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Complete Marketing + Business System
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Make Your Website Talk by Jim Edwards Just a few years ago, people watched in amazement as words and pictures appeared as "websites" on their computer screens through the Internet.Just having a website rated a major accomplishment, even a status symbol, for businesses of every size. Now, however, people expect websites as standard equipment for most businesses and the Internet teems with millions of static web pages.In such a crowded online world, how can a business differentiate itself from all the others? Welcome to the new frontier of the Internet where web pages, even the small ones, dance and sing with audio and video! In the beginning (2-3 years ago), putting audio and video on your website involved very expensive "streaming" servers and complicated software. In those days, audio and video remained the playground of mega-sites and dot-com companies with unlimited budgets. But even then, online audio and video didn't really take off because the vast majority of it required the listener to carry a high-speed Internet connection. Well those days have passed forever and quality audio and certain types of video now lie firmly in the grasp of every website owner! Two things appeared on the scene to enable virtually any website owner to include audio and video on their website, even for dial-up surfers: faster computers and better compression technology. Let's face it, most home computers now pack more punch than it took to send men to the moon.When you combine that with widespread use of "Flash Player," a free web browser plug-in available at www.macromedia.com, which enables high quality audio to stream across the web without special servers, and you now find a perfect environment for what amounts to online radio.At a minimum, many sites now use audio to provide special messages from the site's owner or enable website visitors to hear customer testimonials in the voice and words of the actual customer. Audio testimonials seem to add significant credibility for a website and, since not everyone has them, also help make your website look cutting edge and more "with it" than other sites. Whenever technology breaks old bonds, services and software seem to spring up almost instantly to meet the needs of consumers, in this case website owners, who want to use the technology, but don't want to get bogged down in the technical aspects. For audio, two websites seem to cater to either end of the spectrum. www.audiogenerator.com allows website owners to phone a 1-800 phone number, record their voices to a special web server, and then paste a simple line of code into their website to include the audio.Customers can also call the number to record testimonials for use on the site. www.sonicmemo.com provides similar functionality, however, it requires the user to record their own MP3 files (compressed files that work well online) and upload them to their website.As technology improves, expect to see websites adding these and even more interactive multi-media elements to improve and enhance their ability to deliver information.-- Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the creator of the Web's first, no-holds-barred multi-media newsletter that has people all over the globe saying "HOW Does He Do That!" Check it out FREE at www.IGottaTellYou.com
© 2005 ProfitMAX Marketing - All Rights Reserved
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