LiveKniga.Ru, or Storytelling Blog Story

A few weeks ago I spoke on Habré in my love for electronic readers. Somewhere in the article, I mentioned my small site LiveKniga.Ru with reviews of books I read and was pleasantly surprised that many became interested in this site even more than my powerful arguments in favor of readers. :) Despite the fact that the link was invisible and located under the cut, there was a lot of traffic, and I had to worry a bit for my server. Thank God, the habraeffect test was brilliantly passed, and I thought, why not someday tell a little more about this site (of course, in the corresponding blog). And today “someday” has arrived.

In addition to purely marketing goals, perhaps the ordinary story of this site will be interesting to those who want to launch or have just launched their thematic blog. Do not expect any success story or edification - this is a cool story bro in its purest form.

Prehistory

It all began six years ago, at the time of the general enthusiasm for “live magazines”. Having succumbed to fashion, I created my “online diary” on one city-level resource where most of my friends were registered. "VKontakte" then still existed except in the head of Pavel Durov, somewhere across the ocean, Zuckerberg was working hard trying 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 at the whole world. Pretty soon, I found out that there was a diary, and there wasn’t much to write about. I did not want to inform everyone and everyone about every turn of my personal life (although many friends and especially girlfriends did it with pleasure), and I decided to regularly review the books I read in my diary. Given that I read a lot, the diary was also updated quite often. Six months passed, I was tired of it, and I closed the diary. Moreover, as a true perfectionist, he didn’t just close it but delete it completely (the service didn’t have the “delete diary” function - it took a long time and you need to sit and delete the recording after recording). Praise to heaven that then something pulled me before deleting to make "backups" of pages on the local computer.

Background

As time passed, I switched to higher university courses and realized that my future life is in any case connected with the Internet. Once, having stumbled upon the same “backup” in my folder with the enchanting name “My documents / Anything / Keep forever / Bullshit / backups” , I caught myself insulting that my archival masterpieces are withering away. By that time, the mod had already gone to standalone blogs, completely controlled by the owner, and not hosted on the left platforms. Without thinking twice, I registered the first free domain that came across, somehow connected with books, on a shared hosting with friends, I hastily raised WordPresswith a really terrible finished design theme, and I uploaded all my notes from the old diary related to books there. Got about 30 pieces. The blog was ready. I sent letters to my acquaintances - they say, look at what an awesome site I got, and calmed down. Over the course of several months, from time to time I regularly wrote new reviews of books that fell into my hands on the blog. But in the end, the enthusiasm was over, and again it began to bother.

Here, some of my friends advised me on the Advego content exchange.- they say, if I can’t support the blog myself, but I don’t want to abandon the site, buy new reviews there. I agreed out of interest. I created an order, set a price slightly higher than the “market” and began to receive ready-made reviews. So the blog from personal re-qualified to collective. I demanded from the authors the same approach to reviews that I had - first of all, to express my own impressions of the book, and only then to criticize from a professional point of view. Over time, it was possible to gather a circle of quality reviewers with whom work was carried out on an ongoing basis. But, again, since everything was done for the sake of enthusiasm without a definite goal, and it was worth this pleasure a little expensive for the student - the “celebration of life” could not last long. At some point, the site ceased to be updated, readers scattered, and blog blogging.

And here I amwashed down made a terrible mistake - putting a cross on the site, decided to extract at least some benefit from it and began to post links from Sape in it in black . It didn’t last very long, but, alas, the result was predictable: the search engine’s site ratings went down, and in Yandex the site fell into the ban altogether. The sad consequences of this sin of youth create difficulties for promoting the site so far.

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

History

One evening, sitting in the company of “tuborg”, I went to a half-forgotten site and dropped a mean tear over it. In general, over the past two years, from time to time I went there to read old reviews - they inspired me with nostalgia. A couple of times from absolutely nothing to do, I even threw one or two reviews. And that evening he decided: “That's it! We are reborn! ” And off we go.

It’s clear that quickly reviving a site located in Yandex’s bathhouse and uninteresting in nature to the general public (unlike, for example, humorous projects), which also requires means that are essential for one person to be maintained in a “live” form, is not easy. But I was sure that the blog is worth this 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 and think something in my head, the less likely it is, that I’ll do anything 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 be of use.”

What was the first thing that came to mind at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century with the phrase "website promotion"? Of course, binding to social services. This is what I did first. The feed of reviews began to be transmitted to the page on Facebook using the RSS application Graffiti , the site was linked to Twitter through the TwitterFeed service. An unpleasant surprise was that VKontakte still does not have tools for broadcasting RSS feeds to a page, so we had to work with it individually, manually posting messages about a new record on the page. In the same old-fashioned way, posts are reposted on a blog in LiveJournal. After some thought, it was decided to post full versions of reviews on the LJ blog, so as not to force readers to follow the link. Also on the review pages were placed buttons for sharing content on users' pages in popular social networks.

For the first time, the thematic group “VKontakte” became the main promotion method. At that time there were already more than a hundred high-quality reviews on the site, and in thematic groups you could find many fans of a particular work and bring them to the site, leaving a link with a description of the review inside the group. Since this is actually not spam, I did not even have to start a second fake account. :) Several groups sent me to the ban, but most users reacted calmly to a similar promotion technique, and I began to get additional users from VKontakte. A big minus of this method is in its “instantness”: links placed on the wall of the active group quickly go down when the wall is updated, and transitions on them stop, and if the group is “dead”, then the link on the top of the wall does not cause users to go over. Nonetheless,

Also, a good repost of posts to various literary communities in LJ with a link. True, many large communities are extremely negative about external links in the message, even if the content is useful and thematic, and remove links from the text at the moderation stage (or even block the entire post). Nevertheless, for literary subjects, visitors from the LJ communities, as it turned out, are the most loyal.

In addition, the main tool of the "gentleman's set" of website promotion was practiced - posting in forums. Here I also did not want to act with "black" methods - therefore, I decided to take quality, not quantity. To do this, I set a slightly higher price for my order than others, and in return I began to tightly control the quality of 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 execution.

Our days

At this stage, the blog is still difficult to call successful, but the indicators have grown much 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 selected from the Yandex ban in a natural way (attempts to write to the Yandex administration did not produce results, but we did not count on this). Clever Google quickly revealed that the site had come to life, and today it delivers a significant share of the total number of visitors. I hope that in the future, search engines will reduce the need for enhanced external website promotion. By the way, in addition to “our 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 is content. Again, like two years ago, it was possible to create a team of good authors who are free to choose their favorite works in order to write reviews on them. A lot of authors, 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 in general, so far they have been able to maintain the “lively” spirit of reviews when the author does not give the book an abstract rating, but rather talks about his personal experience with the book. Some readers have blamed us because of the fact that the reviews on the site look amateurish and more like school essays, but it’s precisely 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 gravitate to action-packed fiction and the mainstream prose of the “old school”, on the site we try to keep a balance between the most diverse 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 eminent bestsellers and classic works. However, personal tastes still affect the global trend, but this is not scary, considering that the project is still largely “home-based”.

PS Unfortunately, in purely technical terms, the blog is not very different from itself two years ago: SEO-specialists and usability specialists will probably be horrified by its structure and internal optimization, but, as is standardly said in such cases, “we are working on it.” :)