Successful Blogging Tips: The Simple Strategy that Grew My Blog by 32% in 1 Month

You know that we’re officially in a new year when I have a new blog traffic report! Blogging-wise, 2020 is off to a great start. As you can see from the title of this post, my blog traffic grew by 32% in January. And even better, I did it with a super simple strategy. (Is there anything better than when you find an easy and quick way to grow your blog? It almost never happens.) Per usual, I’m going to share my stats – blog traffic and social media, my top sources of traffic, and my most popular posts – and then get into the details of how I did it. Let’s get to it!

This post contains affiliate links.

All blog traffic reports

January 2020 Blog Traffic Report

Google Analytics Statistics

Pageviews: 14,648 (+32.87% from December, -18.5% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 20.91% (+3.7% from December, +11.22% from last year)

Sessions: 6,600 (+32.23% from December, -24.2% from last year)

Users: 5,731 (+35.77% from December, -28% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1,835 (+0.65% from December, – 1.5% from last year)

Email subscribers: 695 (-1.5% from December, +13.5% from last year)

How I keep my bounce rate so low

Webhostinghub.com Statistics

Pageviews: 123,364 (+27.33% from December, -58.4% from last year)

Sessions: 41,750 (+6.66% from December, +64.19% from last year)

Users: 2,512 (+22.47% from December, -45% from last year)

Social Media

Facebook: 1,084 (+0.18% from December, +4% from last year)

Twitter: 3,692 (+0.7% from December, +11.13% from last year)

Instagram: 2,942 (+1.62% from December, +14.5% from last year)

Pinterest: 9,220 (+0.82% from December, +22.47% from last year)

Tumblr: 3,981 (+0.07% from December, +1.73% from last year)

How I manage social media for my blog | How to get followers on Pinterest

Top Posts

1. 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
2. What Does Endometriosis Feel Like?
3. POTS and Heat Intolerance
4. Beginner’s Guide: Infusion for Arthritis
5. Fun Things To Do in Boston: A 3-Day Guide
6. The Products I Loved (And Wanted) in Grad School
7. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
8. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
9. The Lifestyle Changes I Made for My Rheumatoid Arthritis
10. Why Is Rheumatoid Arthritis So Hard to Diagnose?

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest (66.16%) – If you’re not treating Pinterest like a search engine, you’re missing out. Ever since I started doing that, Pinterest has brought over 50% of my blog traffic. Clearly, January was no exception! (Psst, I’m trying something extra with Pinterest for February, so you’ll hear about that in a few weeks!)
• Facebook (13.57%) – I’m in a lot of Facebook groups for bloggers, in addition to my Facebook page, so I’m glad to see that pay off. You can learn more about what I do with Facebook in my post about how I promote my posts.
• Search Engines (5.53%) – I try to utilize SEO in every post, so I’m glad to see that it pays off here, in addition to in my Pinterest work.

This does not include direct traffic.

How to use Pinterest for blog traffic | How to use SEO to stand out

Successful Blogging Tips: The Simple Strategy that Grew My Blog by 32% in 1 Month

What I did

• How I promote my blog posts (updated a few weeks ago!)
• The simple strategy: individual marketing plans for each post
• Participated in an Ultimate Bundles email sale, which usually leads to losing email subscribers
• Changed my Sumo share options (see left side of the screen) to get rid of Google+ and added LinkedIn

Why I switched to MailerLite from MailChimp for my email newsletter | The best WordPress plugins: the plugins I use and love

I haven’t seen results from

• Changing Sumo share options – I’m not surprised by this at all, but at least I don’t have an obsolete social media network listed now! Google shut down Google+ at least a year ago, but I forgot about it in my Sumo options until recently. I decided to add LinkedIn because of my blogging/social media instructional posts.

What I can learn this month

• Don’t use the same promoting strategy for every blog post – Obviously, I have my standard way of promoting posts, which isn’t changing. But what Sharon discusses in that worksheet about creating a marketing plan for each blog post is that a standard procedure is not enough for change. Which was pretty obvious once I thought about it; how can I do the same thing for each blog post and expect my traffic to grow? For every single blog post, I thought about what are special ways (for me and that post) to promote my posts. Am I a member of online communities who might benefit from seeing that post? Is there a special hashtag or topic being discussed online that I could use? That worksheet/ebook linked above is so simple (hence the name of this post) that it was feasible to use for each post. It obviously made a huge difference! This made such a big difference for me personally because this blog is not a single-niche blog. I categorize it as lifestyle, but, as you all know, I write a lot of posts about blogging and social media, as well as health.

January Goals

• 5 blog posts – Success!
• 12,000 page views – Success!

February Goals

• 4 blog posts
• 13,000 page views

What are your successful blogging tips?

Like this post? Check out:

11 Tools To Grow Blog Traffic: 2020, Why Isn’t My Blog Getting Traffic?, What Do Bloggers Do?, My Proven Method for Blogging with Limited Time