Did I Meet My Blog Traffic Goals in August?

Another month, another blog traffic report. I really like doing this because it’s great to have a solid record of my traffic and the things that have impacted it. All this to say that I’m optimistic about this blog’s future and grateful to have all of you here. So let’s answer the question in the title of this post: Did I meet my blog traffic goals in August?

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Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique Pageviews: 9924 (-4% from July, +25.3% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 15.72% (-1.3% from July, -58.8% from last year)

Sessions: 5576 (+19.6% from July, +49.2% from last year)

Users: 4090 (+1.3% from July, +34.6% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1849 (+0.2% from July, +5.5% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 491 (+1.2% from July, +71% from last year)

How I keep my bounce rate so low

Social Media

Facebook: 1032 (+0.9% from July, +8.5% from last year)

Twitter: 3306 (-0.7% from July, +10.8% from last year)

Instagram: 2648 (-0.8% from July, +4.6% from last year)

Google+: 249 (+0.4% from July, +8.2% from last year)

Pinterest: 6458 (+0.3% from July, +23.9% from last year)

Tumblr: 3879 (+0.1% from July, +2% from last year)

Top Posts

1. 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
2. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
3. Is Chronic Illness a Disability?
4. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
5. Why Is Rheumatoid Arthritis Hard To Diagnose?
6. Hacks for Living with Chronic Conditions
7. What To Do in Boston This Summer
8. How Do Adults Celebrate Their Birthday?
9. 6 Reasons Why You Should Try Blogging
10. 40 Blog Post Ideas

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest (48.93%) – What I find interesting is that the pins that brought the most of this traffic are all for chronic illness posts! As you can see above, more than half of my top posts are health-based, so it makes sense that the popular pins are also health ones.
• Google (3.41%) – Not gonna lie, I wish this was higher. Especially because it was higher last month.
• Facebook (2.81%)
• Twitter (1.82%)

This source list does not include direct traffic, as that is not technically a source.

How I use Pinterest for blog traffic

Did I Meet My Blog Traffic Goals?

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts
• Big thing: specific keywords
  • As Allie from SavvyMamaBlogger says, “The best kinds of keywords to go after these days are those that answer specific questions. These questions often end up being great long-tail keywords too. Generally you’ll see forum results and poorly written content show up in the top of the search results on Google. THOSE KEYWORDS ARE ABSOLUTE GOLD! If you can write longer, more helpful content then you could easily outrank that content in a matter of weeks and months. Better rankings translates to more traffic!” (x). I’ve been getting ideas from autocomplete in the search bar, as Allie suggests. It has been super helpful, especially when I’ve been having trouble coming up with post ideas!
  • The most popular posts that I’ve written this month have been these posts, so it’s definitely working. However, I won’t know if this works long-term for a few months. I’ll definitely keep you guys posted!
  • The posts that I wrote as a part of this are Why Is Rheumatoid Arthritis Hard To Diagnose?, Most Popular Books Published in 2018 (So Far), 6 Reasons Why You Should Start Blogging, Is Chronic Illness a Disability?, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20.
• Started repinning older posts again
• Had my infusion at the end of the month and didn’t have guest posts for that time, which is when my blog traffic started decreasing.

I Haven’t Seen Results From

• Repinning older posts

What I Can Learn This Month

• Specific keywords can be helpful – As I mentioned, the most popular posts that I wrote this month were the posts in which I tried this keyword trick. The other hope (which Allie mentions her post) is that this will lead to an increase in overall domain authority. That would mean that my posts would come up sooner in search engine results, regardless of if that post used this keyword trick.

August Goals

• 8-10 posts – Success!
• Grow pageviews – Very close. I was actually on track to succeed, but then I took a week off for my infusion without guest posts. So we’ll see how things get in September, especially because my pageviews dipped a lot in the summer.
• Grow social media – I think the net difference was about the same. Some grew, some lost.

September Goals

• 8-10 posts
• 10,000 pageviews
• Grow social media

What have you tried to meet your blog traffic goals?

Like this post? Check out:

All blog traffic reports, 6 Reasons Why You Should Start Blogging, Tips for New Bloggers, How To Use SEO To Stand Out, 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools to Try in 2018