How To Drive Traffic to Your Website: May Blog Traffic Report

How is it June already? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be 5/12 done with the year, but I’m also surprised. Especially because my birthday is tomorrow! Time flies when you’re recovering from moderately-major joint surgery, apparently.

Anyway. New month, new blog traffic report! My blog traffic did decrease this month, but I’m not surprised because I had several high-traffic days at the end of April and beginning of May before it decreased a bit for the rest of the month. Hoping that I can bring it back up in June!

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Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique Pageviews: 14340 (-19% from April, +181.8% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 14.06% (+12.8% from April, -75% from last year)

Sessions: 6196 (-23% from April, +108.7% from last year)

Users: 5380 (-23% from April, +111.2% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1831 (+0.5% from April, +5.2% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 450 (+3.9% from April, +72.4% from last year)

How I keep my bounce rate so low

Social Media

Facebook: 1016 (+0.7% from April, +8.5% from last year)

Twitter: 3280 (+0.5% from April, +13% from last year)

Instagram: 2666 (+0.8% from April, +22.5% from last year)

Google+: 246 (0% from April, +15.5% from last year)

Pinterest: 6050 (+1.6% from April, +24.2% from last year)

Tumblr: 3867 (+0.1% from April, +2.7% from last year)

Top Posts

1. 5 Items Every Immunosuppressed Person Needs
2. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
3. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
4. Hacks for Living with Chronic Conditions
5. The 8 Things a Millennial with Arthritis Wants You To Know
6. A Guide to Chronic Illness for Those Who Don’t Have One
7. How To Pack for a Summer Trip
8. Best Gifts for Graduates
9. What To Do in Boston This Summer
10. New England Trips This Spring and Summer

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest (69.57%) – I have been blown away by how much traffic I’ve been getting from Pinterest. Ever since I started focusing on SEO and repinning old posts, I’ve been getting more and more traffic. As you can see from this, I’m now at a point where close to 75% of my traffic is from Pinterest, while Pinterest brought 12% of my traffic in December. Which is just amazing. | How To Use Pinterest for Blog Traffic
• Google (7.51%) – Like I said, I’ve been focusing on SEO, but clearly not enough or else the percentage here would be higher. I’ve been trying to do better at it, so hopefully that will make a difference in June.
• Facebook (3.82%) – This has been steadily decreasing all year, which is more confusing than anything. I’m not sure if this something happening across the board, or if it’s just for me.
• Twitter (1.35%) – This has also been steadily decreasing, and I’m rather surprised by it. I share posts on my Twitter at least 10 times a day, and those often get shared. I guess people just aren’t clicking on them.

This list does not include direct traffic, as that is not a source.

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts
• Big thing this month: social media ads – I did several ads on multiple social media sites this month, including Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Back in 2014-2015, I did this multiple times a month, but I stopped some time in 2015.
• Updated the mailing list freebie for the bar at the top of the blog and the pop-up – I realized that I hadn’t changed it since I first installed them. Oh, and if you’re wondering why you don’t see it while you’re reading this post, I have the settings set so they don’t show up for a month or so once you’ve seen it. I want people to see them to help grow my mailing list, but I get so annoyed by these bars and pop-ups on other blogs that I don’t want you guys to feel the same way when you come here.
• Started taking better pictures for Instagram (ie with my real camera) – I’m trying not to care about the numbers, but I do like having a pretty feed and I want to have an engaged following – I don’t want lots of Instagram followers who never engage with what I post – so the solution is nicer pictures. And the iPhone is great, but my Nikon is better. It’s not a DSLR, but it’s basically a step below.
• Started loading the description of half of my Pinterest images with appropriate terms for that image and not just sentences about the blog post – Now that Pinterest doesn’t show the description of pins unless you click on them, I’m loosening up my own personal rules for Pinterest. I don’t like seeing a description that reads “books, books to read, to be read, tbr, book recommendations,” etc., but if people aren’t seeing them anyway, then it doesn’t matter. And I’m pretty sure this is helping get more blog traffic! I usually have two or more images per post, and I’ll write a proper description for one (“Looking for books to read? Check out my book recommendations for the summer”) and list appropriate terms in the other.
• GDPR – If you’re on the Internet at all (and clearly you are if you’re reading this post) you’ve heard about GDPR. The short version is that it’s a new law that went into effect in Europe, but it affected anyone on the Internet who has European readers/followers. To be on the safe side, I made precautions. I emailed my mailing list and suggested people unsubscribe if they couldn’t remember how they were added to my mailing list (they were added if they downloaded any of my freebies connected to my mailing list) and I updated my privacy policy to be extra clear and transparent. I also made sure every freebie connected to my mailing list includes language that makes it clear that if you get that freebie, you are signing up for my mailing list.
• Changed the freebie in my about page – Again, this was something I hadn’t changed in a while.
• Scheduled LinkedIn promos through the end of June – I’ve never used LinkedIn for the blog, but I’ve seen some people do it, so I’m giving it a shot. I’m not sharing every post, just the ones

I Haven’t Seen Results From

• Ads on social media – This surprised me. Like I said, I used to do this regularly, and it always brought me more traffic. There are a couple of reasons why these may not help any more: the algorithms have changed, people don’t click through ads as often as they used to, I chose bad posts to advertise, you need to buy a lot of ads for them to make a big difference, the list goes on. For me personally, I got more clicks on Pinterest through pins that were pinned to multiple group boards than pins that were advertised. And for Facebook, I got more clicks through on posts in Facebook groups for bloggers and my Facebook page than I did through posts that were advertised. This might be a personal thing, it might be because I’m not doing it correctly, I don’t know.

What I Can Learn This Month

• Ads on social media may not impact your blog
• Loading Pinterest descriptions with search terms can really help

May Goals

• 9-12 posts – Success! I published 12 posts this month.
• 14,000 pageviews – Success! I purposefully kept this number fairly lower than my April blog traffic because I (correctly) assumed that my high blog traffic in April was due to a couple high-traffic days. I figured that I would lose some traffic in May, but I hoped it wouldn’t be super significant.
• 4,000 users – Success! I did the same thing with my users.

June Goals

• 8-11 posts – So, here’s something you can expect: once I start my new job on June 14, we’ll be going to 2 blog posts a week instead of the usual 3. I need to focus on the job and I want to enjoy blogging without feeling tons of pressure to crank out tons of posts. My hope is that by August, once I and my body have adjusted, we’ll be back to 3 posts a week at least 2/4 weeks a month.
• 15,000 pageviews – I want the blog to keep growing! We’ll see.
• 4,500 users

What tips do you have for how to drive traffic to your website?

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