Made with us - promotion experience

After the publication of my project “ Made with Us ” was published , I received several letters asking me to talk about how I promoted and promoted the project. At first, I unsubscribed by general phrases such as “I’m not guilty, he came”, in the sense of a resource untwisted itself, but I didn’t make an effort to this.

In fact, this is true. I did not order any expensive public relations campaigns; I had no clear strategy for promoting the project. But still, thinking, I decided that there is something to tell.

About three years ago, I already made an attempt to create a site with a similar theme. It was called YouRussia, was made on an early version of the same engine, and failed miserably. It failed because I didn’t have a single way to attract anyone to him. I didn’t have any money, nor any reliable source of traffic. Therefore, 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

Time passed, I had my own blog in LJ. Friends gradually appeared, began to comment. I continued to participate in online battles, defending the honor of Russia and our manufacturer, debunking the myths that nothing is being done here, everything is falling apart. Then there was still no big goal, just, as the unforgettable Vereshchagin said - "I’m sorry for the state." 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, not everything is so bad. Articles were distributed in LiveJournal, from that moment people began to arrive in my LJ, the number of friends exceeded the third hundred.

And here an idea arose 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 bundle from the community in LJ and a separate site. I finalized my engine and added integration with LiveJournal to 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, which makes it easier for LJ users to check for updates, I added the possibility of authorization by OpenID on the site to 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 Livejournal to create the first wave of site visitors. It succeeded.

After some time, someone Savik Schuster wrote in the community. He praised the idea, but noticed that there was too much news, they were clogging a friend’s tape, which was inconvenient. He suggested selecting the best news, rather than posting it together. This led me to think of a parallel community where only the best news would get, and a digest for the day with short headlines. To do this, I wrote a LJ-bot, which 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, a bot can be “told” to post, for example, no more than three news a day, with a rating of at least + 10, say. The bot can also be indicated in which log, and on behalf of which user to send records.

The bot can be configured in any magazine, therefore, it now works immediately in several thematic communities, adding news there. On top of that, he posts a daily news digest on my blog . This all leads to a steady number of visitors to the site.

The repost button sticks to each post, so posts from the community are scattered through private ZhZhshks, which provides additional traffic.

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

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

Social networks

After some time, I realized that one LJ is not enough, it would be necessary to integrate into other social networks. I started with Twitter. The site has RSS , and this allows you to broadcast the feed to Twitter. Over time, the VKontakte group was created. However, as it turned out, you can’t automate article posting there, so the members of the group themselves are engaged in publishing. I recently added a Like button block with buttons from four popular networks. Now we are starting to create a group on Facebook .

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

As I already said, the ability to log in using OpenID was originally available. But then one fine day I, here on Habré, came across a wonderful Loginza project. With the help of it, I easily organized the entrance to the site from almost all popular social networks. And it paid off, 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. A very useful thing.

Links to external resources

But the main source of traffic was links to third-party resources. People bumping into the site experience cognitive dissonance, which makes them want to share the find. Link to the resource has become an excellent argument in online battles and various holivara. 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 New Year holidays, I found that the site was lying. It was a Goblin effect - the Terrible and Great Goblin published a link to Sun on its website oper.ru. By the way, the second time he gave a link to the site just yesterday, which doubled the habroeffect.

Links regularly appear on the Global Gamble, at first the volume of traffic from there was quite noticeable in the general traffic. Since the regular appearance of links to the site there indicates the presence of a target audience there, and for the first time I even decided to invest in advertising, paying for a weekly banner placement on Adventure. The second and last time I advertised on dirty.ru in the same way, that is, for my money. That is, in total, I spent something about 10,000 rubles on advertising a resource. I can’t say that advertising had a strong effect, but, you see, the money is not big. Moreover, it is important that the CTR was quite large, because the audience was close in spirit.

Sometimes, site ads were given for free as a donation. The largest resource that hosted the banner for free was lurkmore.ru. For five days my banner hung there, completely free, providing good traffic.



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

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


But naturally, all of the above may not work for your startup. Because the main thing in a startup 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 advance the project. If it’s bad, don’t invest much, but there will be no effect.

I hope my experience will be useful, and will prompt someone to the right and useful thoughts.