1. Serve up only the highest quality audio

Serving up clean, crisp audio will cause more people to visit and recommend your site. There are four things you can do to ensure that your site has fantastic sound quality:

• Use a good original source
• Set your sound levels correctly
• Use a high-quality sound card
• Avoid background noise

For more information about producing high quality sound, visit our Getting the Best Sound out of RealAudio Web page.

2. Divide your audio into identifiable clips.

Visitors to your Web site will spend more time listening to your RealAudio files if you divide them into identifiable clips. For example, if you're publishing last night's newscast, rather than make it available as a single RealAudio file, put a separate RealAudio file on your site for each news story included in the newscast. This will allow sports enthusiasts to listen to sports stories or farmers to listen to weather reports, without having to listen to the world, national, and business news first.

Alternately, you can make an index of shortcuts which will allow your listeners to "fast forward" through long audio files directly to pieces of interest. Please see our pages of National Public Radio stories for examples. Review the RealAudio Server manual for instructions on how to do this.

3. Combine your audio with eye catching graphics.

Your RealAudio files will receive many more hits if you combine them with fun and interesting graphics. For example, you can add hot spots to an advertisement for your product, and link each one to an audio clip describing the feature that is being shown on screen. Or combine a recording of your spokesperson giving a speech, with a picture of that person at the podium. By doing this you'll bring a multimedia dimension to your Web site, and a whole host of loyal listeners.

4. Advertise your audio, and change it frequently.