Made with us - promotion experience

After publishing about my project “ Made by Us ”, I received several letters asking me to tell about how I promoted and promoted the project. At first, I wrote back with common phrases like “I am not guilty, he himself came,” in the sense of the resource he unwound himself, but I did not make any effort to this.

In fact, this is true. I did not order any expensive PR campaigns, I did not have any clear strategy for promoting the project. But still, on reflection, I decided that there is something to tell.

About three years ago, I already attempted to create a site with a similar theme. It was called YouRussia, was made on an earlier version of the same engine, and failed miserably. I failed because I didn’t have a single way to attract anyone to him. I did not have money, some reliable source of traffic, too. So after a while I closed the site and forgot about it. Moreover, the crisis struck, and there was nothing to write about.

Promotion through LJ
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Time passed, I got my blog in LJ. Gradually, friends began to comment. I continued to participate in online battles, defending the honor of Russia and our manufacturer, to dispel the myths that nothing is being done, everything is collapsing. At that time there was still no big goal, just, as the unforgettable Vereshchagin said - “I feel sorry for the power”. At some point I was tired of repeating everything a hundred times, and I wrote a series of articles under the general title “Made in Russia” that, in general, everything is not so bad. The articles were distributed according to LiveJournal, from that moment on, people began to arrive in my LJ, the number of friends exceeded the third hundred.

And here there was an idea to return to the idea of ​​that old forgotten project, but on a slightly different level. I immediately decided that it would be nice to immediately create a link from the community in LiveJournal and a separate site. I finalized my engine and added integration with LiveJournal into it. From the very beginning of the project, all articles on the site, through the LJ API, are synchronized with the sdelano_u_nas community.

In addition to the community, in which LJ users find it easier to follow updates, I added an OpenID authorization feature on the site that would attract LJ bloggers to the site. The first idea of ​​promotion was precisely the idea of ​​simplifying the transition between the site and LiveJournal, using the popularity of Livejornal to create the first wave of site visitors. It succeeded.

After some time, someone Savik Shuster wrote in the community. He praised the idea, but noticed that there was too much news, they were jamming friends, and that was inconvenient. He offered to select the best news, and not post them in a crowd. It brought me to the idea of ​​a parallel community , where only the best news will fall, and a digest for the day with brief headlines. For this, I wrote LJ-bot, who was engaged in the selection of the best news for 3 days, according to users, and posting them in the community. At the same time, the bot can “say” that he would post, for example, no more than three news per day, with a rating of at least, say, +10. The bot can also be specified in which log, and on behalf of which user to send records.

The bot can be configured in any magazine, therefore, it now works in several thematic communities at once, adding news to it. Above all, he posts a daily news digest on my blog . This all consistently leads to the site a certain number of visitors.

The repost button is attached to each post, thanks to which posts from the community are scattered around private ZhZhkam, which provides additional traffic.

Over time, the community began to voluntarily promote some top bloggers. For example, Fritz Morgen does this especially hard in his Tails .

So LiveJournal is a good way to promote your resource, although, probably, it will not be as good for any subject as in my case.

Social networks

After a while, I realized that one LJ is not enough, it would be necessary to integrate into other social networks. I started with Tweeter. The site has RSS , and it allows you to broadcast the feed to Twitter. Over time, the Vkontakte group was created. However, as it turned out, it is impossible to automate the posting of articles there, so the members of the group themselves are engaged in publishing. Recently, I added a “Like” button block with buttons from four popular networks. Now we are starting the creation of a group on Facebook .

The traffic from social networks is not very large, but stable, and the potential remains good, there are still millions of users there, which means that at some point, this can fire.

As I said, the ability to log in using OpenID was originally. But then one day I, here at Habré, came across a wonderful project Loginza. With the help of it, I quite easily organized the entrance to the site from almost all popular social networks. And it bore fruit, users of various social networks and services began to write, comment, and the number of logins from external services now exceeds the number of logins from internal accounts. Very useful stuff.

Links to external resources

But the main source of traffic has become links to third-party resources. People, bumping into the site, experience cognitive dissonance, which makes them want to share the find. The link to the resource has become an excellent argument in online battles and various holivars. Links began to appear on various link aggregators such as digg and vott.

Links to the site began to appear on resources with high traffic, for example, suddenly, returning from the Christmas holidays, I discovered that the site is lying. It was a goblin effect - a link to SUN on its website oper.ru published Horrible and Great Goblin. By the way, the second time he gave a link to the site just yesterday, what doubled the small effect.

Links appear regularly enough on Global Avanyur, at first the amount of traffic from there was quite noticeable in the general traffic. Due to the regular occurrence of links to the site there, it indicates the presence of the target audience there, and I even decided for the first time to spend money on advertising, paying for the weekly banner placement on the Adventure. The second and last time I in the same way, that is, for my money, was advertised on dirty.ru. That is, in sum, I spent about 10,000 p. On advertising a resource. Not to say that advertising has a strong effect, but the money, you see, is not big. Especially here it is important that the CTR was quite large, due to the fact that the audience is close in spirit.

Sometimes, the site was advertised for free, as a donation. The largest resource that placed a banner for free was lurkmore.ru. Five days there hung my banner, completely free, providing good traffic.



That's all. As I said, there was no clear plan for the promotion of the project, but turning back, I can say that I initially did many things right, especially when I decided to make a bet on LiveJournal. I must say that LiveJournal is still among the top five traffic sources.

Even my blog alone is in fifth place, among all sources


But naturally, all that is said above may not work for your startup. Because the main thing in start-up is not how you promote it, the idea is paramount, if it is good, then it will not take a lot of effort and money to move the project. If the bad - then how much do not invest, but the effect will not be.

I hope my experience will be useful, and will push someone to the correct and useful thoughts.