It might not officially be summer, but it essentially is. Summer is great for a lot of people, but not everyone; summer is not great for bloggers, as many blogging veterans know. But when it comes to blog traffic for beginners, you might be wondering what’s happening to your blog and how you can keep your traffic up. In this post, I’m sharing why your blog traffic is decreasing and nine things you can do to keep your traffic steady, if not increasing.
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Blog Traffic for Beginners: Why the Summer Sucks for Blogs
There are a lot of reasons why people might not be reading your blog in general – make sure these things aren’t possible reasons! – but one is just that, again, summer sucks for bloggers.
Plus, I’ve been consistently tracking my blog traffic since 2014 or 2015 and can look back to see trends. These trends show that my blog traffic drops every single year starting in June and then starts increasing again in September. But let’s talk about why that is.
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People are going on vacation – This is the most obvious thing, but it’s true. If you’re American or have a primarily American audience, a lot of people take vacations across the entire summer, but especially around July 4th. If you’re European or have a primarily European audience, you know that a lot of people take lots of time off in the summer.
If people are on vacation, they’re not spending a ton of time online, either on their phones or laptops. If they’re traveling, they may not have wifi or be able to be on their tech.
Plus, there are many people – myself included – who don’t want to be online when they’re on vacation. Maybe they just want to be far away from their computer screens or maybe they don’t want to be sucked into work. But if they’re not online in some way, shape, or form, they’re not going to be reading your blog.
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People are spending time outside – Again, if people aren’t online, they’re not reading your blog.
I’m going to use my family as examples of ways this could play out.
My sister is an occupational therapist. When she’s on vacation, she’s very active – hiking, swimming, running, etc. She’s not reading websites on her phone while doing these things.
When she’s here in Maine, she also loves to read physical books while outside. No matter how interested she is in a topic, if she’s sitting on the deck and reading a paper book with her phone either face down or in the house, she’s not going to read a website of any kind.
My dad is in marketing and he has so much going on when he’s not at his day job. In addition to being the most extroverted people person on the planet, he has a lot going on. There are endless chores happening around the house, not to mention the continual land maintenance; dead trees have to come down and wood has to be split.
Plus, he helps my mom’s sheep farm. My mom calls him “facilities management” – he put in the permanent fence, he helps her with sheep jobs that require two people, and he helps with the mowing. (Four sheep can only eat so much grass.)
Not to mention the fact that he helps a friend and neighbor out with things on the friend’s property, he’s a runner, he loves boating, and he and I are working on a ~secret project~. (More info to come in 2023, potentially.)
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On the other hand, in addition to the sheep, my mom is a genealogy researcher who has clients requiring a certain number of hours of work per month, not to mention her own genealogy research. This requires her to spend a lot of time on the computer, including the research she does to be the best shepherd she can be. She doesn’t want to spend even more time on her computer than she already does.
In the summer, she has a lot of sheep-related tasks to do, so when she’s done with her research work, she’s outside doing that and, again, the mowing. There’s a lot of sheep tasks that she won’t be able to do in a few months because winter comes pretty quickly to central Maine.
These are all various examples of how people are spending time outside and not surfing the web. My family loves and supports me, and they’ll read my blog, but they’re not often spending time on the Internet during non-work hours in the summer.
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Blog Traffic for Beginners: How To Keep Your Traffic Up
Now that I’ve covered some reasons why people aren’t reading your blog during the summer, let’s talk about what you can do so when people are online they read your blog.
Publish your posts earlier in the week
I’ve talked about this before, but when I started blogging in 2013 I posted every week day, when I started grad school in 2015 I went down to posting 2-3 days a week, when I started working at my current company I went to posting on Tuesdays and Fridays, and when I started at my current position in February 2021 I only posted on Fridays.
I chose Fridays because that gave me a weekend to do the bulk of my post and but with a few days of grace to finish or add some final touches to it.
But when summer 2021 started, I realized that posting on Fridays didn’t work for the summer. That’s because it’s pretty common for people to take a Friday off for a long weekend and then not be online again in a substantial way until Monday or even Tuesday.
That meant that I was losing the momentum that my site gets when there’s a new post. So I moved my posting day to Tuesdays.
I decided to stick to Tuesdays when the summer ended mainly because the goal with building an online community is that they know when to expect new content, and, additionally, people take Fridays off year-round. It’s just more common in the summer.
But, to be honest, it was also because I don’t do a lot of blogging work on Wednesdays or Thursdays because of busy life and work things, so the benefit of having 3 extra days to work on a post was instead really only 1. And that’s assuming I don’t have medical appointments on Tuesdays, so the “benefit” of posting on Fridays wasn’t really a benefit.
All of this is to say that posting in the middle of the week is better for your blog traffic year-round, but it’s especially so during the summer.
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SEO
First things first, what is SEO? Moz says, “SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results” (x).
It’s how people find your blog by searching Google or Yahoo or Pinterest. Learn more about SEO from Moz, which is one of the most reputable sources out there.
You should be using SEO all the time, but it’s extra helpful in the summer.
When people are online, they often have a purpose, and that purpose includes searching for specific things.
I use Ubersuggest to find SEO keywords to use. Not only does it give you keyword suggestions, but you can also find related keywords, long-tail keywords, questions, prepositions, and more. It will tell you what the search volume is for each keyword, as well as how competitive it is so you can choose the most successful keyword. And so much more.
You can get a basically unlimited amount of info if you sign up for a subscription, but a free membership still gives you 3 searches per day.
And people searching for specific things is true for not just traditional search engines – Pinterest is a search engine, too. If your blog posts are utilizing SEO, they will be found on Google and Yahoo as well as Pinterest.
I strongly suggest taking Pinterest with Ell to learn more about using Pinterest specifically, as she goes into more and better detail than I could. Suffice it to say, though, that Pinterest is so much bigger than non-website owners could imagine.
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Promote a blog post every single day
If you have at least 30 blog posts, you should be promoting a blog post every single day. When you don’t have a new post, promote an old post.
On days that I don’t have a new post, I schedule promotions of an older post. I try to do posts that are at least a month old, and I spread my post niche’s out so that I don’t have posts from the same niche promoted 2 days in a row.
I do this because I have 3 categories, all a part of my chronic health focus: health, blogging, and lifestyle. For example, this is (obviously) a blogging post, and I spread out the posts I promote across the week for different categories. Yesterday I promoted a lifestyle post, and tomorrow I’ll promote a health post.
Additionally, I sometimes promote old posts in Facebook groups. Some of the groups I’m in have daily sharing threads, and when I don’t publish a new blog post that week, I’ll share an older post in that.
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Promote older posts that you know bring in traffic
When you choose which post to promote for any given day, do your best to choose posts that you know bring in traffic.
This means a couple things.
On the one hand, a low-traffic time is always a good time to promote your most popular posts. These are the posts that people read the most and, most importantly, share the most.
On the other hand, the summer is the best time to promote summer-based posts.
Year-round you should write a combination of seasonal posts and perennial posts. For example, Halloween posts around Halloween time are seasonal and posts that apply year-round are perennial posts.
Personally, 80-90% of my posts are applicable year-round, but I’m a health blogger. Health is applicable all the time.
However, a post about living with chronic pain during the winter does best in the colder part of the year. Yes, I do have some readers in the Southern hemisphere who experience winter when we have summer, but the majority of my readers are in the US. They’re probably not reading that post in the summer.
Instead, I promote my posts about heat intolerance, both in general and POTS and heat intolerance. My post about how POTS works does fine no matter the time of year, but the post about POTS and heat intolerance specifically does best this time of year.
And if you’re wondering, yes, this post you’re reading right now probably won’t do well in January!
Optimize your blog for mobile usage
Google says that “53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load” (x).
Three. Seconds.
That’s hardly any time at all. Load up your blog and time how long it takes for content to show up. How long for the text? How about the images? Does the reader lose their place in the text once the images load? Think about all of the things that annoy you when you check out a blog or website and make sure your blog isn’t doing those things.
I used this site to help me think through what I needed to change about my blog. I hadn’t really thought hard about any of it, which made me embarrassed because at that point I had written nearly 1,000 blog posts (which I’m way over now).
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Publish new pins for older posts every day
I completely changed my Pinterest strategy in 2021 because Pinterest changed their algorithm to specifically credit brand new pins. Basically, “repins no longer increase your views on Pinterest” (x).
I now publish 2-3 brand new pins on Pinterest daily, and they’re all to promote blog posts. The only exception is on Fridays, on which I don’t publish any new pins because people aren’t on Pinterest much on Fridays, especially Fridays during the summer.
These pins are published to my Kate the (Almost) Great board, from which I add them to my Tailwind queue to post on other relevant boards.
My queue has an average of 15 pins a day, and I don’t worry about always filling that day’s queue. So what if only 7 pins are published? It’s still better than 0 but it’s not oversaturating my account, leading to Pinterest suspending me because it thinks I’m spam.
Finally, when I schedule pins, I don’t miscellaneously add them to my queue. I intentionally schedule them so that pins are only scheduled once per day and a board is pinned to no more than twice a day.
The post that helped me a lot when making my new Pinterest strategy is from Leonne Wang.
Write new posts that are follow-ups to popular posts
This is one of my favorite ways to capitalize on past posts!
There are 2 benefits: 1) You can use the past posts to get more blog traffic from the original post and 2) You now know what your readers like. So take these 2 things and write a follow-up!
If your post is 5 ways to be a better blogger, then write 5 more ways to be a better blogger.
If you wrote about great products for managing your condition, then write about even more great products.
You get the picture.
Then, when you’re writing the post, include towards the top and the bottom something like, “This is a follow up to my post about great products for managing your condition,” and link that sentence. This is so someone reads your post and then goes, “Hey, I want more of this,” they can easily find it.
And then go to the original post and do the same thing.
This leads to more page views and a lower bounce rate.
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Write blog posts about the summer
This is a good tip for year-round: while writing perennial posts are great and I think you should be writing mostly perennial posts, make sure you’re also writing seasonal posts. For the summer, that includes summer-based posts.
What exactly that involves depends on you and your blog’s niche.
If you’re a chronic health blogger, then write a post about managing the summer with your condition.
If you’re a health and wellness blogger, then write about your favorite summer exercise, smoothie recipe, or self-care methods.
You get the idea.
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By this I mean you should share blog posts that are applicable to the summer.
Share a series of posts – Tweets, Instagram stories, etc. – that are connected. Each post should promote a different blog post of yours connected to the summer.
It can be about summer or things that are especially relevant during the summer.
And make sure you directly link to the relevant blog posts in the social media posts! People like things to be easy. They’re more likely to read a post if they don’t have to go somewhere else to click a link.
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Don’t worry too much about your traffic
I know this feels counterintuitive, but at the end of the day, your traffic probably isn’t going to soar over the summer. If you’re doing everything right and your traffic is still dropping, keep on and just wait a few months. Blog traffic drops for basically everyone over the summer and there’s only so much you can do if people aren’t online as much.
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Like this post? Share it! Then check out:
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Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
I’ve been blogging for a long time, but I found this post very useful! I’m going to go back and read it again later!!