The longer I blog, the trickier it is to grow your blog. By this point, I’ve tried all of the obvious ways, and so I’ve had to get a bit creative this year. In September, I tried a couple of different creative ways to grow blog traffic. And overall, I was successful! So let’s talk about what my blog traffic was, as well as what those creative ways are.
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Creative Ways To Grow Blog Traffic: Traffic Report
Google Analytics Statistics
Page views: 10475 (+3.97% from August, -17% from last year)
Bounce Rate: 3.13% (-29% from August, -78% from last year)
Sessions: 8718 (-2.2% from August, +42.6% from last year)
Users: 6019 (-12% from August, +13.3% from last year)
Email subscribers: 704 (–0.9% from August, +1.9% from last year)
How I keep my bounce rate so low | How to track blog traffic in Google Analytics
Webhostinghub.com Statistics
Page views: 208,651 (-3.3% from August, +175.4% from last year)
Sessions: 22,827 (+2.8% from August, -29.5% from last year)
Users: 10,574 (-6.5% from August, +474.7% from last year)
Social Media
Facebook: 1145 (+1.32% from August, +6.7% from last year)
Twitter: 3676 (-0.5% from August, -0.4% from last year)
Instagram: 3085 (+0.35% from August, +10.3% from last year)
Pinterest: 10503 (+2.39% from August, +17.3% from last year)
Tumblr: 3986 (no change from August, +0.7 from last year)
How I manage social media for my blog | How to get followers on Pinterest
Top Posts
- What To Do When Chronic Pain Becomes Too Much
- What Does Endometriosis Feel Like?
- The Products I Loved (And Wanted) in Grad School
- Beginner’s Guide: Rheumatoid Arthritis Flare Up
- POTS and Heat Intolerance
- What Is the Difference between Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis?
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- The Lifestyle Changes I Made for My Rheumatoid Arthritis
- What Every POTS Patient Needs for the Summer
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest (73.81%) – I feel like I say this every month, but if you’re not treating Pinterest like a search engine, you’re missing out. Optimize your pins for Pinterest (vertical, larger, titled with a keyword, with a keyword in the URL, etc.) and take Ell’s Pinterest course. It’s so good, and if you think you know everything about Pinterest, you’re absolutely wrong.
- Search engines (7.62%) – I try to use a keyword or key phrase for every blog post. And in addition to using in on Pinterest, I also implement that keyword (and similar ones!) in lots of places in my posts.
- Facebook (3.76%) – In addition to my Facebook page, I’m a member of several Facebook groups for bloggers. So this isn’t a surprise!
This does not include direct traffic.
How to use Pinterest for blog traffic | How to use SEO to stand out
Creative Ways To Grow Blog Traffic: Traffic Analysis
What I did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Big Thing: Updating old(er) posts specifically with Table of Contents
- I did this to make longer posts easier to navigate, and potentially reduce my bounce rate even more.
- Posts I updated with Tables of Contents:
- The Best Food Substitutions for Common Intolerances
- How To Track Blog Traffic in Google Analytics
- Beginner’s Guide: Rheumatoid Arthritis Flare Up
- What Blogging Platform Should I Use?
- Describing Pain Levels to a Doctor
- 50 Crafts, Recipes, & More That You Need for Easter
- How To Promote a Blog Post: 2020
- Beginner’s Guide: Infusion for Arthritis
- Why I Switched to MailerLite from MailChimp for My Email Newsletter
- Wrote a semi-controversial post (We Need To Talk about the “Disease Warrior” Model)
- Updated other pages in other ways, including updating them with keywords.
- Added Jumpropes to posts that they fit with
- Wrote a post featuring a newish social media (Jumprope) and they shared it
- Wrote a post with around 4,000 words (classic fiction retellings)
- Wrote a round-up post (50+ free blog resources)
- Updated my Pinterest and Pinterest practices based on Ell’s updates to her Pinterest course – One of the things I love about this Pinterest course is that Ell is regularly updating it with new information as Pinterest puts it out and she learns more. So even though I completed her course in February, I can keep learning from it.
- Started making pins promoting my newsletter monthly and scheduling them throughout the rest of the month, 1 for each landing page
- Made a new newsletter pop-up, health based
- Promoted the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit (promoting things to my mailing list generally means I lose subscribers)
How to get the most out of Tailwind for Pinterest
I haven’t seen results from
- Making a new newsletter pop-up or promoting my newsletter more on Pinterest
What I can learn this month
- Sometimes you need to get creative! I’ve tried a lot of things to grow my blog over the years. Like, a lot. So I’m at the point where my blog isn’t going to grow by doing obvious things and I need to get creative. That’s exactly what I did last month. So let’s talk about it.
The 4 creative ways to grow blog traffic I mention in the title:
- Updating old(er) posts with linked table of contents – This definitely reduced my bounce rate. I mean, it decreased by 29%! That’s so much! I tried this because know that when I visit a long blog post I sometimes want to skip stuff that I don’t really care about. And I figured that’s probably true for some people visiting my blog!
- Writing a semi-controversial post – This helped because people shared it a lot more than my other posts, and they also commented. Commenting helps show search engines like Google that people care about the topic or page. So writing a post that made people comment on it definitely helped.
- Trying a new-er social media network and writing about them – Obviously you can’t always do this. But I talked about Jumprope in my August blog traffic report, which is a social media network that a lot of people aren’t familiar with. My friend Austen shared the post to her stories and with her Jumprope colleagues, and they shared it, as well.
- Getting creative with Pinterest – I’ve been scheduling some pins directly through Pinterest’s scheduling tool to publish in bursts at the same time on the same day. That definitely has helped, as well as making lots of new pins for older content. I then schedule those pins to my other boards via Tailwind. For the record, I still value Tailwind so much! It’s a great tool for bloggers. But Pinterest likes when people post things through Pinterest, so I’ve been doing that.
Why isn’t my blog getting traffic?
September Goals
- 5 blog posts – Success! I published 5 exactly.
- Grow blog traffic – Also a success!
October Goals
- 4 blog posts (I’m having my infusion today, so I’ll be offline for about a week)
- Grow blog traffic
What are creative ways that you’ve used to grow your blog traffic?
Like this post? Check out:
What Blogging Platform Should I Use?, The Dos and Dont’s of How To Get Your Blog Noticed, Why Isn’t My Blog Getting Traffic?, The Process of Writing a Blog Post
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.
Thank you for sharing your experiences openly, it’s always great to see what other bloggers are doing. I need to try playing around with scheduled pins and maybe even do some promoted pins. I’m noticing a lot of traffic from Pinterest recently and I’d love to boost it up some more.