You know you want to use audio on your website because you’ve heard so much about the benefits - increased traffic, return visitors, people staying longer on your site but you’re still not sure how or where to go about it.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at ways in which you can use audio on your website, this time looking at the welcome clip.

What is a welcome clip? Well, it’s a short audio piece which serves several purposes:

• Let’s clients or prospective clients hear your voice and enhances the ‘know, like, trust’ principle.
• Gives you the opportunity to place a call to action - you might want prospects to sign up for your newsletter, leave a comment on your blog or check out your special offers - whatever it is you want them to do, this is the time to say it.
• Adds some interest to your website, instead of just the usual text offerings (and targets those auditory people out there).

See the audio player in the top left column? That’s my welcome clip that I use on my blog for an idea of how it sounds. I want people to engage with me and feel they can contact me for information. I could rotate this with one asking people to sign up for my free report, to see what effect that has on sign ups.

Don’t get bogged down by technology - you don’t have to add music and sound effects, your voice is more than enough to engage people. And as for length, there’s no hard and fast rule but just keep it to the point - you don’t need to tell people everything at this stage. One thing to note, and there are various schools of thought around this, I would avoid having the audio start automatically. LOTS of people find this very annoying. Make sure your web person knows to set it to play on request rather than automatic play…

Check back here regularly as I’ll also be blogging about the types of resources you can use to get your audio resources up and running. Please do feel free to ask any questions or leave comments - they’re always welcome.