For years, I very intentionally planned my social media content along with my blog content. But 2 years ago, I stopped. I had too much going on! I started doing them again in October again because I figured it was worth a try. Was I missing out? Or did I waste time for years working on them? In this blog traffic report, I’m sharing my traffic from October, as well as what exactly I did with these editorial calendars, and whether or not I’m sticking with it moving forward.
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Traffic Report
Google Analytics Statistics
Page views: 7868 (-25% from September, -39% from last year)
Bounce Rate: 31.83% (+10.16% from September, +33% from last year)
Sessions: 6601 (-25.3% from September, +7.29% from last year)
Users: 5416 (-11% from September, +1.84% from last year)
Email subscribers: 717 (+1.84% from September, +2.42% from last year)
How I keep my bounce rate so low | How to track blog traffic in Google Analytics
Webhostinghub.com Statistics
Page views: 216,747 (+3.88% from September, +112.62% from last year)
Sessions: 20,659 (-9.5% from September, -46% from last year)
Users: 9,374 (-11.4% from September, +457.6% from last year)
Social Media
Facebook: 1146 (+0.08% from September, +6.11% from last year)
Twitter: 3675 (-0.01% from September, -0.5% from last year)
Instagram: 3107 (+0.7% from September, +9.4% from last year)
Pinterest: 10755 (+2.39% from September, +19.67% from last year)
Tumblr: 3986 (0% change from September, -0.5% from last year)
How I manage social media for my blog | How to get followers on Pinterest
Top Posts
- What Does Endometriosis Feel Like?
- What To Do When Chronic Pain Becomes Too Much
- Beginner’s Guide: Rheumatoid Arthritis Flare Up
- POTS and Heat Intolerance
- The Products I Loved (And Wanted) in Grad School
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- The Lifestyle Changes I Made for My Rheumatoid Arthritis
- What Is the Difference between Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis?
- What Does Arthritis Pain Feel Like?
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest (75.06%) – What else is there to say? Spend time on your Pinterest strategy, treat Pinterest like a search engine, take the Pinterest with Ell course (it’s only $39!), make new pins.
- Search engines (7.43%) – It’s validating to see this number given how much time I spend on SEO! If you count this number with Pinterest, then SEO brings over 82% of my traffic.
- Twitter (2.73%) – This is really notable because it’s a direct result of spending time on a social media editorial calendar. I know this because Twitter doesn’t often make this list!
- Facebook (2.48%) – Between my Facebook page and groups for bloggers, I’m glad to see this number.
This does not include direct traffic.
How to use Pinterest for blog traffic | How to use SEO to stand out
Traffic Analysis
What I did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Personal life: spent October in and out of the hospital and had surgery
- Big thing: using editorial calendar for managing social media
- I stopped doing this a few years ago, but for 5 years I was meticulous about planning and managing my social media.
- This involves intentionally planning out social media posts for Twitter, Facebook, and now Pinterest. I do this in Google docs with one tab per social media network.
- Everyday on Twitter I share: a blog post of someone else, a question to encourage engagement, an inspirational quote, and one of my blog posts. I schedule Twitter posts with Buffer.
- Everyday on Facebook I share one of my blog posts and I alternate sharing other people’s blog posts, a question to encourage engagement, and an inspirational quote (with an image for it). I also schedule Facebook posts with Buffer.
- This helps me be more intentional with what I’m sharing and make sure I’m not sharing the same posts multiple times in one month. I share other people’s posts to help build community. I share inspirational quotes so others interact with my content and so I’m not only sharing links to my posts. I ask questions to build community as well as to not solely share links to my posts.
- I’m now using my editorial calendars to help track whether or not I’ve made new pins for older blog posts. I, of course, schedule Pinterest posts with Tailwind.
- I’m also planning out my newsletter far more than I ever have before. In fact, I have 14 months of newsletters planned out! (Sign up here)
- Trying Tailwind Create to make new pins – This is Tailwind’s new smart tool for making new images. You add a link to a post, the title, choose some photos (including from stock images they have), and it makes a bunch of images. You choose with ones you like and download or schedule them! Are these pins the best ones? Not usually. But it’s easy and perfect for when you don’t have a lot of time or energy. For example, if you have a surprise medical issue that leads to being hospitalized 3 times in 1 month and having surgery. Pinterest is now really giving attention to new pins for old(er) posts, so making new pins is crucial.
- Working through the materials in The Genius Blogger’s Toolkit, which I bought in September. Here is what I’ve done so far:
- Holiday Spike, a course designed to get more traffic and make more money during the holiday season
- Gotten new Canva templates from multiple sources
- Gotten new stock images from multiple sources
- 52Prompts, a course with 52 email newsletter prompts. This really helped with planning out my newsletter!
How to get the most out of Tailwind for Pinterest
I haven’t seen results from
- Nothing – So here’s the deal: In October, I played around with my Google Analytics plugin settings, which is what I believe caused my numbers to drop in Analytics. I think this because my statistics for my website hosting and for WordPress showed an increase in traffic. Even if the numbers themselves are always different, I’ve never had WordPress stats increase and my hosting site stats increase and have Analytics drop. Never. So take it from me – don’t mess around with your settings!
What I can learn this month
- Having a social media editorial calendar is so crucial – I came to this decision a couple of ways.
- One, for the first time in a couple of months, my Twitter and Facebook followers and engagement numbers is moving forward. It has been stagnant for a while, but I’m seeing things moving in a good direction. I think that this is due to the fact that using a social media editorial calendar helps me keep my brand per say (chronic health + life with a chronic health primary audience) front of mind and help me create focused content.
- Two, October was full of medical stuff for me. Like I mentioned, I had 3 hospital admittances and surgery. Planning my social media out well in advance helped me not lose social media followers and, overall, gain them. It wasn’t planned, and the most planned event had only a week heads up. I already had social media content scheduled or written and waiting to be scheduled. And that made a big difference! With social media overall, if you aren’t sharing content, you’re losing followers and audience.
- Three, I didn’t feel overwhelmed due to my calendar(s). It doesn’t take that long to come up with everything that will go in the calendar and I can do a week’s worth for Twitter and Facebook in 30 minutes tops. Actually scheduling them with Buffer takes half that time. It helped a lot with my stress about blogging tasks when I’ve been dealing with a hectic time at my job and health-wise.
- Four, this helps me create an overall brand for my content across all platforms. People don’t want disjointed content; they want to see different things in different places (don’t want to see the exact same content on Facebook as Twitter, for example), but they don’t want to see unrelated content under the same brand umbrella.
Why isn’t my blog getting traffic?
October Goals
- 4 blog posts – Success! I published 5
- Grow blog traffic – Meh. Given that I messed around with my settings, I want to say success, but I can’t just declare that I succeeded when there’s even a 1% chance that I didn’t.
November Goals
- 4 blog posts – I already have 2 scheduled to go, and this is the 3rd. But I’m going to have my Rituxan infusion this month, which often affects things.
- Grow traffic – I really want to see 10,000 page views on Google Analytics, but I’ll settle for growth in general!
Have you tried a social media editorial calendar?
Like this post? Check out:
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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 such an interesting read. I love your transparency and your solid plans for growth.
Thank you! Obviously I prefer to share huge growth, but it’s important to me that my readers know that I’ll share when I mess up as when as when I succeed.
You’re my inspiration! I’m trying for a couple of months to plan my social media content, just like I do for my blog, but it’s difficult with a full-time job, freelancing and the blog.
I totally get that! It’s one of the reasons why I took a few years off. But it’s so much easier when it’s all already typed in a doc and then I just spend some time every week scheduling. It takes a lot less time that way!
I definitely need to work on my social media plan. I tend to start and then life gets in the way.
Makes total sense! I found planning out extensively really helped. Makes it much more manageable!
Very interesting post to read, especially for a new content creator! I started doing this planning not so long time ago and if nothing it keeps me from stressing out. It is nice to read that it does much more than that too!
Planning is so helpful for so many reasons, and it’s delightful to find out that it can help blog and social traffic and reach, as well!
Yes, I know it’s time to create a social media calendar … just need to do it, so thanks for the motivation.
Ha glad to help! I knew for a few months that I needed to get back to it, and then I spent most of October in and out of the hospital, and having that calendar was so helpful.
Thank you for sharing this great report. This is very useful for me as a – compared to you – new blogger! Love your Twitter tips and will definitely implement them!
Of course! It can be tricky to find the strategies that work for you individually, which is why I find it so important to share all sorts of strategies.
Edit calendars are so important. Yet it’s always the last thing on my list. Thanks for the reminder to get back at being more consistent.