I didn’t give the actual audience figures in the last blogpost because (frankly) I didn’t know if they could be considered good or bad.

Then on Monday afternoon I received a promotional mailshot from Digital Photo, Practical Photography and Photo Answers, the biggest camera magazines in the UK and part of the mighty Bauer Publishing Group.

They were excited to announce that their photo website had 88,445 UU in the past three months. I had to go away and look up what UU meant, and it stands for Unique Users. Our stats reports give us Unique Visitors, which I guess is the same thing.

So I’m even more excited to announce that fotoLibra had 100,426 UV in the past three months.

Nevertheless — it’s not enough!

I suggested on my personal fotoLibrarian blog that this would be the first entry on the fotoLibra Pro blog. And so it proved to be. Welcome everyone.

Evaluating our AWStats analytics, I see that last month, February 2008, we had the highest ever number of visitors to the fotoLibra site.

As a start-up, we didn’t have a track record, so advertising seemed to me to be the obvious way to tell people fotoLibra had arrived. Advertising was the only way to go, but it was expensive.

We knew we had a great product. When we launched, we spent a great deal on money advertising to buyers and photographers to kick start us, so our viewing figures bounced up the charts. Now we haven’t got wads of spare cash for marketing, so we have to rely more on word of mouth, recommendations, trade fairs, personal contact — and we’re easily topping the audience figures we got when we were spending £10,000 a month on advertising.

Is there a lesson to be learned here?

One lesson is that this should be posted in the new fotoLibra Pro blog, not in my personal blog which does touch on fotoLibra stuff but which is intended as a soapbox for me to rant and rave about the things I deem worthy of ranting and raving about. Like Wales topping the 6 Nations table. So here it is. If you really want to see what occupies the mind of the world’s greatest living picture librarian, typographic historian and folly maven (there can’t be another?) then click on the “fotoLibrarian’s Blog” link under “Blogroll” in the RH column.