How Blog Traffic Reports Can Get Traffic to Your Blog

Over the weekend, I asked you guys in my Instagram stories if you wanted to see this post or one with a roundup of blogging tutorials. (If you want to see that, definitely let me know in the comments or on social media!) As you probably figured out, this was the winner. So I’m going to break down why I do traffic reports and how I’ve used them to get traffic to my blog, including what you have to have and what I suggest you have.

The blog traffic report posts have become some of your favorite posts, so I’m happy to share how you can use these types of posts to grow your own blog. I hope that this helps you!

Check out my blog traffic reports!

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My Personal Journey with Blog Traffic Reports

I started posting blog traffic reports way back in 2015. I started them because that was when I first got serious about growing my blog, and posting these reports was a way of keeping myself accountable. I hoped that it would also help other people grow their blogs, as they could read about what I did and whether or not it worked.

After almost 2 years of posting these every month, I felt that my growth was stagnated. This (beginning of 2017) is when I started doing 1 “big thing” a month. The big thing is one overall strategy that I try working on for the entire month. For example, I’ve done SEO, Pinterest, pinning older posts, and more. The point of this is that you can’t really do one thing once and expect it to massively improve your traffic. You have to do it multiple times, maybe in multiple ways, to get a good idea of its impact.

But that wasn’t the only thing I did. I did other things and kept track of everything, including when I got sick and didn’t share posts. When I wrote a post that was a hit, I kept track of that. And I included it all – the good and the bad – in my posts.

What Your Traffic Reports Need to Get Traffic to Your Blog

What you have to have – First and foremost, you need to be honest. So share your data honestly. When I say data, I mean your page views, sessions, bounce rate, and users. Why do all of these matter? Page views are pretty self explanatory; they’re the number of times that people have gone to your blog. Sessions are basically a time someone visited your site. For example, if you’re reading this right now, you’ve started a session. If you click one of the links in this post and go to another post, that may be a new page view, but it’s still part of the same session. You might go to one page or five in one session. If you come back tomorrow, that’s a new session. The bounce rate is how often someone goes to your blog and then leaves your site. This is one statistic that you want to be low, as a 20% bounce rate means that only 20% of your visitors left your blog after seeing one page. And users is another self-explanatory one, as it’s a count of how many individuals go to your blog. Want to know how to keep track of it all? Get set up with Google Analytics.

You also have to share what you did that could affect your traffic. Sure, people want to be nosy and will read your stats if you only provide them. But if you want to grow your blog with these posts, you need to share what you did that could have affected them. People want ideas on what they can do that will also grow or hurt their blog traffic. Did a post get featured somewhere? Was there a family emergency so you couldn’t blog for a week? These are the sorts of things that people want to know.

How I keep my bounce rate so low

What you should have – The above is what you absolutely need in a blog traffic report if you want to get traffic from it, but now I’m going to talk about other things that you should have that can really help you. First, you need a catchy title. Sure, “July Blog Traffic Report” works sometimes, but I get the most blog traffic from posts that have titles that grab attention. Some popular posts have titles like How I Grew My Traffic by 50% and Why I’m Focusing on One Blog Traffic Boosting Tool a Month. Like I said, people like to be nosy, so they’ll probably read your post anyway, but having a title like this will make everyone want to read your post. You should also optimize SEO in your post. By this I mean choosing a phrase that people might search for in Google and using that in your post so that you show up on search engines. That’s a very simplified version; to really succeed, you need to do a lot more than that, which you can learn about here. This can help your post show up in standard search engines, but it can also show up in Pinterest results. Once I started really focusing on SEO, I went from 12% of my traffic coming from Pinterest to over 60%. So this can be super helpful for you!

I also think that you should share your social media statistics in your traffic reports. Social media can bring tons of traffic to your blog – see my previous point – and it’s more honest to share those stats than to pretend that social media didn’t do anything for your blog. I also think that your social media numbers are just as important as your blog statistics, especially given that we bloggers tend to put emphasis on blog stats and social media ones. How many Instagram followers do we have? How many people like your Facebook page? These sorts of things matter, so you should probably include them.

Something else that I think is super helpful is sharing exactly how your stats changed in the time since your last report (month, quarter, etc.). Again, my most popular blog traffic reports are those that have statistic changes in the title. People want to know what you did that can grow your blog, so you have to have what your changes are. Maybe you’ll post these once a month, maybe it’ll be once a quarter. But you should include what the changes are.

How to use SEO for blog traffic

What you might want to have – This category is basically a list of things that can bring you more traffic, but it’s very up to you. The first thing is multiple images in your post – especially ones that do well on Pinterest. Like I said, I get a lot of traffic from Pinterest. This is because I make sure that I have Pinterest-optimized images for my posts, and multiple images. My images are vertical (which do better on Pinterest) with catchy titles, and I also have multiple sizes. I use one image size for blog posts and a larger version for Pinterest. When I schedule promotions for new blog posts, I upload larger ones to Tailwind for Pinterest. I used to try hiding images in my posts that would only be available when you went to pin images, but after trying and failing, I gave up.

I also suggest adding things called calls to action (CTAs). These can be links to tweet in the post or even links to sign up for the mailing list. You’ll notice that I have both of these in this post: the mailing list is up above and the tweet is below. A tweet can get more people to see your post, while signing up for the mailing list can be helpful depending on how you use your mailing list. You might try to sell your list something or send new posts to inboxes. It depends on your preference.

Finally, I think you should include links to your other posts in your traffic report. You’ve probably seen these throughout this post, and you’ll see these at the end of this post. I suggest including links to related posts throughout your post so you don’t rely on the end-of-post links only. But including them at the end can help someone decide to go check out another post. Both of these things will help you get more page views, but I also suggest you make sure the link will open in a new tab. This might just be personal preference, but I find it very annoying when I’m reading a post, see another one that I might want to read, click the link, and leave the post I was reading.

9 reasons why Tailwind is worth the money

What do you like or dislike from blog traffic reports?

Like this post? Share this post and check out:

My blog traffic reports, 5 Ways To Master Instagram Hashtags + Free Hashtag Tracker, How To Use Pinterest for Blog Traffic, How To Promote Your Blog Posts + Sharing How I Promote Mine, 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools To Try in 2018