Most Recommended Books
See which books shaped the world's most successful people.
Over the last 180 days, Most Recommended Books (https://www.mostrecommendedbooks.com/) has received 30,000 visitors. But a third of that (10,000) was this month alone!
It's growing, but now I feel it is time to focus solely on growth (all we worked on until now was product with very little focus on growth).
I'd love feedback on different ways it can grow! It's heavily SEO focused, and all I've done so far is tweet one recommender a day (this was the latest one https://twitter.com/richardreeze/status/1245074541400993793?s=20) and posted on a subreddit here and there.
Any advice?
After implementing a new design, Most Recommended Books (https://www.mostrecommendedbooks.com/) reached $100 for the first time this month!
This is despite my mistake of rebuilding the site in React without knowing it would kill our SEO (whoops). We used to average 150 visitors a day with the old design, but this week we only averaged 12.
Despite less traffic, we are making more money per day and user session times have gone up. So the redesign was a good idea.
Right now I'm working on fixing my mistake (by rebuilding the site in Next.js). And I can't wait to see how much we make when our site and SEO are at their best!
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Why do you have to rebuild it in Next? With how popular React is, is there not a good SEO plugin or solution? Or is SEO just easier with Next?
As for the dip in SEO traffic, isn't that temporary and shouldn't it bounce back pretty quick if you take all the necessary steps with Google?Nice site btw...that's a lot of pictures!
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Yeah so I thought there was a good solution (like React Helmet) but I found out search engines use the server response directly.
The problem with React is that it's all client-side JavaScript. So search engines and crawlers don't see all the code you wrote.
To be fair, I saw somewhere that search engines are "smarter than you think" and can crawl your JavaScript. But then my website went from 150 users a day to 12 as soon as I published the React app, so I had to reevaluate that premise.
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Great idea! The website is a bit slow for me though, for example when I clicked on “back”, I expect it to be instant as the page was already loaded.
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Ah sorry about that! This is where I feel the most pain. But we are working on making it faster 😊
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Congrats on the success! That's great - I find this super inspirational!
Just out of curiosity, how are you getting these book recommendations?
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Thank you for your kind words!
I get the book recommendations from several sources. They just have to be reliable.
For example, many book recommendations came from Tim Ferriss' podcast. Bill Gates' list came from his own website (https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books). And a list like Travis Kalanick's came from a biography (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735211396).
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The idea is really good, the execution can be easily improven.
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Your current url structure domain.com/recommender/name is not good for SEO. Having the keyword in your URL is probably the most important on page-factor. You should have something like this domain.com/name-recommended-books.
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Consistency between Seo slug, meta-description and H1. Right now you have "name recommended books"and as H1 "name reading list".
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Add more content to the page. You have a lot of "thin" pages, pages that have very few words. Add a description to the book or some info about the recommendation. When and why was it recommended?
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Thanks for the tips! Super super helpful.
I'll make sure to implement each one of them (#3 is a bit harder because it's a UI issue, but another comment here mentioned it and I know it would be a great addition to the site, just needs to maintain the clean/ simple look)
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When I read that you accidentally killed your SEO with React, I was going to recommend Next.js! I hope that goes smoothly for you.
I like the idea of your site! Are you making money from affiliate links? I'm guessing that because I don't see a pricing page or anything.
A few thoughts:
- I don't know what your design looked like before, but I feel like it could be even better. On the 'top books' page, things feel very tight. I think it would be more pleasing with more white space.
- It would be cool if 'top books' didn't just show a list of who has recommended that book, but if it showed what each recommender said about that book. Having more context on each book would motivate me to click through more.
- Another idea would be creating collections of recommended books. Instead of each book on its own, create collections where certain people recommend all books in a collection.
- Finally, this may be out of your desired scope, but I think this idea is an excellent base for replacing GoodReads. I hear that GoodReads has a ton of users, but a terrible UI/UX. What you've built is essentially the same thing. Just the reviewers are famous people, and you're doing the work of putting their recommendations in there. If you add the ability for people to create profiles, write reviews, and follow others, it could seriously boost your engagement and grow your email list. In this scenario, you should keep adding recommendations from famous people because then it's as though they're using the platform. It might be a good solution to the chicken/egg problem of a platform.
I hope these are helpful! I'm happy to bounce ideas any time.
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Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Ryan!
To answer your question, yes we are making money from affiliate links.
I have thought about the points you mentioned (except the GoodReads one, but I can see how a profile feature for individuals could work in the future).
The most immediate one for me right now is the "what each recommender said about that book" point. I totally agree! And I have the full list of sources from where I got the data.
This problem is a UI one though. All solutions I can think of for the "what people said about this book" data would clutter the page.
Do you have any example (any website of app) of what could look good? (e.g. They show different types of data for an item without cluttering the page?) This is a problem that keeps me up at night.-
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I got a chance to throw some ideas together of what could look good for expanding the list items.
Two example sites that handle opening cards in a list differently:
Marketing examples opens items into a modal on top. This gives a lot more space to display content about that item but also gives the user an easy way to get back to the list.
Adobe stock splits the list right below the selected item and loads in the extra content there.
I created a figma file with a rough layout of what that might look like for you: https://www.figma.com/file/Pmj0EuwA5Fb2Z9p55Svw90/Top-Books-Example?node-id=0%3A1
I hope this helps!
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This is really cool. Thank you SO MUCH for taking the time to do this Ryan! It made building that feature clearer. I think I know what it will look like now.
I LOVE the book "Refactoring UI" btw. A lot of great material for not only this feature but future ones.
All the best (and happy holidays!)
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No problem! So happy I could help.
Good luck! Happy holidays :)
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Hey, just want to follow up - I've been insanely busy the past few days and haven't been online at all.
There's definitely a way to accomplish this in a slick interface that's not cluttered and gets all of the information there. I'm gonna throw something together and I'll post back here.
In the meantime, if you haven't heard of it I'd suggest checking out "Refactoring UI". It's an awesome book focused on teaching design to developers. It's helped me a ton and I haven't even gotten through half of it yet.
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Great stuff!
Where does your revenue come from?
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Thanks!
Amazon affiliate links 😊
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Have you tried out Gatsby. It's a static site generator built on top of React and GraphQL and the SEO is really good when you build websites using it.
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I have no experience with Gatsby but I did wonder which one would be best for my site.
Maybe I can ask you! I read this post https://dev.to/jameesy/gatsby-vs-next-js-what-why-and-when-4al5
and found that the gist is "If it's a big app, use Next.js. If it's a small app, use Gatsby."
The problem is I'm not sure whether my app is big or small? It doesn't have thousands of pages yet but it's new and already has 300+ pages (and we plan on growing to thousands... But not tens of thousands). Is that big?-
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If you are planning on having thousands of pages then I would suggest sticking with Next.js. Reason being that once you have over 10k pages using Gatsby the build time tends to be slow or so i heard. I have not encountered that problem yet since many of my sites are still relatively small.
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Very interesting site!
First feature I see would make for a better experience is sorting a Reading List by number of times the book is recommended.
And I guess intersection of recommenders: What books do both Bill Gates and Naval recommend if any? Any interesting insights that you are able to pull from looking through these connections would make for a great blog post as well. -
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Congratulations Richard! I noticed a long list of profiles (with book recs) being loaded on your landing page. Of course the content is required, but might hurt visitor experience.
I wanted to recommend a tool we're building that integrates a smart search bar widget for a website and allow users to navigate with ease. This should remove a lot of the initial listing as it makes the content searchable. We support internal and external (blog / news / social and more) links .Check us out @ https://navigator.bytebeacon.com for a demo. We haven't launched yet, but are looking for early adopters interested in integrating navigator for free and give us their feedback on integration and usage. Let us know if you'd be interested!
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Thanks, Anas!
I'm working on solutions to each of those problems, thank you!
So I wrote this somewhere else but basically React is all about client-side JavaScript. The problem is search engines and crawlers usually use the server-side code (so all the client-side code you write in React isn't seen by them).
That's why it affects your SEO.
Some people point out search engines are "smarter than you think" and can crawl your client-side JavaScript. But when my website went from 150 users a day to 12 as soon as I published the React app, I decided to switch to a server-side rendered app (that's what Next.js does)
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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2 Comments
Those are some impressive numbers! Nice work man 🎉
Thank you, Jordan!