Anniversary of BTCsec.com

Exactly one year ago, on July 31, 2011 , a Bitcoin- related website was launched - BTCsec.com . The site was made in one evening on the knee, even folded with tables for speed, and consisted of several HTML pages. That was the beginning. For details on the history of its creation, support and development I ask for cat.

I promise any statistics, description of the rake, tips and other cookies


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How it all began:

It all started with a note on the blog overclocking site, which describes the way to make money on video cards. Closing the conservative inner voice “divorce advertisement-scam!” With the memory that he defended a diploma in metacomputing calculations, and there is nothing impossible here, the note was read. Then he read two more times, until complete mastering, because The material was a little out of the slender ranks of IT articles to which I was used.

The very first attempts to do mining according to this instruction showed that everything works, BTC drips and, not without dancing, but are converted into the usual rubles and dollars. Further - more, the system really interested me, but the more I plunged into it, the more questions arose. The list of bookmarks in the browser on the topic was quickly growing links to forums, articles, wiki, there were subfolders with exchanges and exchangers, monitoring services, income prediction, complexity and many, many things. So the very idea of ​​Bitcoin rather quickly became more interesting than mining, I began to be interested in general financial issues in order to understand why someone Satoshi invented all this at one time, and moreover, I managed to implement my political and economic considerations in code.

When it became difficult to navigate in your own bookmarks, and the forums had to answer the same questions, the idea was born to make your site and organize Bitcoin knowledge on it, make service catalogs, and the very small availability of articles in Russian fired this desire even more .

By that time, I already had the experience of “start-ups”, when the site was planned to be discussed at meetings, design blanks were drawn, then it was made for months, superimposed on CMS, then my friends with whom he thought, I didn’t have time As a result, the project dragged on and was never implemented. Considering this experience, I made the first right decision - not to wait for anyone, but to sit down and do it, if not a lot, but for someone to use it a little bit already. So one evening the btcsec.com domain was registered in hc.ru (do not ask why I don’t remember it there), and several pages with useful, as it seemed to me, materials and links were written in a notebook, after which they were laid out in network.

The site at the time looked like this:

Growth

The site began to grow. A large Bitcoin FAQ was translated and supplemented, articles began to be laid out and sections were supplemented with links to useful resources. One good person helped to reverse the site. At a certain point, it became clear that I wanted to have my own forum for discussing issues, then PHPBB was bolted, and the site itself moved to infobox.ru hosting, since I did not want the main site and forum to be on the same hosting, until everything is set up normally, for security reasons (yes, paranoid).

After some time, PHPBB was tired of finishing, and IPB was bought, it turned out to be more pleasant to work with him in many aspects. Later blogs were screwed to it, because I wanted users to share experiences with each other, write manuals and actively participate in the life of the resource. After hc.ru began to signal constantly that the CPU load was exceeding (with 5-7 active users), the forum was thrown to the virtual machine from hetzner after the first shutdown of hosting, by the way, the virtual machine managed at the price of the shared card from hc.ru.

Promotion

After the opening, almost any site is faced with the fact that no one knows about it, and its attendance is zero. Therefore, the first thing that has been done is the posts in all thematic branches that such a resource has appeared, you can find such useful things on it. After the publication of a large FAQ, in which there were answers from the English wiki and my experience, it became much easier. It was possible to give answers to questions from users with links to what they are interested in, and on other resources a link to this FAQ was placed in the header to those nice. I advise you to pay attention to this seemingly simple but effective way to promote - help people, give them what they are looking for. Look for their questions on search engines, register on other forums, answer. It is a banality, but it gives good results: not only the target users, but also the attitude of the users whom you helped, and who themselves later share with such questions by reference.

The next thing I tried is directory placement. I allocated 2k tickets for it to the Bank of Russia and ordered it from one of the promotion companies. According to the results, I can say that it gave a little in puzamerk, but one should not expect that live users will go from these links, there were practically none.

Contests and promotions. Quite a useful thing that motivates users to be more active. After the launch of the forum, he made a promotion for meaningful posts, and after the introduction of blogs - 1BTC for a post in them, the action is still valid, by the way.

And do not forget about the initial content when opening sites with forums and blogs, no one will write on an empty resource, so all primary materials are yours, and it is desirable that they be useful and exclusive.

At the same time I began to communicate with the owners of other resources, such as exchanges, exchangers, services. We exchanged links, sometimes experiences and community news, and these were always interesting and positive people, it pleases us in such work.

Most of the material on the site was written by me, but I ordered some articles and translations by agreement with other authors. After a set of some critical mass of texts, the share of transitions from search engines first became equal, and then grew the share of transitions from other sites, as will be seen in the diagrams below.

I tried contextual advertising from search engines, but there was no point in this, too narrow a subject. Anyone looking for it, still finds the right materials.

I tried to write topics on gaming forums, because there are a lot of people with powerful video cards and a small amount of pocket money. The calculation was simple: schoolchildren and teenagers can pay for their games or access to the Internet with their computers when they are idle, this will obviously be interesting to them. But the cruel reality put everything in its place: after writing materials on about a dozen forums, and for each I did an individual post, a little earlier or a little later the topic was cut down by the moderators "for the scam." Where he did not have time to ban write moderators, gave links to Wikipedia, but it was all in vain, "scam" or "so it can not." It is a pity, but this option did not work at all.

For the sake of interest created a group in the social. networks, began to publish news resource there. Since the promotion of groups and accounts is not engaged, it is more mischief than a source of traffic, and a field for experiments.

Of course, like anyone who opened the site, I almost every day watched the change in puzomerok. If Alexa was changing more than dynamically, then the TIC first became 10 instead of 0 only a few months later, and 20 quite recently. Google Page Rank as demarcated in 3 out of 10, and hung on this mark. But I must say that from Google the transitions are still much more to the site than from Yandex.

Statistics

Next will go mainly graphics, not requiring explanation, but I will comment on something.


The annual diagram shows the main stages when what appeared on the site, you can sit ponastalgirovat.


See the red rush? So something looks approximately, like habraeffekta. That is a sharp increase in attendance for a couple of days and a decline. As you can see, there is practically no residual lift after it, i.e. those who hope 1-2 times to popiar on large resources, take this moment into account. Real attendance achieves completely different ways and a permanent work on the resource.


Google and Yandex make all search traffic, the rest can be practically ignored.


Not surprising, given the Russian-language focus of the resource.


Yes, Windows is leading by a wide margin.


For those who are especially interested - yes, IE6 also exists, its share is 0.2%, i.e. 392 calls. By the way, he even overtakes IE 10.0, which has 58 visits.

Advertising

Until recently, there was no advertising at all. That is, of course, appealed, then hang banners on tourism, then something else. But I didn’t need such an advertisement at all on the site, and in the future it will not be there either. And if what thematic resource should be placed - so please, and for free, in the right directory. I just want to collect all the useful resources so that users can quickly find them.

What's next?

Develop, improve, grow. Moreover, it can be seen where it takes only time. Over time, of course, difficult, because This project is a hobby, it was made on enthusiasm and is supported on it, financially it is only one expenditure. But to complain here is not appropriate, this project is for me anyway more than I have invested in it - a lot of positive emotions, meeting many interesting people, a broader vision of financial systems, the experience of supporting a more or less serious site in the end. I also learned much more about Bitcoin when trying to share information than I would have been looking for.

Briefly about the plans - this is an increase in the number of useful materials, in particular, on the development. For example, classes in PHP, and maybe even other languages, for working with Bitcoin. Further expansion and updating of links to resources in directories. Everything changes in this industry very quickly, new sites appear, old ones disappear. Several links, which not so long ago placed in the statistics and monitoring section already lead to non-existent sites, but only in the last couple of days I found several very interesting projects on the network that I did not know about before. So what to work here is clearly there.

Thanks to those who supported me all the time, helped me, or just tolerated me.

Thanks to everyone who read to the end, I really hope that you have found something interesting for yourself in this “multi-letter”. If you have any questions, criticism, suggestions and other stream of consciousness - write, I really am interested in receiving any feedback.