Creating and monetizing blog

Hello.

I am the editor of the blog Faktrum Selena Parfyonov and I want to tell you the story of this project from the moment the idea originated until today. It will be a story about how, without investing any money and promoting a website in any way, we reached 15,000–17,000 unique users per day for 8 months of work and took 3rd place in the top of the Russian-language blogs of Yandex.
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For convenience of understanding, I will divide the post into 2 sections: work on a blog and its monetization.

So:

The history of the Fact Book began in early 2010, when designer Alexander Taranov had an idea to register an @factroom account on Twitter. At that time, Russian-language Twitter accounts began to gain popularity, publishing various interesting information, such as quotes, horoscopes, news, and the like. The idea of ​​posting short informative facts seemed interesting and promising.

Faktrum's tweets at the time looked like this:

It turns out that there is such a religion - Jedaism. Only in the UK 390 thousand Jediists.

The smallest human bone is in the ear.

Saint Patrick, the patron saint of the Irish, was not Irish.

Now, cognitive facts in this form can be found in many places on the Internet, but then it was not so widespread, and the @factroom twitter account in a short time became very popular. Facts were published about 10 times a day.

After three months of this work, in March of 2010, Sasha decided that in the future this could turn out to be a full-fledged blog and registered the domain factroom.ru. But the blog was opened much later.

Throughout 2010, the facts continued to be posted on Twitter, the audience grew due to a large number of retweets and, by the time Faktrum was open, its number exceeded 10,000 followers.

4 months before the launch of the blog, in August of 2010, Sasha created the group Faktrum VKontakte and announced its opening on Twitter. About 200 people joined the group, and by the time the project started, this audience was just under 2,000 participants.

It should be noted that neither Twitter, nor Vkontakte made any attempts to “promote” accounts, users added themselves, on the advice of friends, which subsequently gave Factrum an active audience consisting of living people.



In the fall of 2010, we met Sasha, and he invited me to participate in the work on creating a blog. In early December, we locked ourselves in a room, isolated ourselves from contact with the outside world, and set to work. Sasha made the site, I filled it with content (50 articles), and we announced the launch of the blog in the social accounts of Faktrum. The announcement was first published on January 5, a stub and a counter hung on the site. During the week, we occasionally recalled the launch of the blog in order to “warm up” the interest of the audience. On January 12, 2011, at 00.00, Fawn Room blog was launched ...

... and after a minute of work the server fell :) We did not expect such an influx of the audience, so we did not consider the technical possibility that in the first minute 2,000 people would come to the site. On Twitter and Vkontakte there were messages from people who could not get on the site ... After 20 minutes, the work of the Fact -Ure was restored. During the first day, more than 5,000 people came to us, the next day their number was 4,000 - and this was the smallest traffic in our entire history. According to the results of January 2011, the average traffic per month was 5,400 unique visitors per day.

We published 5 articles a day, every day, including weekends. I collected interesting facts from all over the Internet, translated some of the material, compiled thematic collections. Each fact was announced in social networks, and the main audience was, naturally, from there. The format of the presentation of information has not changed, we still published short interesting facts that users could share with friends, but now at the end of each fact there was a link to the blog. It was possible to go through it in order to get additional information about the fact, after reading the article, it was possible not to go through, but immediately retweet and share with a friend. The preservation of this concept allowed the Assembly to continue to actively gain an audience in social networks and increase traffic. Now the number of @factroom followers on Twitter is 27,000, in the Vkontakte group there are 9,600 participants, and this, I repeat, without any action on our part, is a self-coming audience. This is a key point in understanding how we managed to achieve great credibility of the blog.

A small digression. The first 4–5 months of work for the blog Faktrum was hellish work for us. We practically did not move away from computers; work lasted 12 hours a day, seven days a week. You can come up with a cool idea, you can ensure a bright start, but without the huge forces invested in the project, success will not be achieved. Now Factrum absorbs 6-8 hours of our time per day, as experience has increased and a skill has appeared, but this too is quite a lot.



After a month of work, in January of 2011, Sasha came up with Faktrum / rand . The idea was taken from the experience of the then sharply gaining popularity of random sites that gave out random information (such as www.fucking-great-advice.ru ). Sasha made a section in the blog, in which short facts collected during the year of the Factroom on Twitter were randomly issued to the user. You could share the liked fact on any social network. This section gave a huge influx of traffic, and the number of pages viewed per day increased to 500,000 - 700,000. Several times this figure approached 1,000,000. Over time (after 3 months), the section began to lose popularity, but it played its role: the number Faktrum's unique visitors were around 10,000 per day.



The first result of popularity in social networks: a month and a half after launch, at the end of February 2011, we were surprised to find our blog in the top 50 rankings of Yandex , in 27th place. The next time we updated the rating, a week later, we moved up one line and then disappeared from the ranking and blog search.

We wrote to the Yandex support service and received apologies and an explanation: “You disappeared due to an algorithm error. We returned Faktrum to search on blogs, you will return to the ranking after the next update. ” The next update happened more than 3 months later.

In the spring months we worked as before. In April, an advertising attempt was made for the first time: we exchanged advertising posts with the site www.fresher.ru , which increased traffic by about 1,000 users per day. Also in April, a Twitter account @factroom_love was opened, in which we, using the old scheme, began to publish short informative facts, but on a narrow topic: about love, sex and relationships. To recruit the first followers, we advertised a new Twitter account @factroom. When, after 2 months, the number of followers @factroom_love reached 5,000 (now over 8,000), a corresponding section in the blog was opened. Traffic increased by about 1,000 more. And finally, in May, we offered to exchange advertising posts for the Bigpicture.ru blog, which at that moment occupied the 1st place in the Yandex rating, and received about 1,500 more traffic users. Thus, the number of our visitors by the end of spring was about 15,000 - 17,000 per day.

In early June, a significant event occurred in the biography of Faktrum: the Yandex rating was finally updated. During the spring, in anticipation of this update, we made various assumptions as to what place we will occupy when we return. The result exceeded all expectations: during our absence, readers of the blog put so many links in runet that we were on the 3rd line, where we remain to this day.



In the summer, we collaborated with Interpretation Studio on an iPhone application . The idea was to make an interesting and free application for randomly viewing short facts. Thanks, by the way, to the guys from Interpretation, everything was done quickly and abruptly. On August 23rd, the FFPC app was posted on the App Store. During the day it rose to the 1st place in the top of the App Store and lasted there for 3 days. For the first week, the application was downloaded more than 30,000 times.



On August 16 in Moscow, the presentation of the Runet Rating award took place. Factrum took 2nd place in the category " entertainment and sport ."



Summing up: we promoted a blog in a way that had not been used in the blogosphere prior to Faktrum: we gained credibility and popularity solely due to deep integration into the social network. Although now we already have a lot of our own traffic, the traffic from Twitter, Vkontakte and Facebook is still a significant proportion.

Actually, with regard to the history of the emergence and development of the Factroom, that's all. The content of the blog during this time has not changed: we are still working on Faktrum together, we publish interesting educational articles, about a third of the materials are my copyright content, the rest is copy-paste from various sites and blogs of the RuNet. In addition to the main blog feed, there are 2 thematic sections: Love and Star. In May and the beginning of June, Factrum's traffic was 23,000–25,000 unique visitors per day; in the summer’s summer season, it dropped to 15,000 per day, currently at the same level. Go to the second section:

Monetization

Blog Factroom was created as a commercial project. We made a site where we wanted to make money, but since the blogosphere was completely unfamiliar to us at that moment, only the sale of banners was planned. It turned out that you can monetize your blog in a variety of ways.

Banners

I’ll start all the same with banners, as it will be logical from the point of view of chronology: our first advertiser bought exactly the banner. This happened about three weeks after the launch of the blog, in the wake of the tremendous popularity of the “Short Facts” section. We were approached by a representative of a startup dating service and bought a banner for 3 months for 13,500 rubles. It was the first profit of the FF :)

The top banner, which is at the same time the branding of the blog, enjoyed and enjoys great popularity. It is very bright, noticeable and, in addition to a large number of transitions, it works as image advertising. A month after the opening, he was rented by the advertiser for a month and since then has not been empty for more than 2 weeks. Now he bought for six months ahead, until the end of winter. The number of transitions on it is 22 000 - 25 000 per month, which, with our traffic, is an excellent indicator.
The top right banner gives about 18,000 transitions. I mainly sell banner ads. Approximately 30% of sales occur at the initiative of the advertisers themselves.

Informers, contextual advertising, advertising line

With a traffic of about 5,000 per day in the first months of work, the placement of informers gave us a small but steady income. We started with the placement of the media informer. He brought just a penny, 60–70 rubles a day. For some time, we looked for a good affiliate network and opted for MarketGuide. At first they earned about 500 rubles from their informers. per day (traffic by this time was about 10,000), then the income began to decline gradually, it is not clear why. After a couple of months, it dropped by half. They work in dollars, so this may be related to the exchange rate, or maybe they have such a system.

At some point, it turned out that the MarketGuide manager, who was working with us, made a website that completely copied Factrum materials. We had to write to his superiors and the company that provided him with hosting. The problem, of course, was resolved, but cooperation with MarketGuide was overshadowed.
At the end of spring, we started working with the Pay Click network and, of all the systems we tried, we like it most. Works in rubles, weekly payments, good income. With traffic of 15,000, as we have now, it brings from 200 to 400 rubles. per day (one informer, located on pages with posts, absent on the main one). In time, we plan to stop placing informers altogether.

Experiments with contextual advertising did not lead to anything: neither Google, nor the Runner, nor others brought any profit.

We also sell “advertising lines” of the Nolix system. Here, too, do not do anything, have registered a blog in the system, set a price for the line of advertising, then everything happens automatically. It is difficult to calculate income, because advertisers acquire the lines unevenly: sometimes a lot, sometimes very little. But I think you can call the figure about $ 150 per month.

Selling posts

Selling posts is the main way to monetize for the vast majority of blogs. We offer 2 types of placement: the first attached post for a day (3,500 rubles) and unattached post (2,500 rubles). Sergey Baryshnikov, co-owner and manager of the blog Bigpicture.ru, sells posts on Faktrum. We met in May when I asked him to exchange advertising posts with his blog. Up to this point, advertising posts on Factrum were placed only at the initiative of advertisers, there were few of them, they did not bring much income.

Since May, Sergey began selling the posts and sold a huge amount in May — June. In June, almost every weekday was busy. In the second half of July, sales went into decline, August passed very quietly. Now, when the “dead season” is over, the interest of advertisers is gradually increasing.

In order to have a stable sales of advertising, especially advertising posts, you need a manager, someone who will deal with this professionally. Being a blog author and at the same time a successful manager is difficult. It simply does not have enough time to post 7–8 times a day and develop the blog. Therefore, for us to give the sale of advertising to outsourcing was a very good decision.
Now in figures: the average income from the sale of posts on Faktrum is about 5,000 - 7,000 rubles. in a week, that is 2–3 sold posts. That is, 20 000 - 30 000 rubles. per month.

I summarize: recently I had to make a calculation of the average profit of a blog over the summer and I got a figure of 99,000 rubles. per month. This is the total income from the sale of all types of advertising (including the placement of seo-links) on a blog, which occupies the 3rd place in the Yandex rating and has 15,000 unique users traffic per day. This figure is the average for the period from late May to early September.

The profit that blogging brings us is the net income, since we have no expenses, not counting the manager's commission. We do not buy advertising, do not promote the blog, do not cheat rating and do not do anything at all, except that we run a blog and try to develop it. Factrum spawned a huge number of clones and laid the trend, which was picked up by many popular publications, which now regularly publish facts or collections of facts. Even Yandex caught this trend: the recently introduced new style of mail contains short interesting facts that are randomly displayed to the user. I think that the secret of a successful blog, like any successful project, is made up of a good idea and a lot of work.

Thank you all for your attention.