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.
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
- Hacks for Living with Chronic Conditions
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
- 31 Historical Fiction Novels To Take You Back in Time
- Resources for the Freshly-Diagnosed Chronic Illness Patient
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- Why You Should Be Buying ColourPop Makeup
- What It’s Like To Live with Pain for 15 Years
- New England Trips To Take This Spring and Summer
- A Weekend in Boston
- 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.
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
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.
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