Tip: Gain trust (and sales) by upping your audio game

Whether it's for a podcast, promotional video, webinar, or one-on-one interaction with customers, audio quality is more important than you might think. Increase trust and conversions by improving your audio.

In one study, people rated a speaker's presentation as being 19.3% better when the audio quality was high. They also liked the speaker more and viewed them as more competent and intelligent. That impacts trust, and trust impacts sales, so it may be time to ditch your built-in laptop (and headphones) microphone. Check out podcast-quality mics instead. Blut Yeti is good quality while still being affordable, as is the HyperX QuadCast. And of course, audio quality is also affected by background noise, internet speed, and so forth. When recording, you can clean up the audio with free software like Audacity or Ocenaudio. But if it's live and poor quality can't be avoided, listeners will be more forgiving if you mention the elephant in the room.