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.
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
- Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
- 40 Blog Post Ideas
- Blog Post Ideas for 2016
- Christmas Gift Ideas for Dad or Anyone
- 40 Blog Post Ideas for Lifestyle Bloggers
- A Weekend Trip to Boston
- Arthritis Foundation Advocacy Summit 2016
- How To Pack for a Summer Trip
- February Blog Traffic Report
- 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?
Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
What is this free workshop you speak of? How did I miss this?!
I’m not sure! I believe I knew of it because I’m on her mailing list.
Great job Kate! xx
This is awesome! I really need to start setting some true number goals and start measuring it like you do!
I need to follow this and see if work for me. Congrats 🙂