Well, we’ve passed Halloween and are barreling towards Thanksgiving. I don’t hate it! This is my favorite time of year, except for the stress of school that comes with it. But I’m starting November off with happy blog news – my traffic increased in October, as did my social media followers! Before I get into what I did, let’s look at what exactly increased and by how much.
Traffic Report
Current Statistics
Unique Pageviews: 7422(+6.9% from September, +5.4% from last year)
Bounce Rate: 10.53% (+15.7% from September, -82% from last year)
Sessions: 3637 (+18.6% from September, -9% from last year)
Users: 2632 (+12.2% from September, -25% from last year)
Bloglovin: 1767 (0% change from September, +3.4% from last year)
Email Subscribers: 307 (+4.4% from September, +36% from last year)
How I keep my bounce rate so low
Social Media
Facebook: 969 (+1.8% from September, +10.4% from last year)
Twitter: 3093 (+2.6% from September, +16.4%from last year)
Instagram: 2557 (+0.9% from September, +58% from last year)
Google+: 237 (+1.7% from September, +20.9% from last year)
Pinterest: 5439 (+1.9% from September, +44.6% from last year)
Tumblr: 3827 (+0.3% from September, +4.9% from last year)
Top Posts
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
- What Abled People Need To Know about Disability
- A Weekend in Boston
- Top Drugstore Makeup
- Endometriosis: The Disease Women Aren’t Talking About
- What You Need To Know about Arthritis
- Beginner’s Guide: Seronegative Rheumatoid Arthritis
- 40 Blog Post Ideas
- 5 Life Changing Books
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest (34.89%) – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Pinterest is a blogger’s best friend. I’ve heard people say that you should think about it as a search engine, and I completely agree. But it’s unlike a search engine like Google because the quality of the image is just as important as the search engine terms. I started focusing on optimizing my images for Pinterest back at the beginning of the year, and I’ve continued what I learned. I strongly suggest you look into optimizing your blog for Pinterest!
- Direct (24.75%) – This makes me happy because it means nearly a quarter of the page views in October came from people coming directly here.
- Twitter (15.73%) – I love this because Twitter is the big thing I focused on this month! Scroll down to see what I did. Honestly, I didn’t think Twitter had helped until I was looking at traffic sources. Last month, Twitter brought me 6.92% of my traffic, less than half of what it did this month.
- Facebook (9.51%) – As I mention in my post on how I promote my blog posts, I’m a member of multiple Facebook groups for bloggers. That plus my Facebook page really help drive traffic.
Traffic Analysis
What I Did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Big tool this month: getting traffic from Twitter. Things I did to optimize my Twitter to get more blog traffic include changing the header, updating my bio, started pinning a tweet that promotes a blog post and changing that pinned tweet every week or so, and added a link to my mailing list.
- Joined Helene’s free Instagram challenge
- Featured in Logojoy’s Expert Roundup
- Went through and added more CTAs to more post
- Changed the email signup in my sidebar
- Spoke at Blog Camp Boston
- Got incredibly sick (bronchitis) and only published 1 post the week of the 16th
I Haven’t Seen Results From
- Adding more CTAs to posts
- Spoke at Blog Camp – This did increase my social followers, but it didn’t affect my blog views.
What I Can Learn
- Twitter can affect your blog traffic, but it might not be obvious
- If you want to grow your Instagram, you need to be intentional about it.
October Goals
- 7,000 monthly page views – Success!
- Maintain bounce rate below 20% – Success!
- 9-12 posts – Success!
November Goals
- Maintain page views
- Maintain bounce rate below 20%
- 9-12 posts
Has Twitter helped your blog traffic?
Like this post? Check out:
How To Use Twitter as a Blogger + Free List of Things To Post, 8 Ways To Lower Your Bounce Rate, 10 Things Every Blog Needs, Why an Editorial Calendar Is Really Worth the Time + 164 Blog Post Ideas
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.
i love reading reports like this! thanks so much!