This is Part 5 of my Beyond the Words series exploring the various and sundry ways in which you can add multimedia such as images, videos, audios, and downloadables (PDFs) to your website to spice it up.
So far we’ve explored some in depth recommendations on how to prep and include images on your WordPress posts and pages and looked at a couple of alternatives for easily embedding YouTube or Vimeo videos.
But wait…there’s more!
Different people learn and take in new information in different ways.
Some prefer to read; some love to listen; some learn best by doing.
The flip side of that is thinking about your preferred communication style. Some people are great in front a live audience (or a camera). Many coaches are gifted at connecting via a phone call. And some of us love to write.
When you’re creating content for your website, take both of these angles into consideration – play to your own strengths and think about offering a variety of ways to interact with it for your readers.
For instance, a blog post doesn’t have to just be writing.
I have a client who puts on some really dynamic teleseminars, and we use the recordings from the teleseminars in a couple of different ways:
- We, of course, provide the MP3 files for the recordings to participants of the teleseminars as a bonus that they can listen to online or download to listen to at a later date.
- The recordings can get packaged into an info product that can be sold as an evergreen webinar online.
- But the really genius thing we do with these is pull out 1-2 minute snippets from the recordings – little gems of advice that support her overall coaching message – and use those essentially as her blog posts. It’s like a mini podcast for her subscribers that is a direct reflection of her coaching message and style. (And her subscribers love it!)
It requires a bit of doing to find and clip out the audio snippets (there are some great, free tools such as Audacity that make this doable), but once that is done…
Getting audio files added to WordPress is a breeze.
MP3 files, unlike videos, are not terribly resource-intensive.
Even if it’s a recording of an hour long teleseminar, the file is usually fairly manageable. As opposed to video where you most often want to use a third party host (like YouTube or Vimeo) in order to get the best playback performance, with audio, you’re usually OK to upload it directly to your site just like you would an image.
Gone are the days of having to have a separate plugin (that was often confusing and overwhelming to configure) in order to play an MP3 file on your site.
WordPress does you a solid here and has that just built right in. All you have to use the Add Media button, just like you were inserting an image and then upload and insert the MP3 file.
And here’s what an audio file looks like embedded in your blog post…
In the next (and final, I think) post of the Beyond the Words series, we’re going to take a look at some of the other interesting things you might want to embed in your blog posts like PDFs or Word docs or tweets or polls or slideshows. The possibilities are mind-boggling.
