My second project is not working as I expected

[nvictor]

First I want to thank you all for the valuable feedback I got on my first project: Victorsreviews. I wanted to provide inspiring articles and reviews for programmers.

I got some traffic from it, and could get people to buy the books I reviewed. Two authors asked me to review their books. I have to admit that my two articles got more traffic than the reviews themselves.

My issue is that I can't possibly be providing reviews and article as fast as my project needs to get more traffic. So I came up with BooksQuery which I thought would some my problem.

Booksquery has generated less traffic than Victorsreviews. I thought since I can't recommend books as fast as I can through reviews, wouldn't an automated way be better?

So I started tagging books I know about: year of publication, short read, long read, beginners, intermediate, etc... This is basically how Booksquery works. And I have been spending time on Amazon and Google books gathering all the info I need to build the database.

However, I don't know how to get Booksquery known to people. Google and Yahoo work on content and the project does not provide content in the sense search engines see it. It's basically just a search engine with a twist that returns results. Google have only indexed the homepage and the credits page. The results pages cannot be indexed.

I'm feeling kinda down right now because I have spent some time on it and I don't know what else to do. I have been trying to add a user review section for each book but I am giving up the idea.

Looking at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BookDepository, etc... I see that user reviews is hard to get. And whole programming book sections on these popular websites go without a single user review. Except for Amazon which has to use incentives and email reminders to those who have actually bought the books. Reviews are perhaps not my solution.

I would appreciate your feedback and advice. If anything, I just have a growing database of tagged books, and not sure how to make it known. I just don't want to give up now.

Thanks a lot in advance.

[Milena]

Don't give up! I think your website is very useful and it looks great. Since a few of my friends are programmers I shared your booksquery.com site via facebook. Do you have a circle of friends who read these types of books? I think that's your best place to start in terms of getting reviews. I don't know a lot about getting into this field, but like anything, getting hits/known takes time. So just be patient! Your idea was great, your site is great, and other people are bound to think so sooner or later

[danthony]

Sites definitely aren't built overnight. Try posting to it daily and get some SEO work done to it. Tweet every post, Facebook ads and building it with great content can be enough to start it climbing in the search engines.

[nvictor]

thanks a lot Milena, danthony

i won't give up.