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Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Public Speaker Marketing - Using MP3 Files To Promote Your Business

MP3 is a very common compression format for audio files. Although not everyone is comfortable with using and buying digital files, there is a market for them.


Once you have recorded an audio file for your CD there is no reason to ignore the MP3 version.

If you are using a .wav editor program on your computer all you have to do is open the .wav file that you used to burn your CD and click on "file" and then "save as". You will have many formats to pick from. Choose "MP3".

Listen to an MP3 file: http://imtcva.org/getting-started/attend-an-info-session/

Variable Quality

The entire reason to have a compression format like MP3 is to make the file size smaller so the file can be distributed more easily. What most people don't know is that you can have extremely high quality MP3 files with a larger file size and really low quality MP3 files with a really tiny file size.

128 kbs (kilo bits per second) is considered CD quality MP3. Most people would not be able to tell the difference between this file and a true CD. 8 kbs is an MP3 file that is extremely poor quality, but the file size is really tiny. You have a range between 8 and 128 kbs you can pick from.

About 24 kbs will give you acceptable quality with a file size that's manageable. Below you'll see the differences in file sizes for an audio recording of a teleseminar that was 74 minutes long.

The high quality mono .wav file was 383 mb (megabytes) Stereo would have been twice as large, but it's not needed for simple voice recording. At CD Quality MP3 the file size was 69.5 mb or 5.5 times smaller than the original. At 24 kbs MP3 the file size was 12.7 mb or 30 times smaller than the original. At 8 kbs MP3 the file size was 4.3 mb or 89 times smaller than the original file.

User Instructions

Whenever you put a link on your website for someone to download an MP3 file, you always want to put some instructions to help those people who aren't extremely savvy with the download process.
Here are some instructions you can use:

"Right click" on the link below and then "save target as" to save the file to your hard drive, mp3 player or Ipod.

Many people save files to their desktop so they can find them easily. When you have uploaded an MP3 file to your website and linked to it, most people don't know about the "right click" operation above. Putting those instructions near the download link will save you lots of time on the phone helping people get the file downloaded.

A common thing that happens with both MP3 and .pdf downloads is that people will ignore the instructions and left click on the link. This will start the MP3 file playing in their media player, but they actually haven't downloaded it to their computer. The same thing happens with a .pdf file. Left clicking opens the document, but on your server, not theirs.

Then when they close the document it disappears because it's not actually downloaded to their hard drive.

Super Side Note: If you open an MP3 file in Windows Media Player you can make it play up to 2 times faster and still understand what is being said. This makes studying audio training very efficient. Try it.

Open up an MP3 file in Windows Media Player. Click on "Play". Then click on "Play Speed".


MP3 Distribution

You can have great success with pre-loading MP3 player/recorders with content and then selling the entire player. People love this because they get a usable player/recorder and the content with a minimum of hassle. This is especially good for people just introducing themselves to MP3 because they can skip the downloading step and just start listening.

More products that you can sell...