How To Increase Site Traffic: August Blog Traffic Report

Another month, another blog traffic report. I’m pretty pleased with things this month, both for blog statistics and social media. My hope is that things continue increasing over the rest of the year. So why have things turned out so well? I used a couple of different tools this month, and they definitely worked. Check out the traffic report and then find out what I did that helped things so much!

All Traffic Reports

Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique pageviews: 7918 (+35% from July, -26% from last year)

Bounce rate: 26.72% (-53% from July, -12% from last year)

Sessions: 3736 (+11% from July, -53% from last year)

Users: 3038 (+5.7% from July, -39% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1752 (+0.05% from July, +2.4% from last year)

Email subscribers: 287 (+6.2% from July, +44.9% from last year)

Social Media

Facebook: 951 (+0.4% from July, +9.9% from last year)

Twitter: 2984 (+0.3% from July, +17% from last year)

Instagram: 2531 (-0.1% from July, +88.9% from last year)

Google+: 230 (+4.5% from July, +20.4% from last year)

Pinterest: 5214 (+2% from July, +54.2% from last year)

Tumblr: 3801 (+7.9% from July, +5.14% from last year)

Top Posts

1. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
2. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
3. Dating with Chronic Medical Conditions
4. Relationships and Chronic Pain
5. A Weekend in Boston
6. Best Books To Read Right Now
7. The 5 Books That Changed My Life
8. 40 Blog Post Ideas
9. How To Pack for a Summer Trip
10. A Letter to the Mom Who Yelled at Me on the Bus for My Disability

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest: 39.62% of traffic sources – I love seeing this because it shows that all the work I put into my Pinterest account is working. I spend at least an hour once a week scheduling Pinterest content for the upcoming week, and that helps grow my account. Also, I do my best to have a great alt text for all the images on here so they’re easier to find on Pinterest. That helps people who aren’t following me to find my images, and then of course my followers see my images, too. Plus, I’m a member of multiple group boards, which helps get my images seen.
• Facebook: 14.01% of traffic sources – I’m also a member of many blogging Facebook groups, so between that and my Facebook page, that helps a lot with my traffic.
• Twitter: 8.91% of traffic sources – Twitter is my favorite social media platform because words are my thing, so it’s nice that this brings me a fair amount of traffic. As I mention in my post about how I promote my blog posts (see below), I mention RT accounts in some of my tweets with blog posts, so that helps them get shared.
• Google: 7.21% of traffic sources – I don’t use SEO in every single one of my blog posts unless it fits in easily. If it would be poorly written by using SEO keywords, I don’t use it. But it looks like the posts that I do use SEO are helping!

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts
• Collaboration posts (books to read, holy grail beauty products, what to do once you’ve been diagnosed with a chronic illness)
• 1 post that had a lot of links to my other posts (best study tips for college)
• Free download that didn’t require signing up for my email list
• Featured on sweettartbeauty’s Instagram
• Added call to action in most popular posts and about page (end of July)
• Added top bar for mailing list with freebie included (end of July)

I Haven’t Seen Results From

• Collaboration posts possibly – This is hard to tell because I don’t think that this did a ton for my traffic immediately, by more and more people have been sharing those posts. Plus, the post about book to read is in the top 10 most popular posts this month, so maybe it did help. However, the collaboration posts were really great because they got me connected with more bloggers and they were posts that I didn’t have to do much for! I collected the responses, made an image, and tied it all together, which is less work than a usual post.

What I Can Learn from this Month

• Call to action at the top of the page and in posts really helps grow the mailing list – Oh my goodness does this help. I think that this is the most that my mailing list has grown since I started it. I have had people unsubscribe once the newsletter goes out, but it still leaves me with a lot of subscribers. I try to make my newsletter helpful – with a recap of the month, free downloads, more of a chat about what’s going on in my life, a preview of what’s to come, etc. – and I don’t send it more than twice a month, but there are still people who only signed up to get the freebies and I can’t blame them for that.
• Mixing up freebies that don’t require signing up for the mailing list with ones that do can help – I don’t want the free downloads I make to be only available to my mailing list because then a) people who don’t want to sign up are just not going to get the freebies and b) freebies can be good for traffic as well as growing the mailing list. I’m going to try to switch it up so because the last free download I made was available to everyone, the next one will require signing up for my newsletter to get.

Goals for August

• 7,000 monthly page views – Success!
• Bounce rate below 54% – Success! I think this is mostly due to writing a post full of links to other posts, but I’m not positive that is the case.
• 9-12 posts – Success!

Goals for September

• 8,000 monthly page views
• Maintain bounce rate below 40%
• 9-12 posts

What is your biggest trip to increase site traffic?

Like this post? Check out:

10 Things Every Blog Needs, Why an Editorial Calendar Is Really Worth the Time + 164 Blog Post Ideas, 5 Most Amazing Blog Post Ideas To Bring You Traffic for Years