Celebrating the small milestones: 60-100 uniques a day on my LEGO review aggregator
A while back I celebrated a quiet beta launch, and said I wanted to get better at highlighting the small milestones. I feel it's time to do that again: Brick Insights, my LEGO review aggregator, now average between 60-100 unique visitors a day.
It's not a huge amount, but it's traffic! A small chunk of it is from search and referrals. I intend to grow both over time - I'm talking to many of the sites I'm indexing, and they really like the project. That'll help with the visibility.
But the majority of the traffic comes from the widget I built. One of the larger LEGO sites (brickset.com - a fantastic resource if you're into LEGO) implemented it. I already had a relationship with the owner of that site since I helped him collect LEGO instructions a few years back.
The general feedback on the project has been extremely positive. It seems it solves a problem AFOLs have. My main focus right now is reaching out to all of the sites I'm indexing, gathering and fixing their input, and then I'll refocus on building more features again. It's a good strategy in two ways - it'll helps me make the product much better, and it nets the site a some visibility since the site owners tend to share it around.
Thanks for reading! Would love to hear your wins as well!
Congrats on the launch! This site is super slick and cool. And that's awesome you've been able to get it integrated into brickset.com. Seems like a great way to tap into their existing audience.
Great idea. Do you have plans to roll this out for other topics as it seems quite scalable and relevant?
Oh no, not at all :) My interest is in digging deeper into the LEGO world, not looking at other verticals. But, if one were to do that, I have two observations that might be useful:
You would need to double down on SEO and affiliate linking much more than I intend to if you're thinking about spreading yourselves into other topics. Because...
Over the long haul, most of the time spent on this site will be reviewing the incoming reviews. Some of it is done automatically (amazon, shop.lego.com, other structured sources) but most of it is placed in a review queue for me to manually extract score, snippet and other stuff. This work isn't scalable (without considering adding more people), so you might need to cut back on other things like manual outreach and creating additional products (which I intend to focus on).
That said, I think your idea could definitely be a profitable way to go about it. Metacritic and Open Critic does okay, for instance - the concept of review aggregators isn't new at all. If you're interested, go for it!
This site is awesome - but why are there no links to buy any of the sets? (maybe I just didn't see them)
Thanks! I just haven't prioritised those. Figured they wouldn't be worth anything before people actually visited the site. Now that people do, I'll bump up that task. Thanks for the input - much appreciated!