It’s hard to believe it, but I’m already a year and a half into this journey of publishing my blog traffic each month in the search of openly sharing my attempts to increase traffic. Since it has been that long, I decided to start something new this month. Instead of comparing my blog traffic to that of the month before and that of the first month I started keeping track, I’m now going to look back at the month before and the year before. That means that this month I’m comparing this month’s traffic to September’s and October 2015’s.
Traffic Report
Current Statistics
Unique Pageviews: 7,041 (-22% from September, +53% from 1 year ago)
Bounce Rate: 56.90% (+23.5% from September, -32% from 1 year ago)
Sessions: 3,993 (-21% from September, +18% from 1 year ago)
Users: 3,467 (-21% from September, +19.9% from 1 year ago)
Bloglovin: 1,708 (-0.3% from September, +10.2% from 1 year ago)
Email Subscribers: 225 (+4.6% from September, +287.9% from 1 year ago)
Social Media
Facebook: 877 (+1.4% from September, +19% from 1 year ago)
Twitter: 2,655 (+2% from September, +46% from 1 year ago)
Instagram: 1,615 (-3% from September, +79% from 1 year ago)
Google+: 196 (+2% from September, +47% from 1 year ago)
Pinterest: 3,760 (+3% from September, +123% from 1 year ago)
Tumblr: 3,646 (+0.3% from September, +7.8% from 1 year ago)
Top Posts
- Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
- 40 Blog Post Ideas
- Chronic Pain and Loving Someone with It
- Blog Post Ideas for 2016
- A Weekend Trip to Boston
- 40 Blog Post Ideas for Lifestyle Bloggers
- Being a Chronic Pain Patient in the Opioid Abuse Crisis
- Christmas Gift Ideas for Dad (Or Anyone)
- Need Grammar Help?
- The Lifestyle Changes I Made for My Rheumatoid Arthritis
Traffic Analysis
What I Did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Found out what time is best to post on Instagram to increase chances of high engagement
- Scheduled posts on Twitter and Facebook promoting all posts from the past year that aren’t time-specific (like holiday posts)
- Changed the feature color to make links stand out more
- Fixed Popular Posts page – has probably been out of commission for a while
- Fixed 404 Error page
I Haven’t Seen Results From
- Changing the feature color
- Fixing the Popular Posts page
What I Can Learn From This
- Scheduling promotions of old posts makes a difference, especially since my follower count has increased since I published older posts.
Goals for October
- 9-13 posts – Success! I posted 11 times.
- Engage on Instagram at least 3 days a week for at least 10 minutes at a time – I did much better this month (I managed this 2 weeks and did it 2 times in 2 weeks)
- 10,000 pageviews – Nope. Not even close. So frustrating! My only consolation is that my blog traffic was much lower in the middle of the month, so the end-of-the-month statistics were still better than it was a few weeks ago.
- 30% bounce rate – Similarly, I didn’t manage it. Again, so frustrating!
Goals for November
- 9-12 posts
- Engage on Instagram at least 3 days a week for at least 10 minutes at a time
- 10,000 pageviews
- 40% bounce rate
What have you done recently to increase traffic to your blog?
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.
Do you ever have giveaways or join them, it really increases social media traffic!
Yup! I’ve done a lot of them over the years I’ve been blogging. I haven’t done as many recently because they aren’t as common and I have to use my money intentionally because I’m paying for grad school.