June Blog Traffic Report

Another month, another traffic report. I’m actually really pleased with this one, though! My traffic increased by 28% in June, and my social media grew, too. What’s extra exciting about this, though, is that this happened in a month where I had surgery and was pretty much offline for 2 weeks. How did this happen? Well, I have a pretty good idea …

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Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique Pageviews: 6542 (+28% from May, +20,9% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 54.81% (+0.2% from May, +462% from last year)

Sessions: 3735 (+25.7% from May, -27% from last year)

Users: 2588 (+1.6% from May, -29% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1747 (+0.4% from May, +2.6% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 266 (+1.9% from May, +47.8% from last year)

Social Media

Facebook: 942 (+0.6% from May, +10.3% from last year)

Twitter: 2918 (+0.5% from May, +17.5% from last year)

Instagram: 2639 (+21.2% from May, +97.8% from last year)

Google+: 215 (+0.9% from May, +18% from last year)

Pinterest: 4964 (+1.8% from May, +68.7% from last year)

Tumblr: 3787 (+0.5% from May, +5.6% from last year)

Top Posts

1. The Cost of Chronic Illness & How To Make It Easier
2. Chronic Pain and Loving Someone with It
3. What To Do in Boston this Summer
4. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
5. A Weekend in Boston
6. Erin Condren Teacher Planner End-of-Year Review
7. How To Pack for a Summer Trip
8. 40 Blog Post Ideas
9. 26 Things About Me Because I’m 26 Today
10. 30 Things About Living with POTS

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest – What is so great about this is that it reinforces how important it is to optimize your posts for Pinterest. This was the big thing that I focused on several months ago, and I have been impressed with the results since then. Can it be time consuming when you’re getting used to it? Absolutely. But the fact that Pinterest has been my leading source of traffic for months shows that it’s worth it. Besides, you work hard on your posts – you want people to see them.
• Direct – This is great because it means people were coming directly to the blog and weren’t being referred from other places. This could be people in general going directly OR it could be they saw me post about a new post on Instagram or Snapchat and went directly to the blog because of that. If you’re one of those people, could you tell me?
• Facebook – This is not surprising because I’m a member of many Facebook groups for bloggers and I post a lot about my blog posts on my Facebook page.
• Twitter – Twitter is my favorite form of social media because I’m a words person. It’s good to know that my posting there is not going unnoticed.

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts
• Big thing this month: write longer posts
• Discovered some of the links in posts weren’t working; fixed them
• Joined an Instagram comment pod
• Instagram loop giveaway
• Had guest posts while offline for surgery

I Haven’t Seen Results From

• Fixing the links

What I Can Learn from This Month

• Writing longer posts works – This is the first time in at least a month or two that my traffic has increased, and I’m surprised about that because I was offline for 2 weeks post surgery. That seems to demonstrate that writing longer posts does help, which is something I have seen other people talk about before. Why? I’m not 100% sure, but I have some ideas. 1, there’s more information in the post for people to learn from. 2, it’s easier to read than a post of mostly bullet points (something that I am guilty off). 3, the SEO terms are worked in more naturally than if there is less text to go around. Whether the main reason is one of these things or a combination of all three, I know that writing longer posts is something that I will keep doing.
• An Instagram comment pod can really help your Instagram engagement – I’ve heard a lot about comment pods for a while (it’s a group of bloggers who comment on each other’s pictures), but I was really sold on them after I joined one. With Instagram’s annoying algorithm, people are shown more pictures that have had interaction (likes or comments) than new ones, and by having more people comment on my pictures, these pictures are showing up in the timeline of more people, bringing more engagement overall.

Goals for June

• Increase pageviews – success!
• Lower bounce rate – fail
• 9-12 posts – success! (Barely)

Goals for July

• 7,000 monthly pageviews
• Bounce rate below 54%
• 9-12 posts

What has helped your blog traffic grow the most?

Like this post? Check out:

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