Skip to main content

July Best month yet

Looking back July has been our best month on all dimensions so far.

We had more visitors, hits and downloads than any month previously.

Sales were also healthy but we are now also benefiting from the revenue from the Google AdSense campaign. During the month we increased the amount of advertising space on our pages and we have seen the effects of that coming through. We have tried the search option but that isn't doing much for us at the moment and we are now going to try some referrals.

In particular we have found that some of our customers who use IE have not set it up very handily for downloading music and they are unable to find the file after hearing it for the first time. We have always been able to resolve this for them but plan to recommend Firefox on the basis of it's superior downloading facilities.

August has always been a slow month for us and it is shaping up that way again this year - presumably this is because schools and colleges tend to be closed for most if not all of this month in North America and Europe so we are looking forward to things picking up again in September.

Yesterday this computer hung after the restart following the latest Microsoft update - it only took a few hours to follow the Dell troubleshooting pages on the laptop and roll back to Wednesday. Now we are not sure if it was that update or the Trojan which Zone Alarm quarantined this morning. Still it is the first time we have had to use the restore facility on XP and it appears to work really well once you can find it.

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).
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more