Why I’m Focusing on One Big Blog Traffic Boosting Tool a Month

Another month has come and gone, which means another blog traffic report. February was … interesting. My traffic grew overall over the course of the month, but I had a big traffic drop in the middle of January, so I’m still catching up to where I was before that. But my social media is growing slowly but surely, so that’s good.

Like I said at the beginning of February, you need to keep doing the “magic” to grow your traffic. You can’t just do one task once and expect it to make a big difference immediately. Sometimes that’s the case, but not usually. With this in mind, this year I’m choosing one task to really focus on each month and I’ll continue doing it the next month. This way, I’ll get a good idea of what really works. In February, I focused on writing great grabbing headlines for my blog post titles. In March, I’m going to try to make more content upgrades.

FYI – In order to properly compare statistics from month to month, the data in this blog traffic report is from 31 days – February + the last few days in January.

All Traffic Reports

Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique Pageviews: 7,880 (+10.5% from last month, -30.7% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 54.32% (+53.9% from last month, +170% from last year)

Sessions: 4,501 (-20.1% from last month, +13% from last year)

Users: 4,012 (+19% from last month, -37% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1,729 (+0.4% from last month, +3% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 249 (+0.4% from last month, +124% from last year)

Social Media

Facebook: 923 (+0.9% from last month, +13% from last year)

Twitter: 2758 (+1.3% from last month, +25.5% from last year)

Instagram: 1851 (+6% from last month, +75.4% from last year)

Google+: 205 (+0.9% from last month, +21.3% from last year)

Pinterest: 4378 (+4% from last month, +107% from last year)

Tumblr: 3695 (+0.4% from last month, +5.3% from last year)

Top Posts

1. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
2. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
3. A Weekend Trip to Boston
4. Christmas Gift Ideas for Dad or Anyone
5. A Note on Living with Acute Chronic Pain
6. Why You Should Be Buying ColourPop Makeup
7. 40 Blog Post Ideas
8. How To Get Blogging Traffic: My Blogging Advice To Actually Grow Your Blog
9. What I Learned from Website Copywriting
10. 4 Questions To Ask Before Traveling with Chronic Pain

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest – I think that the fact that Pinterest is now first in the list shows that the work I did on making really Pinterest-friendly images in January (and continued in February) is paying off.
• Google – Proof that my work on search engine optimization works! Woohoo!
• Direct – Like I’ve said in previous blog traffic posts, if you came directly to the blog from Instagram or Snapchat, let me know! It’s hard to know what’s really direct (aka something thinking they want to see something on the blog so they type in the URL) and what’s direct but from my Snapchat or Instagram/Instagram stories. I would love to get a better feel for the difference, so let me know if you’ve ever come directly here because of one of those!
• Facebook – I’m not that surprised by this because I’m a member of multiple Facebook groups, and I promote my blog posts there. I’ve talked about this in my post on how I promote my blog posts, but I do a fair amount of sharing on Facebook.

Traffic Analysis

What I Did:

• How I promote my blog posts
• Like I said, I really focused on creating catchy blog post titles. It has been important to me that I write titles that would make people want to read the post but that weren’t clickbait; I don’t want the title to show a different post than the content does. So I worked on writing catchy titles that make people want to read the post and ensuring the post lives up to the title.
  • The pages that helped me create blog post headlines: Olyvia, Verve, and Raelyn Tan
• Instagram loop giveaway
• Tried to follow 1 Instagram account a day. This is more about engaging than anything else. In the past, I’ve set goals for myself to engage on Instagram for 5ish minutes a day 3 days a week, and I just can’t stick with it. By committing to following 1 account a day, I make myself go through different hashtags I use on my posts to find accounts that I want to follow, and in the process, I like and comment on posts, aka I engage. Multiple posts about growing Instagram followers say that you should engage on Instagram in authentic ways in order to grow your own followers; I’ve found a way to do that.
• Changed the blog link on Twitter to go to the About page instead of the homepage to hopefully decrease bounce rate

I Haven’t Seen Results From:

• Changing the blog link on Twitter – I just did this at the end of the month, so hopefully this will help in the long-run!

What I Can Learn from This Month:

• Choosing one big blog traffic boosting tool a month and mastering it really can help. Of the 10 most-read posts in February, 4 of them were published in February. It isn’t usual to have that many from the month in the top 10 posts, and while obviously writing great posts can affect that, people don’t necessarily know that it’s a great post until they read it. How do you get them to read it? Great titles.

Goals for February:

• 8,000 pageviews – Close but no cigar
• 9-12 posts – I posted 8 times, so I missed this. This happened because I had a week (last week I believe) where I was so overwhelmed with work and was dealing with my body being stupid and I could only focus on the blog or school; I chose school
• Grow social media followers – Success!

Goals for March:

• 8,000 pageviews
• 9-12 posts
• Bounce rate below 50%

Like this post? Check out:

7 Things I Did To Get More Blog Traffic in 2016, 10 Ways To Get More Blog Traffic, 5 Most Amazing Blog Post Ideas To Bring You Traffic for Years