav file into MP3. I use DB Power Amp, which is a powerful converter well worth its small cost.

Flash Converter: To stream your audio you will need a program to convert your MP3 into the flash format, which is called SWF. This is a simple process with the likes of Web Audio Plus, Sonic Memo and others.

Html Stuff: You will have to put your code from your flash converter into a web page if you want to see and hear your buttons. This is easier than it sounds.

Web Hosting: You need to be careful when choosing a hosting service. Make sure they provide enough storage space and bandwidth.

All of the above may seem confusing but we will go over the things you need to know to be successful. Create Streaming Audio ezine will help you each step of the way. Next time we meet you will get a basic tutorial on how to record your audio into your computer.

Lucrative to one person may mean something different to another.

There’s millions and millions of different topics and niches and products out there.

My niche, the internet marketing crowd and copywriting and marketing niche, it is such a small niche.  

Copywriting niche, if you ask ten people on the street, “What is copywriting?” I guarantee you probably out of ten, maybe one may know what copywriting is.

My niche is a very small niche, but there are huge niches out there. One niche that I like within my small niche here is I like business opportunity.  It’s that saying, “Catch a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for life.”

When you’re selling a business opportunity on how to make money, or you’re selling them a system that he can implement and use to provide for his family for the rest of his life, that has a lot of value. There are a lot of people looking for that. So, I like business opportunity. One of my main products is an HMA Marketing Consulting System. That really is a business opportunity. It teaches you how to be a marketing consultant, and if you take to it and study it and implement it, you could make a nice living doing marketing consulting. So, it’s a short cut to the process.

Those type products have a lot of value, and it’s great to use audio interviews, expert interviews and testimonial type interviews to promote that type of thing.

So, I would go with business opportunities and you might find some other niches that are even more popular that have a higher demand and say, “Do your research.”

A lot of my recordings aren’t necessarily business opportunity, but they’re information trainings. Copywriting really, it could be a business opportunity, but there’s skills like negotiating and copywriting and sales scripting and how to get more referrals. Those are all skill type interviews, and those actually will translate into more money in your pocket.

So, my niche, business skills and business opportunities have been pretty good for me. So, I would stick with something like that, and I would also think about the type of margins when you’re creating your information product. What could they sell for?

Business opportunities tend to sell for higher margins. People will pay more for those. People will pay a million dollars. I don’t know how much a McDonald’s franchise is. Maybe they’re two or three million now, or they’ll pay a million dollars for a Subway. Franchises are being sold everyday, and these things go for fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, a million dollars because they’re business opportunities.

When people buy into them, they believe that that franchise is going to support them for the rest of their life. So, I would consider something like that with high margin. I absolutely believe that audio can sell high ticket items like that.

Audio streaming is definitely one of the hottest marketing tools these days that brings increased traffic and sales to various websites. If you would like to incorporate audio streaming to your site, here’s the 8 best ways to do it:

1. Learn how to incorporate audio streaming on your website or hire somebody who can. Not all websites are designed for audio streaming especially those that were created a couple of years back. Thus, it is very important that if you want to incorporate this marketing strategy on your website, you must know how to properly do it. Search the internet for various tutorials that can help you in uploading streaming audio on your site.

2. Incorporate audio streaming on your squeeze page. Would not it be nice if you can communicate the benefits of being a member of your e-mail list through audio streaming? Enumerate the reason why your visitors should leave their email address and look forward to your promotional email.

3. Use audio streaming on your sales page. Instead of posting testimonials of your satisfied clients, it will be more impacting if you can actually record their voice and use the audio on your sales page. It will appear more credible and enticing.

4. Promote your products and services through audio streaming. Every once in a while you can run a radio-like ad to entice your visitors to buy your offerings. Make it upbeat, interesting, and lively.

5. Make sure that your audio files are of high quality. They should be crisp and easy to understand. People can easily get annoyed if your audio is full of hiss or is very choppy.

6. Pay attention to the tone of your audio files. If you are running a professional website, it would help if your tone is formal to compliment the theme and topic.

Webmasters these days are very innovative when it comes to making their sales pages attractive and catchy. Of course, they had to do this stuff lest internet users would skip their boring web sites. One of the many innovations in web site marketing is to have on your site a sound to go with the text of your pages. Audio marketing is just one of the many techniques that you can add to spice up your sales pages. In the past, online marketers had to deal with poor sound quality output on their web sites. It was quite a big effort for them to produce quality audio marketing.

However, online marketers have realized that good sound quality is just as important as the content of their web page. To have a profitable audio marketing, you need to find a way on how to come up with quality audio for your web site. You can choose whether to hire a professional to create audio for your web site or you can learn how to do it by yourself. For some online marketers, outsourcing the services of a professional in web audio production is more practical. They believe that it can be more profitable if they concentrate on income-generating aspects of their business and leave audio marketing to the hands of experts.

With very little knowledge on the technical aspect of sound production, one may produce a mediocre sound for their sites. Thus, they could be wasting their time on unproductive outputs. On the other hand, affiliate marketers who are determined to produce their own outputs, have audio streaming tutorials that they can study. Making your own sound output can actually be less expensive than hiring the services of a professional. This is one advantage of learning the craft yourself. However, it also requires your time to apply and practice what you have learned. If you think you have the time to divert your focus from your business to audio marketing, then you may learn how to create sound outputs yourself.

Though it may be time consuming, you will still benefit greatly from learning this new innovation. There are a lot of related tools that will aid you in producing good sound for your sales pages. To have a successful audio marketing, you have to pay particular attention on the details of the sound that you will be producing for your sales page. The voice quality of your talent must be pleasing to the ears. People would often prefer to hear those voices that they usually hear on television or radio. That would be impressive to hear. Aside from the voice quality, you have to make sure that your talent is able to enunciate the message that you want to relay to your prospective customers.

In order to produce quality sound output, it is also important that you have edited it well. It should be free of unnecessary noise which may affect the whole presentation. Surely no one would want to browse a page with distracting noises. Avoid frustrating your customers. This could make them all the more shy away from your page. Maximize the benefits of audio marketing and increase your online business’ earning potentials.

Thanks to the internet, you have been given a lot of options when it comes to marketing your business. Entrepreneurs have been quick to take advantage of the technology and proceeded to build websites for marketing and even e-commerce purposes. However, though some web masters have enjoyed riding every big wave in internet communications technology, a lot others have been left behind; that is, while you will see business websites with embedded audio and video, you,re more likely going to see sites with just text and some pictures.

If you,re contemplating the idea of joining the 21st century, then you should begin entertaining the idea of integrating audio technology to your internet marketing strategy.

Audio in Your Website

Audio files in your website are a good way of making your website more appealing and personal. Line upon line of text has a tendency to put readers to sleep.

Audio files make wonderful accents on a website. For instance, while the page is loading, you can include music or a voice requesting the user,s patience. When the site has properly loaded, there could be a welcoming spiel. You can include short promotional audio files with your product offerings. You can also give site navigation instructions to your visitor through audio. There are a lot of possibilities!

What makes audio files so ideal is the fact that they are much smaller than video files; they,re so much easier to open and load, even for dial-up users. Making audio for your site can also be as simple as using an audio software that converts audio sound into a code which you can paste in the appropriate section of your site.

Audio in Your Promotional Emails

You have heard video emails, of course. Going by the usual route, you will have to engage the services of a video streaming ASP for that. If you would like though, you can embed audio in your emails. Put in some wonderful ad copy, but spice it up with some audio clips with your short radio commercial that can grab your email recipient,s interest and induce him or her to read your text copy.

To make such audio files for email marketing campaigns, you also need to use audio software for the purpose.

Audio in Your Feeds

You have heard about pod casting, I suppose? This is comparable to R S S feeds, except that audio files are the content that,s fed into the subscriber,s portable device or desktop computer. To make pod casts, you need to use a feed (XML code) writer and post the feed button in a website. People who have subscribed to your feed will be alerted whenever you post new audio files.

How do you get prospects to actually listen to your interviews?  You are always going to have some people who toss your information. Probably a majority of the people and it depends on how you distribute the audio. If you give them the choice and you’ve described the audio of what they are going to listen to and you’ve done a good job on the production there is a good chance they won’t toss it if they are in the market for what you have created for them in that interview.

They’ll toss it if you give them a poor interview, if you’re asking questions that they don’t want to know. If you’re not covering the information through your research that they need to know. All the mistakes we’ve talked about will get them to toss your recording. But if you’ve done it right and matched your message and your expert to your market there is no reason they should toss it. If you are taking your interview and mailing it to every name in the phone book, yeah, they are going to toss it because its junk mail.

If you give people the choice to download and absorb the information on their time, by their own choice and they’ve qualified themselves by the description, the headline, of what this interview is about and what you promised to deliver, they will listen to your interview and they will listen to all of it and whatever you can provide them. I have people who tell me they’ve listened to every interview on my site. They have listened to 100 hours of my interviews. So if your content provides value they will listen to it.

When I was young I read all the books written by Douglas Adams. I liked it so much that I have managed to persuade my parents to buy the audio books of the titles I have read. I remember getting larges boxes with up to twenty audio cassettes for each book and listening to one cassette each night.

Today one can get audio books in 3 different methods – audio books on cassettes, audio books on CDs and audio books on MP3 or other media files. In this article I will examine the pros and cons of each audio book method.

1. Audio books on cassettes are the oldest method. Their quality is moderate. However, their quality maintains stable for long periods.

Each cassette usually contains one or two chapters of the audio book. Most of the listeners find it inconvenient to change the cassettes so frequently. However, some find it easy having a cassette for each chapter.

The main disadvantage of audio books on cassettes is the fact that audio book on cassettes weight more than the old fashioned book and occupies more space. It is definitely less convenient.

Furthermore, it costs more than the same title on all other methods – the old fashioned book, audio book on a CD or on an MP3 file.

2. Audio books on CDs exist in the market for more than 10 years. However, this method is not as popular as one think it should be. Although it is cheaper and far more convenient than audio books on cassettes it is still as common as audio books on cassettes used to be. Some tend to ascribe this phenomenon to the mass return to the old fashioned books in the past few years.

3. Audio books on MP3 or other media files have many advantages – they are much cheaper than the other audio books’ methods, they occupy no physical space at all and their quality is good. Their popularity increased enormously in the past year, but they are still less popular than the other audio books’ methods. It is estimated that the popularity of MP3 mobile players as IPod will initiate a revolution considering audio books.

I want you to fall in love. In love with recording audio interviews. And I’m going to tell you if you want to make money doing something you love, you should do audio interviews. With Audio Interviews you can package them and sell them.

I’m going to give you a perfect example about how to do this. There’s a website called Tunecore and these guys are doing exactly what I’m teaching. I have no idea who they are, but they have all kinds of information products, audio downloads, they interview experts and the gentleman who asked this, he loves musicians, I would say start interviewing musicians. Let’s say he interviews ten musicians about their career as a musician. What do you think someone will pay more for?

Those two interviews with those musicians and what they love about their career and what their life is like and how many gigs they play? Or what if you did ten interviews for musicians on how to get a number one song or how to do mastering; how to master your songs. Or how to do marketing or how to publish your digital music. An interview on vinyl, creating vinyl records and selling old LPs. Or mixing your music for the best potential sales on copyright issues.

These are subjects that the business of the music industry, I think, would have a lot more appeal and bring a higher dollar volume than actually the lifestyles of different musicians.

So I would tell him start interviewing experts within the business music industry. It’s a huge niche. These guys, I remember looking at what of their seminars because these guys – their niche – is teaching about publishing your digital songs so musicians who create a series of songs it’s not really all about albums anymore, it’s about that one track, that one hit, and it’s about how to market your song.

It was interesting to me because I wanted to learn from music about how to get distribution on an audio interview. It’s not music but it’s still an audio content and their distribution system would work the same way for me and I’ve looked at their seminar. They were selling an online training for about $10,000. So I would tell this guy, go to Tunecore, look at what they’re doing and model it. Their niche is digital music. Maybe you can model something for maybe vinyl music, LPs. I think albums are getting back in fashion with a lot of the younger kids today.