All in all, I’m pretty happy with my November traffic. It didn’t change much from October, but I had several guest posts because of my infusion, I had my infusion, I felt horrendous for at least half the month, there was Thanksgiving, and I’m in the middle of finals. So it definitely could have been better, but I kind of expected it to drop due to everything I had going on. And plus, in the middle of the month, I had over 5,000 page views (middle of October to middle of November). But let’s get to the statistics, what I did, and what worked so we can work on getting more blog traffic together.
Previous Blog Traffic Reports
Original Statistics
Traffic Report
Current Stats (December 1)
Unique Pageviews: 4502 (+19% from the start, -2.1% from October)
Bounce Rate: 83.08% (-0.8% from the start, +0.1% from October)
Sessions: 3185 (+13.3% from the start, -4.2% from October)
Users: 2614 (+35.8% from the start, -9.6% from October)
Bloglovin: 1556 (+15.6% from the start, +4.5% from October)
Email Subscribers: 75 (started at 0, +29.3% from October)
Social Media
Facebook: 747 (+24% from the start, +1.6% from October)
Twitter: 1908 (+23% from the start, 5.4% from October)
Instagram: 973 (+142% from the start, +8.1% from October)
Google+: 136 (+61.9% from the start, +2.3% from October)
Pinterest: 1850 (+102% from the start, +9.8% from October)
Tumblr: 3417 (+1% from October)
Top Posts
- 40 Blog Post Ideas
- Navigating the Holidays with a Chronic Illness
- On Plagiarism in Blogging
- A Life Update
- October Blogging Traffic Report
- How To Save Spoons When Cooking
- Holiday Card Grammar
- Gift Guide: Monogrammed
- Why You Should Be a Global Citizen
- The 8 Things a Millennial with Arthritis Wants You To Know
Traffic Analysis
What I Did:
- How I promote my blog posts
- Added rich pins
- Changed my Pinterest strategy
- Updated About page
- Changed permalink structure for SEO
- Edited CSS so links are underlined
- Started scheduling more social shares
- Made my Snapchat public and started to use it to promote blog posts
- Using my Instagram to promote blog posts
- Started to use social media more purposefully, even non-scheduled posts
- Wrote more shareable posts
- Facebook ad that actually when through and stayed published
- Promoted Pin
- Sponsored Venus Trapped in Mars and Rhyme & Ribbons
- Giveaway with Letters from Rita and giveaway led by Helene in Between ($130 to Starbucks and it’s still going, by the way!)
- Made sure that all links are opening in new pages
- Many more things that I learned from Helene’s Quit Your Job To Blog course. Because she charges for the course, I will not share the specific things I did that I learned from her. That wouldn’t be fair to her or to anyone else who has paid for the course.
What Worked:
- What I did from the Quit Your Job To Blog course
- Adjusted social media strategies
- Facebook ad and promoted pin
- Writing more shareable posts
I Haven’t Seen Results From:
- Updating my About page – This is the kind of thing that will hopefully keep new readers coming back, but I may not notice that this page is what made them become regular readers.
- Making sure all links open in a new page – Well, I’m attempting to, any way. I installed a plug-in that is supposed to do that, but I don’t know if it’s working. If I can get it working, then hopefully my bounce rate will decrease dramatically.
- Snapchat – A public Snapchat is what all the kids are doing, but since my followers are mostly friends from real life, it may be a while before this helps. (Add me! I’m katebmitchell)
Previous Goals:
- Keep increasing statistics – I kinda maybe reached this?
- Reach over 2,000 Twitter followers – Nope, but I’m over 1,900, so that’s cool. Follow me if you haven’t already!
- Reach 1,000 Instagram followers – No, but I’m super close! Less than 30 to go! Follow me if you haven’t already.
Plans and Goals:
- 1,000 Instagram followers
- 2,000 Twitter followers
- 5,000 monthly page views
- Decrease bounce rate
What helped you get more blog traffic?
This post contains affiliate links. This means that if you click and sign up or purchase, I will be paid. For more information, check out my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting Kate the (Almost) Great!
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.
This is super interesting! I love reading traffic reports…they give me so much inspiration of what I can be doing to improve my blog. I have been thinking about making my snapchat public, because like you said, it seems to be all the rage right now. But I just don’t know if I would be into it! I’m interested in seeing if you find it makes a difference in December!
Thank you! In terms of Snapchat, I think it’s going to be most helpful in getting my non-blog friends to read posts. I don’t advertise my blog much on my personal Facebook (mostly because I know my friends would get annoyed with me if I did), so if I do it on Snapchat every now and then, hopefully that will help.
Wow, this is really interesting! I admire you for talking so openly about this. I know a lot of people are hush hush about their stats, so it’s nice to see someone so willing to talk about it. I’m going to go check out your other posts to see what you’ve been doing to increase your stats, I’m always looking for new ideas!
Ivory Avenue
Thank you so much! I try and talk openly about it as much as possible because I love traffic reports. It’s almost more important to me to know what didn’t help as it is to know what did.