Streaming audio and video on your Web site is a simple and effective way to deliver your message to customers. They effortlessly see and hear your message without straining their eyes reading small type on the computer screen. Even better, they don’t have to wait for an entire video to download before it begins playing. What could be easier than that? In fact, 53% of all adults say they view online video, according to a recent Forrester Research study (October 2006).

Seeing Is Believing
Streaming media offers you an opportunity to prove that what you say about your business is true. What sort of video should you stream on your Web site? The answer can be as creative or commonplace as you wish. The important thing is to remember that the video is part of your marketing efforts. You can turn it into a powerful sales tool that fits with the overall tone and style of your business identity.

The advantages of true streaming are:

• It can broadcast live events.
• It’s efficient and can handle large traffic loads.
• It can detect a user’s connection speed and send an appropriately sized file.

HTTP Streaming: Simple and Inexpensive
HTTP streaming is an open connection from the user’s Internet browser to the server. The server pushes new information into the data stream that flows to the user’s browser and doesn’t close the connection when it is finished, continuously updating the content displayed on the user’s screen.

The Upside:

HTTP streaming has some advantages over true streaming:

• It is essentially free with most Web hosting plans.
• Servers already run on the HTTP protocol, so no additional software is required.
• The only extra requirement is that your Web host recognizes the multipurpose Internet mail extension (MIME) types for streaming media files—and most Web hosts do.

The Downside:

While you can send the same quality content, and users don’t have to wait for the file to download in order to view it, HTTP streaming has these disadvantages:

• It serves only a small number of visitors at one time.
• Users must choose the file that best fits their connection speed.
• It cannot broadcast a live event.

For most Web sites with relatively low traffic, however, HTTP streaming is cost-effective and satisfies the needs of customers who want to view videos.

Put HTTP Streaming Files on Your Web Site

Your more technologically savvy Web visitors probably already have Windows Media Player, RealPlayer or both installed on their desktops. Adding media to your Web site that plays in these two programs is simple.

Step 1: Create a media file and save it in a streaming media format.

• Step 1: Create a media file and save it in a streaming media format.

RealPlayer formats include these file extensions: .ra, .ram, .rm and .rpm.

For Windows Media, use: .asf, .avi, .aif, .aifc, .aiff, .au, .cda, .dvr-ms, .m1v, .mid, .midi, .mp2, .mp3, .mpa, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .rmi, .snd, .vob, .wav, .wma and .wmv.

• Step 2: Upload the file to the Web server where your Web site resides.
  
  
• Step 3: Create a hyperlink to your file or embed it in your Web page.

Start Streaming!

By streaming media on your Web site, you give customers a feature they’ve come to expect from the Web sites of large, successful companies. It makes the impression that you’re on top of the latest trends and ready to deliver value to your customers. Best of all, you have a bold new medium for communicating your message in a way that’s easy for customers to receive.

Just like blogs took off in popularity, now podcasts are gaining popularity and becoming an effective means for getting your message across. If you haven’t heard of Podcasting yet, you just might be in the minority. According to Forrester Research, by 2010 podcasting should have about 12.3 million listeners. That’s a huge potential audience just waiting to hear what you have to say.

Since creating a podcast is relatively inexpensive—you just need a decent microphone, ample Web space bandwidth and software to create the podcast feed—the bulk of podcasts are coming from independent broadcasters. As this trend continues to gain momentum, it will provide even more opportunity and potential to reach a large and savvy audience.

What Is A Podcast?

A podcast is an audio file stored on the Internet that you can download to your computer or MP3 player and listen to whenever you want. Specifically, Podcasting contains an audio file in the RSS feed's enclosure tag. An enclosure tag is used in RSS feeds to include certain types of files. The file contained in an enclosure tag can be: an image, a data file, a video file, or an audio file. Podcasting specifically refers to RSS feeds that contain audio files in their enclosure tag.

Convenience and Choice

One of the many benefits to Podcasting is that it allows users tremendous flexibility to download content when it’s convenient for them and listen to it when they want, on a device of their choosing. Listeners literately have the ability to customize their own programming. Plus, by subscribing to RSS feeds with Podcasting features, you can keep up with your favorite programs and save time searching the Web for new material.

Most RSS readers already are equipped to play podcasts. Any software that can play a sound file can easily transmit a podcast. You can also choose to make your podcasts portable by downloading them to an MP3 player. This flexibility lets you listen to podcasts wherever and whenever you want. Many people compare podcasts to digital video recorders since they allow the listener to select what they want to record, when to listen to their recordings and skip commercials or other interruptions.

A Marketing Opportunity

Small businesses should consider Podcasting as another affordable and viral means for promoting their products and services. Similar to blogs and RSS feeds, Podcasting offers a relatively easy and inexpensive way to reach a large audience.

Blogs can add a natural boost to your organic search engine ranking because they are frequently updated, chock-full-of-links, content-rich sites that search engine spiders love crawling. While blogs instinctively fit with search engines, there are always steps you can take to improve your ranking. Check out these ten tips for making your blog a search engine superstar.

1. Choose Descriptive Titles
Make sure your blog has a noteworthy title. Headlines are given more importance by search engines so make sure you use targeted keyword phrases to describe the topic you are writing about. A good title not only helps your search engine ranking, it gives your readers more clarity about your subject matter.

2. Emphasize the Right Things
Make sure to reinforce the same targeted keywords and phrases you used in your title throughout your writing to establish the relevance of your article to the title.

3. Use Your Keywords in Text Links for ALL inbound and outbound links
Whether you are linking to pages within your site or to external sites, using text links instead of graphics for your navigation links improves your links’ impact on spiders. Also try to include your best keywords in the link text that navigates to pages optimized for those keywords.

4. Use Your Keywords in the Page’s Title Tag
Always make sure your keywords are included in each of your page’s title tags. Try to make your keyword or key phrase the first word of the title. Each page of your site should have its own title tag, with its own keyword.

5. Put Your Keyword in Your Description Tag
Try to include your keywords or phrases in the description tags of your pages once or twice—but don’t go over that or you could be accused of spamming the search engine.

6. Place Your Keywords in a Keywords Tag
Even though many of the major search engines, such as Google no longer look at the keywords tag, some small, specialized engines consider the keyword tag additional relevant text on your page. Include your most important keyword for the page first. Then add a few related keywords or phrases.

7. Make Sure You Use Your Keywords in Heading Tags
In html, H tags are for headers. They range in size from H1 (the largest) to H6 (the smallest) ALL H tags are given more weight than regular text. Bigger H sizes count more than smaller ones so don’t miss out on this keyword treasure trove.

8. Put Your Keywords in Bold Text In Several Places on the Page
Bold text is given more weight than regular text by search engines, so put your keywords into a boldface phrase once or twice on the page.

9. Use Your Keywords in Text Early and Often
Regular text is usually enclosed in a body tag or a paragraph tag within the body tag. Use your keywords once or twice in the first sentence of text. A good rule of thumb is to repeat the keyword two to three times in each paragraph.

10. Use Your Keywords in Alt Tags
Include your keywords in alt text for each image on your Web pages. This is the text that displays when you move your mouse over an image, as well as in speech synthesizers for the blind.