Instrumental Music

Shop Re-opens

2008-03-05T10:01:00.002Z

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.

Just a little surge

2008-01-29T08:23:00.000Z

Google's algorithms are churning again this week - not a peak but a bit of a surge.

Our main beneficiary seems to be our iTunes advice page which is nice but not very productive for us.

It is very odd that something we wrote a couple of years ago should be so popular in an area where you would expect much more professional help to be available.

Our ISP service has been/is being upgraded so I'm waiting for any fall out from that. OS Commerce have a major update on the stocks so I'm hoping that any significant consequences for us can wait until we tackle that one. From an operational point of view our biggest problem seems to be downloaded files lost in the bowels of the XP operating system.

Also noticed today that our ISP have increased the maximum bandwidth of our package dramatically so I'm thinking of putting sample players on a lot more pages.

We have a few fans who seem to go through our whole sample library and we will have a look at how we could make that easier possibly by playing them one after another off the same page.

The threat of the record companies coming in and trying to supplant the iTunes business model is something we need to take seriously and develop a response. Fortunately we already know a bit about making advertising work with our music but we will have to ramp up our game to respond to them.

AdSense is back - up and running on the site

2008-01-09T10:05:00.000Z

Yes - the errant postcard turned up thanks to a nice bit of informal mail re-direction and Google have now satisfied themselves as to my bona fides to the extent that they are willing to make payments into my bank account and present adverts on our site!

The added confidence that this seems to give potential customers is also evident in the renewed trickle of sales. Some interesting optimisation opportunities in the light of this experience - onward and upward.

A New Year Dawns

2008-01-02T09:56:00.000Z

We have been quiet for the last few months while I have been tackling some other projects.

The website has been doing well without much in the way of intervention but in the last couple of week we exhausted Google's patience with us on the latest stage of identity verification - I lost the postcard with the PIN and requested the replacement sent to our old address! The absence of relevant adverts seems to be having a very negative effect on sales which is very odd.

We have also seen the seasonal surge of visits from new i-pod users to our remarkably popular help pages but hat has ebbed away now and visitor numbers have subsided a bit.

So this is the year to sort out a few basics and return to the creation of new and original arrangements with some new software and hardware.

Danse Macabre

2007-10-30T07:55:00.000Z

Yes it has been a long time.

The new house has preoccupied my thoughts and time and is still doing so.

This is just a short update.

Visitor volumes are riding high but volatile. Sales are strengthening too. After the massive spasm of updates on Google there have been lesser by relatively frequent spikes of activity on Rank Pulse indicating that Google has become more active in updating rankings. The new webmaster tools also show the shifting patterns of positions and search behavior.

It is coming up to Halloween and Danse Macabre by Saint Saens is top of the charts for a few more days again this year.

SERPs Churn dies down again

2007-09-24T07:34:00.000Z

Just a quick comment to note that the churn of SERPs on Google has died down again after the longest period of high activity I have seen since I started to use the Rank Pulse site.

RankPulse Graph

This is obviously their copyright material but I don't suppose they will mind us giving them a plug. Oddly the most active chart today is for the letter 'i' but 'mattress' illustrates the recent turmoil more vividly.

We seem to have once again bubbled up slowly across the piece.

Now that the new office is set up we will have to do some more work on the site and the ads some of which are doing well while others have failed to perform at all.

Google Flux Continues

2007-09-18T06:04:00.000Z

The exceptionally high level of flux in the Google search results has now continued for two weeks - twice as long as previous episodes.

This suggests that Google are testing significant refinements of elements of their algorithm in the continuing campaign against Spam. This doesn't appear to be a problem in our area these days and although we are seeing fluctuations in SERPs, visitor numbers continue at high levels.

Meanwhile inappropriate comments have been added to this blog so we have hidden them all. Disappointingly comments have never played a significant role here so in some ways this is not much of a loss but it is irritating to have to respond like this. We will investigate the prospects for moderated comments in due course.

Google SERPs Change Surge

2007-09-06T06:32:00.000Z

Rankpulse has again registered a significant surge in SERPs change on Google - much too early to say what that may mean for us.

We have been quiet for a while because we are moving premises - a new studio/office is being delivered today.

We have moved out of Greater London to the sunny uplands of the North Downs - let's see what this does for our creativity.

August was a quieter month as usual but the students are coming back and so should our visitor numbers.

Now here's a funny thing!

2007-08-07T06:51:00.000Z

Customer contact is one of the bonuses of running this sort of business.

It is only with that customer feedback that you pick up the problems they have experienced and give yourself a chance to fix them.

Over the past couple of years the most frequent difficulties have been concerned with downloading. We fixed the worst of those with the updates we did earlier this year but Microsoft still come up with new ways to hide files downloaded with IE if you don't arrange the settings properly.

The one thing that has never been questioned in the whole time has been the quality of our recordings - until yesterday that is. A customer in Australia down loaded the recording of the Brahms Hungarian Dance No 6 he had bought - it played OK on the PC but when he burned it on to a CD it crackled like crazy!

Now for some reason I had never burned one of our recordings to a CD - so I tried it with the Microsoft Media Player and the same recording - result perfect!

Normally you assume that with digital recording quality is binary i.e. it is either there or it isn't. Drop outs, delays and distortion can occur with players but the original material that leaves our computers here should arrive in pristine form with the customer. Never the less I emailed a copy back to Australia and this morning I open my mail to find that this copy burned perfectly.

If anyone can suggest why I'd be very interested to hear from them.

July Best month yet

2007-08-03T06:53:00.001Z

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.

Google SERPs Spike - More & More Churn

2007-07-19T06:42:00.000Z

Rankpulse has recorded another Google event about half the size of the last one but bigger than anything else in the last 6 months.

Yes it is churn and more churn. Our Keywords roil and boil on an almost daily basis but our overall performance is pretty steady. I'm not sure if this isn't a new Google tactic to keep the spammers off balance and test user reactions to a variety of ranking algorithm settings.

Our visitor numbers have come slightly off their peak levels but have held steadily well above previous heights. Customer orders are up too and so is our AdSense Content based advertising revenue.

The task of re-formatting our streaming pages to allow inclusion of more advertising is well under way but it is a bit laborious.

Once that is complete we'll go back and try to fix the AdSense Search facility so that it allows searches of our site. Then we can try deploying that more widely. As it is some one found it lurking on our site map yesterday and had a go.

AdSense - a couple of months in

2007-07-10T06:49:00.000Z

As I have mentioned before Google's contract is a bit restrictive in terms of what can be disclosed about the arrangement.

But I think a few comments are justified, although of course, they are personal comments based on the experience of just one site.

From our first toe in the water experiments with individual ads on some pages we have in the last day or so moved to maximizing the advertising coverage where that can be done without compromising important page layout considerations. So apart from this blog we don't use the top of the page. We do use the right hand side where it doesn't interfere with our own product tables.

If there is space at the end of our text we include the 'fat one' otherwise a single banner has been placed at the bottom of most product pages and all the streaming sample pages. We have even added the banner ads to our product pages in the shop below the action buttons because we know people do sit and listen to these samples for up to 30 seconds and then sometimes listen again. There also seem to be a few individuals who come and listen to lots of samples, occasionally over several days.

As you would expect Google's monitoring stats are pretty good although some of the more sophisticated aspects take a bit of getting used to. Through this we are seeing our advertising income rise steadily without any negative impact on our own sales - there could even be a small positive impact.

To conclude this has been a very positive and interesting experience so far, despite the mysterious process by which our actual remuneration is determined and the stochastic visitor behavior with their decisions to click or not to click.

Unprecedented Visitor Levels

2007-07-04T07:43:00.000Z

Well, our last post was not far off the mark - those levels of visits were sustained making June a record month and have in the last few days have been surpassed.

The keyword re-focus and bounce reduction initiatives really appear to be paying off although there is still a lot of turbulence on individual keywords. Encouragingly buying behavior seems to be following the visitor activity and the e-commerce side of the site is functioning really well now.

We are planning to move home soon and there will be some disruption to the creative side of the business while we get settled in. But we are going to take the opportunity to upgrade some of our equipment and possibly software before we produce more recordings.

The dual processor PCs are looking very good value now and the 100% increase in memory, not to mention the large caches should mean that we will not hit processor constraints with our instrument emulation software as often as we do now.

Visitor growth at last!

2007-06-14T10:43:00.000Z

It is always a tricky decision to announce an increase in visitor numbers because they can fall away again so easily but this follows the biggest upheaval in Google SERPs for more than 6 months and a recent pick up in Googlebot activity on the site. Over the last three days we have seen a 25% increase to levels that we have hardly ever seen before.

So it is fingers and toes crossed that the work we have done on the site has brought us to a new plateau and that we have a firm foundation for the next set of refinements and further growth.

Of course we now have the extra potential benefit from increased visitor numbers in the pay per clicks on our Google Ads because we are looking to strengthen and refine that activity too.

We started on this refinement phase activity months ago and this just demonstrates how patient you have to be in this game.

Bounce Research Findings

2007-06-11T06:43:00.000Z

Today I came across one of those gems which makes the whole business of optimising site for Google so worthwhile.

As someone who was trained in science and sought to apply it in a marketing environment over many years with huge budgets it is so nice to be able to appreciate the efforts of those who experiment on Google with the help of a few acquaintances and get results.

As you know we have been concerned about the bounce rates on some of our pages and have taken action to reduce it, with some modest success. It had occurred to me that Google might be using this information to improve the search results for searchers on the assumption that bounces are a bad thing and that might harm our rankings.

In the experiment reported in this article they seem to have proved that this is the case - so we can start to see why Google Analytics would be free to webmasters. I'm so impressed I signed up for their newsletter at www.1stsearchenginerankings.com and I'll flag items of interest here.

In the meantime our keyword results are churning away following the recent spikes of SERPs churn but the overall level of visits is pretty stable and we are strengthening our Google Ads activity because that doesn't seem to be doing any harm to our sales activity levels and is developing a steady trickle of pennies.

Now it is five Rankpulse Google SERPs spikes in a week!

2007-05-31T08:15:00.000Z

This kind of churn really is unprecedented - but still no comment on the forum.

Here is a chart from www.rankpulse.com of the top ten positions for ten sites up to yesterday:

The blur over the last few days illustrates what is happening to the relative positions of these sites in the Google Search Engine Results Positions (SERPS). While the top two sites have managed to stay above the fray everyone else has been engulfed.

And that is just how we feel at the moment - well and truly engulfed!

But you can also see that former number 1's have disappeared completely from the top ten chart but that the recent movement mostly revolves around sites that have been there or there abouts in recent time.

Third Spike on Saturday

2007-05-28T07:24:00.000Z

It's a very unsual Google update that has just passed by without any comment that I've seen on the forum. Major spikes have been recorded on RankPulse's measure of Google SERP's change on three days with one quiet day between them is I believe unprecedented. With so many differnt keyword contributing to our visitor numbers it is impossible for us to discern any significant imapcts in the short term.

Overall it looks as if May will pull us back to our January visitor levels but of course our shop is working properly now so we may see a bit more business out of it.

The number of people who come to listen to a short sample of our version of Widor's famous Toccatta without purchasing the whole thing is quite extraordinary.

Google Update History

2007-05-26T07:05:00.000Z

Yes some confirmation of the RankPulse observation here google-update-history-136975 in the SEO forum and a nostalgic wander down memory lane for veteran SEO enthusiasts.

That was followed by a second RankPulse spike yesterday - even higher than the first one - Google rolls on!

It is not too surprising that there would be a delay beause of the time it takes for changes to be propogated throughout Google's network of data centers.

Another Google SERPs Upheaval?

2007-05-24T07:07:00.000Z

RankPulse has published its highest spike for 6 months showing a one day churn of 15% of the SERPs on the first page from the sample of 1000 keywords which it monitors. On a normal day we expect to see around 4% churn. But there is no comment on the optimiser bulletin board yet.

In theory this shouldn't happen any more because of the constant re-indexing which Google undertakes and it is possible that it is the one or two datacenters that RankPulse connect with catching up. But the previous days data look reasonably normal so that seems unlikely.

It is a bit hard to see if there are any impacts on us at this stage because Analytics seems to be a little slow in completing all of yesterday's results - but nothing too disasterous so far.

We have been trying to interpret the results of the changes we made some weeks ago in terms of re-focusing on some keyword targets and trying to reduce the bounce levels on some of our worst pages. There certainly have been some improvements on both at the page level but it is hard to see any movement at the site level. There is so much churn on our keywords week to week and we have so many it has become quite unmanageable.

Many Keywords Few Conversions

2007-05-07T12:03:00.000Z

After the recent refurbishment of our keyword focus - there has been more purchase activity which naturally sparked our curiosity.

Delving into the Analytics tables we were able to find that there is a very small number of keywords out of the 2.2K words that have been used to reach us in the last month which prompted purchase.

Most of those are for specific pieces, one for a specific piece instrument combination! But the largest is the oddest 'mp3,itunes' because it leads to a page which has been notably unproductive with a very high bounce rate. Perhaps it is a fluke but if not more focus may be called for to secure our position. We may also have a look at some more instrument piece combinations.

A Well Earned Break in the Carribean

2007-04-30T06:09:00.000Z

We're off to the St Lucia tomorrow for a couple of weeks in the sun.

Who knows what musical influences we will be exposed to and how we might translate that into new recordings when we get back.

Such is the wonderful technology of the Internet our trusty laptop will enable us to mind the shop from those distant shores but there will probably be a short intermission in blog entries.

When we come back it will be time for a full review of the impact of the changes we made to the site in the last few weeks. The overall level of activity is about the same but it seems to be better focused and the shop is working very well now. So we'll concentrate on the effectiveness of the specific actions we took and see whether there is more to do to build and sustain the profile and impact of our site.

AdSense - the first few days

2007-04-25T10:22:00.000Z

The terms and conditions of AdSense are a bit restrictive about public utterances but a few general comments seem in order.

In the first place the set up was very quick and efficient. It took a little playing around to get the hang of the the different advert formats and we are currently trying about four variants on different parts of the site.

Our attempts to track them with the Channels facility dosen't seem to have come off but it is too early to start really digging into that yet.

I have seen some comment about prices per click in one of the news groups but again it is too early to get to grips with that yet and we'll keep an eye on it.

Any how - modest supplementary income for rather modest effort is not to be sneezed at so we'll carry on - refining as we go.

Bounce Rates Falling

2007-04-23T07:02:00.000Z

It is nice to report some success following problem identification and prioritised action.

The excessive bounce problem on quite few of our pages had been with us for long time but we had been focused on other issues.

Then by reordering the pages listed in the bounce rate reports we were able to focus on the most extreme cases - starting with the 100% cases - yes all visitors to those pages left immediately!

One of the common factors was that the first music sample offer was below the bottom of the visible page so we systematically revised the layout of many of the www.download2mp3.com/ pages to fix this and try and make them look more enticing.

After a suitable wait we have found that bounce rates have fallen and almost all of these pages have improved their bounce rate performance.

We are less worried about bounces away from the sample pages because those visitors will have heard a clip from one of our arrangements and that probably means that they are in the wrong place and not looking for our kind of music.

AdSense Sign Up

2007-04-12T07:20:00.000Z

A further review of our Analytics data has convinced me to experiment with Google's AdSense.

The bounce rates from many of our pages make it clear that many visitors are just not seeing what they are looking for when they reach us so we might as well get what we can out of the visit. Our traffic volumes mean that even with significant conversion rates we won't make much.

The risk of loosing valuable customers is pretty modest and the ads can sometimes increase the credibility of a page to a new visitor i.e. most of our visitors.

We will be selective about the pages we target with this - naturally from the start it will include this blog and our iTunes and iPod pages and then we'll experiment with our more business critical pages.

One of the incidental benefits of the Bit Pass closure is that we can now track all our sales activity through the site with Analytics - the data isn't really statistically significant but it is providing sufficient clues to drive some further refinements on a number of specific pages to try to reduce the higher bounce rates on certain pages.

We are also going to have a look at playing music on these blog pages in postings or on the menu bar.

Re-focusing on Target Keywords

2007-04-11T11:47:00.000Z

It is now nearly a month since we did a thorough site overhaul - looking at our target keywords and re-focusing pages as indicated by current performance.

Yesterday we had our first detailed look at the impact and as ever it is a fuzzy picture.

There is no obvious overall rise in traffic but there is evidence of progress on some pages and the targeted keywords so our efforts were not in vain but as one might expect they weren't all as successful as each other. It is also probably the case that some of the changes have still to work through - some of the relevant cached pages were only picked up in the last week or so.

The big success was the prominence that our www.download2mp3.com/bach_more.htm
has now achieved with significant support from the Baroque music reference which clue we picked up from Keyword Discovery. Handel is also doing much better at the moment thanks to our new Hallelujah Chorus emphasis - a bigger draw than Sheba or the Concerto Grosso. There is also some encouragement for a separate Vivaldi page especially if we can produce some more material.

There were a number of other minor successes where there has been movement in both SERPs and visitors and some where there was no evidence of progress at all. So we'll be having a look at the latter for our next round of re-focusing encouraged that Google is still a pretty rational environment if somewhat competitive in places.