Kate the (Almost) Great

Chronic illness blog

in Writing & Blogging

How I Grew My Blog Traffic by 50%: March Blog Traffic Report

I’m back from my surgery absence! I’m definitely feeling better, but it will be a while before I’m at tip-top shape. I want to take a moment to thank all the people who guest posted while I was recovering, and I hope you all enjoyed their posts. I’m back for a few weeks now and then I’ll be out for a week when I have my infusion on the 19th. And then I’ll be back until the next infusion 4 months later!

Anyway, shall we get back to our regularly-scheduled content? As you already know from the title, today we’re talking about my blog traffic in March. I’m very pleased with it, and I hope it bodes well for April and beyond.

All blog traffic reports

Want to grow your blog traffic? There are lots of tips and tricks on the Internet to help you do just that, but do you know if they'll work? Here are the things that I did that grew my traffic by over 50% in March, so you know that they work.

Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique Pageviews: 14465 (+53% from February, +107% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 11.22% (-19.8% from February, -81% from last year)

Sessions: 6745 (+58.44% from February, +68.45% from last year)

Users: 5610 (+63.08% from February, +58.87% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1814 (+0.49% from February, +4.61% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 394 (+9.1% from February, +56.97% from last year)

How I keep my bounce rate so low

Social Media

Facebook: 1014 (+0.19% from February, +9.38% from last year)

Twitter: 3226 (+0.87% from February, +12.83% from last year)

Instagram: 2642 (-1% from February, +16.38% from last year)

Google+: 245 (+0% from February, +15.02% from last year)

Pinterest: 5853 (+2.18% from February, +28.58% from last year)

Tumblr: 3854 (+0.12% from February, +3.99% from last year)

Top Posts

  1. Hacks for Living with Chronic Conditions
  2. 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
  3. 31 Historical Fiction Novels To Take You Back in Time
  4. Resources for the Freshly-Diagnosed Chronic Illness Patient
  5. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
  6. Why You Should Be Buying ColourPop Makeup
  7. What It’s Like To Live with Pain for 15 Years
  8. New England Trips To Take This Spring and Summer
  9. A Weekend in Boston
  10. How Do Adults Celebrate Their Birthday?

Top Sources of Traffic

  • Pinterest (55.05%) – As I’ve mentioned before, Pinterest is a search engine and you should prepare your blog post images accordingly. You can read all about how I’ve done that at that link I just included. That (search engine optimization) is why so much of my traffic comes from there! (For comparison, in December 12% of my traffic came from Pinterest and now it’s over 50%.)
  • Facebook (7.14%) – I’ve a member of several Facebook groups for bloggers, and they definitely come in handy, as can be seen here.
  • Google (5.9%) – SEO is your friend!
  • Twitter (2.45%) – I like that this makes the list because it’s my favorite social media network, but I would like it better if it got me a little bit more traffic. Oh well.

This list does not include direct traffic because that’s not a source. Also, these percentages are combinations from the first two pages of sources.

I did a lot of things in March to grow my blog traffic, but there are two key things I did that I know for a fact contributed to growing my traffic by over 50%. Check them out, as well as the other things that I did, so you can grow your traffic, too.

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

  • How I promote my blog posts (updated list with all of my secrets!)
  • Big thing in March: linking to my other posts
  • Did a collaborative post
  • Had a roundup post
  • Got accepted to HealtheVoices, shared that on Twitter, and connected with other attendees
  • One of my tweets was featured in a Buzzfeed post
  • Kept repinning my blog posts from over a year ago
  • Participated in #HowToPissOffDisabledPeople on Twitter
  • Twitter cracked down on accounts, including one of the retweet accounts that I use, so I lost over 20 followers
  • Mentioned in one of Darrian’s posts
  • One of my tweets was featured in a Page Six article
  • Had surgery on the 26th and two of the people who were supposed to guest post didn’t (so out of a week, there was only one post)

I Haven’t Seen Results From

  • Tweets featured in other places

What I Can Learn from this Month

  • Linking to other posts can really help! I always link to older posts at the end of every post, but I’ve worked hard to include other posts in my new posts because I have hundreds of posts and new followers may have never seen them. This is one the two things I did that massively helped my blog traffic.
  • Repinning old posts can also make a huge difference. Proof? Out of my top 10 posts, 6 of them were posts that I had repinned this month. SIX! That’s not a small percentage. This is the other thing I did that made a huge difference.
  • Just because you’re featured on a famous site doesn’t mean it will do anything for your traffic.

March Goals

  • 9-12 posts – Success!
  • Maintain pageviews – Success!
  • Maintain social media following – Mostly success!

April Goals

  • 9-12 posts
  • 12,000 pageviews
  • 4,000 users

What has helped grow your blog traffic the most?

Like this post? Check out:

All blog traffic reports, How To Use SEO To Stand Out + Free SEO Checklist, How To Optimize Your Social Media as a Blogger (And How To Grow Yours!), 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools, Why Social Media Matters for Bloggers

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