Skip to main content

Review of the Year (part 2)

August - in parallel with the completion and launch of the Multi-track store we went back to Wordtracker to look for more key word opportunities.

But the key move of the month was our adoption of Hitslink which has helped us see much more precisely what our visitors are doing on the site and where they have come from. There were some shocks when we realized just how much of the traffic we have comes from robots. It looks as if the big ones visit every day.

September saw the launch of some new pages prompted by the Wordtracker work and the iPod/iTunes pages are now after four months generating a lot of visitors. This month we also worked on the Ringtone collection and got it launched at the end of the month. Results have been pretty depressing really despite having reasonable positions on Google for keywords like 'classic MP3 ringtone' , the interest we saw in our samples earlier in the year and the growth of Mobile phones with MP3 playing capacity.

Through the months of October and November we rode the Google Jagger roller coaster from record heights to the depths of despair. We re-found the community of Google watchers and were amazed by the range of tools that they offered to monitor what is going on across the datacenters. This isn't necessarily a very healthy occupation but is is possible that one or possibly two of the actions we took as a result of that research resulted in the relatively healthy visitor volumes that we have been experiencing for several weeks now.

The Jagger experience also prompted our entry into the article publication arena which is probably a dead end for us unless we can up our game on the exciting writing front. Christmas was pretty quiet as far as sales go and so we go into the new year with a big question mark over the commercial viability of this venture. It feels like we have got to first base - putting decent quality merchandise in front of browsers who have expressed interest. It all depends on our capacity to convert sufficient of that interest into sales.

From a human point of view we have seen a lot more human visitors to this blog and we can see that the site has a few fans who are coming back time and again to go through our whole catalog of samples and we have a few paying customers whose anonymity is protected by BitPass. The blog and the web site have failed lamentably to prompt responses from our audience - the visitor stats are really the only feedback we get and that is pretty thin gruel.

But Hey next week is the start of a new year with fresh challenges to meet and new music to make.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.