Well, there’s still snow on the roof and in the yard, so it has remained pretty cold. The fire’s doing it’s job though and it is noticeably warmer in the house this year to last.
I had a surprise on Friday when my little band of 8 year olds came round for their class. I thought they were starting again next week. Luckily I did have an activity up my sleeve which was combining animal names and adjectives. So, “be a happy pig”, “a sleepy lion” etc. When Paula’s dad came round to get them and was looking through the window, I am not sure what he thought as they were performing crazy chicken, sleepy dog, happy pig etc. I’m not sure what Ian thought either, as he had nipped out to buy more gas and returned to find the house full of animal noises.
I had hoped that the holidays might make them decide that they don’t want classes any more, but they seemed quite happy. The teenager will start back again next week, though, and I can’t imagine that he’s going to be quite as enthused.
Manuel came round last night at 10.00 which isn’t late by Spanish standards, he would have left us to go home for his tea. He gave us a price for reroofing the workshop and retiling the house. The workshop needs completely redoing, but the house just needs the old tiles taken off and new ones put on. The price was under half what we were expecting so we’ll probably go ahead. I was in two minds about reroofing the workshop, but we have to do something as it can’t be used as it is. Well, it can, but things can’t be kept in their when it rains. However, when I was thinking about it, what our house doesn’t have which most houses do, is an outdoor kitchen. I think that my workshop was probably once an outdoor kitchen – where they prepare their sausages and things. So keeping it in good order will be an investment.
I think I startled Manuel as apparently the way I pronounce door in Spanish sounds like a swearword insult. It’s all down to the fact that we can’t roll our ‘r’s.
We’ve been having some interesting time advertising our sites. We’ve been using a service called Project Wonderful, and it a type of micro advertising. You can bid on advertising slots on different websites. So you could bid 1 dollar or 50 cents or something and while you are the highest bidder, your advert shows. You can stop the ads by putting a time limit on or putting a cap on the total amount that you can spend. Well, this is where we’ve started to become clever! I’ve been tracking our page views and 50% of them come evening onwards – in effect the majority come from the US. So, instead of putting an advert on a medium site all day, I’ve been placing ads on high value (relatively) sites just for a few hours. The net cost is the same, but we are reaching more people. I can’t see how it is going on MakeForBusiness, as the site is new so I have nothing to compare it with. However I think that I can definitely see an impact on MakeForBaby, but there is one factor that might be skewing the figures and that is the bad weather. Our advertising coincided with the bad weather here and in many parts of america, so I am wondering if people are browsing the Internet more and not going shopping. I quite like this micro marketing model. It takes a bit of faffing around to really make it work smartly, so I can’t imagine that we’d use it all the time, but for occasional use I can certainly see how it benefits sites such as ours.
Ian says it is snowing again. Shame, as we were hoping to go for a walk. Wonder how long it will last for….