The net is getting touchy-feely. Time was when a website had mostly text. People wrote long blocks of text to tell you about their products or services and you had to read through all of that to get an idea of what they were offering. Photos were too "heavy" to put on web pages, meaning that the file sizes were too large and bandwidth too little for photographs to display. Even then, people were in a hurry on the net and if a site took too long to load, people just left and went to another site.

Then came technological breakthroughs like the jpeg (or jpg) format for photographs. This enabled photographs to be "thinned down" without much loss in quality and the web exploded with pictures. Bandwidth also got cheaper and more plentiful and photos loaded quickly and smoothly.

And people began to notice something: Pages with photos of the person writing the content got more views and people stayed longer on those pages. Not surprising, really. As human beings, we like to know with whom we are communicating. Hence the facility offered by instant message clients to have a photo of yourself in the "chat window" as you type out messages to each other.

And now, some savvy communicators are doing more. They're adding sound to their websites. To be more precise, they are adding their own voices, with a welcome message or a small pitch to tell you about their products or services.

This immediately makes the website more friendly. Not only can you see a photo of the person making the pitch, you can hear them talking to you. As human beings, we respond at a gut level to faces and voices.

You can see this in your offline selling too. A letter has less impact than a phone call. A personal visit, which combines sight, sound and touch is the most effective of all.

While the net hasn't yet been able to offer touch as a sensory experience, it is now well-set to enable you to let people hear your voice when they "come over" to your website. A small mp3 file that delivers a simple welcome message can do wonders for your web presence.

There are many ways in which to add sound to your website or blog. Blogs, in particular, are very well adapted to adding sound. Some blog hosts allow you to even upload a voice message via a phone call.

It's time, then, for net users to take that next step towards reaching out better to visitors. So speak up, your visitors are listening.

Copyright (c) Deepak Morris, 2005

The author runs a unique course on voice development. Check his blog for more tips: http://thegoldenvoice.blogspot.com