March Blog Traffic Report

What’s really exciting to me today is that this marks 1 year of monitoring my blog traffic. For the past 365 days, I have been actively trying to grow my blog traffic and working towards a tangible goal of 20,000 monthly page views on Google Analytics. Like working for any goal, it hasn’t been a straight journey of success. For the first couple of months, my traffic increased slowly. Then I moved to self-hosted WordPress, and my traffic jumped dramatically. And then the opposite happened for a few months before things going back to my new normal at the beginning of this year. My hope is that it won’t be long now until I reach that goal of 20,000 monthly views. But who knows? All I can do is work hard and hope that my work pays off.

Original Statistics

All Traffic Reports

Traffic Report

Current Statistics (March 1-31)

Unique Pageviews: 13,391 ( +245% from the start, +7.8% from February)

Bounce Rate: 6.05% ( -92.7% from the start, +115% from February)

Sessions: 6,062 ( +115% from the start, +52.3% from February)

Users: 4,455 ( +131.2% from the start, -30% from February)

Bloglovin: 1,684 ( +25% from the start, +0.8% from February)

Email Subscribers: 135 (started at 0, +21.6% from February)

Social Media

Facebook: 826 ( +37% from the start, +1.3% from February)

Twitter: 2,369 ( +53% from the start, +7.8% from February)

Instagram: 1,213 ( +202% from the start, +14.9% from February)

Google+: 171 ( +103% from the start, +1.2% from February)

Pinterest: 2,252 ( +146% from the start, +6.8% from February)

Tumblr: 3,537 ( +1% from February)

Top Posts

1. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
2. 40 Blog Post Ideas
3. Blog Post Ideas for 2016
4. Christmas Gift Ideas for Dad or Anyone
5. 40 Blog Post Ideas for Lifestyle Bloggers
6. A Weekend Trip to Boston
7. Arthritis Foundation Advocacy Summit 2016
8. How To Pack for a Summer Trip
9. February Blog Traffic Report
10. The Five Books That Changed My Life

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts
• Giveaway through Becca Dorr
• Traveled and experienced higher pain than normal
• Had 3 guest posts
• Made some changes to The Greatest People You’ll Ever Meet mailing list – I’m now sending out a newsletter twice a month instead of once. The one in the middle of the month contains a list of all posts so far that month, and I’ll now include a list for the second half of the month for the end-of-the-month newsletter. I’m only sending out one more newsletter a month than I am right now, but it will hopefully drive more views.
• Attended Melyssa’s free workshop on building Pinterest and email list in 30 days and made changes to my Pinterest because of it

What Worked

• Becca’s giveaway
• Melyssa’s workshop

What I Haven’t Seen Results From

• I didn’t do much, but what I did do worked!

What I Can Learn from These Statistics

• You don’t have to spend hours and hours and hours on building your blog traffic! I attended Melyssa’s hour-long workshop and spent approximately 30 minutes making changes because of it and it has dramatically improved my blog traffic.
• Getting into a system of how you promote your posts is a GREAT idea. It takes me less than 15 minutes to schedule my blog promotions after scheduling a blog post, and I do the same things for every blog post. It is all automatic to me now, and I would not have the blog traffic I do if it wasn’t for that.
• While guest posts are better for my blog than no new posts, new and original posts are better for my blog than guest posts. I’ve known this for a while, but I wanted to bring it up because I had more guest posts than usual in March because of my trip to D.C. I love having guest posts, though, because sometimes I’m not feeling well enough to write a new post or I need a break or sometimes it’s just nice to have someone else’s perspective on here.

Previous Goals

• 15,000 monthly pageviews – Fail, unfortunately. I think this was because of a couple of things. 1) Like I just said, I had more guest posts than usual because I was in D.C. 2) Even with guest posts, I had fewer blog posts in general in March. In February, I had 14 blog posts and in January, I had 12. In March, I had 9.
• 8,000 sessions – Also fail, which I think was probably for the same reasons. I can promote old blog posts all the time, but I still get visitors and sessions from people following on Bloglovin, aka they mostly read my blog when there are new posts.

Plans and Goals for April

• 15,000 monthly pageviews – So long as my traffic keeps going how it has been in the last week, this is totally possible.
• 8,000 sessions
• 6,000 visitors

What have you done to improve your blog traffic?