Our One Year Anniversary for Relaxing Sounds

Although the work contained in this website began in late 2008 the site itself is coming up on it's one year anniversary. On March 15th, 2009 the site went up and we were open for business. I thought I would take this time to reflect on what I was thinking and doing during the first few months.

• The original name we were going to run with was virtualtourist.com. I soon realized that that name would be confusing to a lot of people.

• It took 32 days to sell the first recordings. This was mainly because search engines did not index the site for weeks so no one knew we were there.

• Return business is surprisingly brisk <big smile>.

• I am guesstimating that over 400 hours of work went into the site (and the recordings) before it opened. I have well over 2500 hours in it now.

• I spent a great deal of wasted time and energy designing CD covers and researching distribution. When I finally got around to researching the CD biz itself I realized that brick and mortar CD sales were going the way of the dinosaur. It's all about downloads now.

• Copyrighting our recordings turned out to be the easiest thing I learned. It all happens online now.

• We currently have over 46 unique relaxing recordings with five more in the works.

• This website has over 250 pages and is in 5 languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Italian) with four other languages having pointer pages (Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, and Polish)

• Marketing the site has been a challenge and I have learned more about search engines than a human should ever have to.

• I have written 65 of these sleep thoughts (a play on the term 'deep thoughts')  I have noticed when I go 'off message' biz goes down so, even though I try to keep it real, there is a lot of redundancy to these thoughts.

• Some uses that we did not consider; but people have found for our relaxation recordings, are controlling chronic pain and help with overcoming fears (i.e. the fear of flying via Jumbo Jet)

• The Tinnitus free download page has turned out to be more popular then I thought it would be. We continue to give free downloads to those suffering from ringing ears. This is a passion of mine as I can testify that my personal 25 year battle with chronic tinnitus has had a negative impact on my life.

• Finally, a site like this one would not have been financially possible for me (or almost anyone) as short as 4 years ago. I have a lot of people to thank. Check out the credits page!

Anyway, the site is doing well and will be around for a long time to come. I thank all of our customers for their patronage and great ideas for future projects.

 Brad McBride

If you are interested in reading more here are some links to some other thoughts:

The Secondary Visual Cortex       Visualizing to Relax        Sleep Onset & Visualization

 

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