LiveKniga.Ru, or a story about a blog with stories about stories

A few weeks ago I was explaining on Habré in my love for e-readers. Somewhere in the article I mentioned my small site LiveKniga.Ru with reviews of the books I read and was pleasantly surprised that many people became interested in this site even more than my powerful arguments in favor of the readers. :) Despite the fact that the link was invisible and located under the cat, there was a lot of traffic, and I had to worry a little about my server. Thank God, the test of the habra effect was brilliantly sustained, and I thought, why someday not tell a little more about this site (of course, in the corresponding blog). And today, "someday" it is.

In addition to purely marketing goals, perhaps the ordinary history of this site will be of interest to those who want to launch or just recently launched their themed blog. Do not wait for any success story or edification - this is a cool story bro in its purest form.
')

Prehistory

It all started about six years ago, at the time of universal enthusiasm for "live magazines." Having succumbed to fashion, I created my “Internet diary” on a single city-level resource where most of my friends were registered. VKontakte then existed except that in the head of Pavel Durov, somewhere overseas, Zuckerberg was working hard to attract the first million visitors to the site - therefore, in general, personal blogs were the only outlet for young people who wanted to shout about themselves the whole world. Pretty soon I found out that there is a diary, but there’s nothing to write about. I did not want to inform everyone and everything about every turn of my personal life (although many friends and especially friends did it with pleasure), and I decided to regularly review in the diary the books I read. Given that I read a lot, the diary is also updated quite often. Half a year has passed, I got tired of it, and I closed the diary. Moreover, as a true perfectionist, I didn’t just close it, but delete it completely (the service didn’t have the “delete diary” function - it took a long time and I had to sit and delete the record after the recording). Praise the heavens that then something pulled me before deleting to make "backups" of pages to the local computer.

Prehistory

The time has passed, I switched to the university's higher courses and realized that my future life is connected with the Internet in any case. One day, stumbling upon that same “backup” in my folder with the enchanting name “My Documents / Any Different / Store Forever / Bullshit / Backups” , I found myself offended that my arch-making creations wither away. By that time, the mod had already gone to standalone -blogs, fully controlled by the owner, and not hosted by the left sites. Without thinking twice, I registered the first available free domain, at least somehow connected to books, on a shared hosting with friends I quickly picked up WordPress with a really awful finished theme and filled up all my old diary entries related to books. Gained about 30 pieces. The blog was ready. I sent letters to my friends - they say, look, what an awesome site I have turned out, and calmed down. For several months, I occasionally regularly wrote new book reviews on the blog, which fell into my hands. But in the end, the enthusiasm ended, and this again began to annoy.

Here, some of my friends advised me to the Advego content exchange - they say, if I am not able to support the blog myself, I don’t want to throw in the site, buy new reviews there. I agreed out of interest. He created the order, set the price a little higher than the “market” one and began to receive ready-made reviews. So the blog from personal retrained in collective. From the authors, I demanded the same approach to reviews as I did - first of all, to express my own impressions of the book, and only then to criticize it from a professional point of view. Over time, we managed to gather a circle of quality reviewers, with whom the work was conducted on an ongoing basis. But, again, since everything was done with enthusiasm for the sake of no definite goal, but it was worth the pleasure a little expensive for the student - the “celebration of life” could not last long. At some point, the site stopped updating, readers scattered, and the blog withered.

And then I washed it down and made a terrible mistake - by putting a cross on the site, I decided to extract at least some benefit from it and began to post black references on it from Sape . This did not last very long, but, alas, the result was predictable: the ratings of the site from search engines went down, and in Yandex the site got banned. The sad consequences of this sin of youth create difficulties for the promotion of the site so far.

In suspended animation, the site spent about two years, receiving a dozen visitors per day due to the unique content once indexed by search engines. Then came the fall of 2011.

Story

One evening, sitting in company with the “Tuborg”, I went to a half-forgotten site and dropped a mean tear over it. In general, over the past two years, I occasionally dropped in there to read old reviews — they brought nostalgia on me. A couple of times from absolutely nothing to do, even put on one or two reviews. And that evening I decided: “Everything! Reborn! ” And off we go.

It’s clear that quickly reviving a site located in a Yandex bath and uninteresting to the general population (as opposed to, for example, humorous projects), also requiring essential means for one person to keep it alive, is not easy. But I was sure that the blog was worth the torment. As in the good old days, I didn’t have any clear plan of action and answer to the question of how and when I would benefit from it - I noticed a long time ago that the more I think about an idea in my head, the less likely that I'll do something at all. Everything was based on confidence: “Well, a good site, what is there ...” - and a vague thought: “If people like it, someday I will benefit”.

What first comes to mind at the beginning of the second decade of the XXI century when the phrase "popularize the site"? Of course, binding to social services. This is what I did in the first place. The review tape was broadcast to a Facebook page using the RSS Graffiti application, and the site was linked to Twitter via TwitterFeed . The unpleasant surprise was that VKontakte still has no tools for broadcasting RSS entries to the page, so we had to work individually with it, manually posting messages on the page about the new entry. In the same old-fashioned way, repost of blog posts in LJ is done. After some deliberation, it was decided to post the full versions of reviews on the LiveJournal blog in order not to force readers to follow the link. Also on the pages of reviews were placed the buttons sharing the content on the pages of users in popular social networks.

For the first time, the main method of promotion became the VKontakte thematic groups. At that time, there were already more than a hundred quality reviews on the site, and in the thematic groups one could find many fans of a work and attract them to the site, leaving a link with a description of the review within the group. Since this is not actually spam, I didn’t even have to start a second fake account. :) Several groups sent me to the ban, but most users reacted calmly to a similar method of promotion, and I began to receive additional users from VKontakte. The big minus of this method is in its “momentality”: the links placed on the wall of the active group quickly go down when the wall is updated, and the transitions to it stop, and if the group is “dead”, then the link to the upper part of the wall does not cause the users to switch. Nevertheless, on this method alone, in a couple of weeks, it was possible to increase site traffic from a couple of dozens to hundreds of users per day.

Also a good idea was to repost messages to various literary communities in LiveJournal with an indication of the link. True, many large communities are extremely negative about external links in the message, even if the content is useful and thematic, and links are removed from the text during the moderation stage (or the entire post is blocked at all). However, for literary subjects, visitors from LJ communities are, as it turned out, the most loyal.

In addition, the main tool of the “gentleman's set” of website promotion was the practice of posting messages in the forums. Here I didn’t want to act with “black” methods either - so I decided to take quality, not quantity. For this, I set a slightly higher price for my order than the others, and in return I began to tightly control the quality of the posting. In general, I often use this approach, and not only on the Internet. As a rule, losses on saving pennies are more than compensated by the quality of performance.

Our days

At this stage, the blog is still difficult to call successful, but the figures have increased significantly compared to a couple of months before, when the “second coming” was just beginning and the visitor was almost zero. The average number of visitors per day is 300 unique, on other days it already reaches 400. The pages of the site are slowly getting out of the Yandex ban in a natural way (attempts to write to the Yandex administration did not produce results, but we didn’t count on it). Clever Google quickly spotted that the site had come to life, and today already supplies a significant proportion of the total number of visitors. I hope that in the future, search engines will reduce the need for enhanced external promotion of the site. By the way, in addition to “own” publications, once or twice a week we get good reviews sent by our readers, and this is very nice.

Well, of course, the pride of the site - content. Again, like two years ago, we managed to create a team of good authors who are free to choose their favorite works in order to write reviews on them. The authors' turnover, of course, is observed, because one or two people are not able to read all the interesting books of the world, but, as far as possible, I try to keep good reviewers longer. Of course, all authors have their own writing styles, but on the whole they manage to maintain the “lively” spirit of reviews, when the author does not give an abstract assessment of the book, but rather tells about his personal experience with the book. Some readers blamed us because of this that reviews on the site look amateurish and more like school essays, but it’s on this feature that the whole concept of the site is built - I don’t like the well-trained spirit of professional reviews. So this is not a bug, this is a feature! :)

Although I myself am engaged in action-packed fiction and mainstream prose of the “old school”, on the site we are trying to keep a balance between various genres of literature. On the one hand, this, of course, is a risky attempt to “sit on two chairs,” trying to please both yours and ours - but so far everything does not look so tragic; Readers favor both reviews on famous bestsellers and classic works. However, personal tastes still affect the global trend, but this is not so scary, considering that the project is still largely “homemade”.

PS Unfortunately, from a purely technical point of view, a blog is not very different from two years ago: SEO-specialists and usability-specialists will surely be terrified by its structure and internal optimization, but, as is standard in such cases, “we are working on it”. :)