Blog Growth Stats for November 2017 The Truth About Blog Growth

Last updated on April 10th, 2019 at 06:16 am

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is getting their blog ready for Christmas. It’s time for my blog growth stats for November so you can see what I did for my blog and whether or not it actually grew.

Last month I stayed extremely busy with writing content. I felt like that’s all I did besides my freelancing work.

As you know, I started this blog so I can move away from my freelancing work. You also know that the techie stuff comes easier for me than growing this blog.

It’s challenging growing this blog, but I am up for it. The best way to hold myself accountable for working and growing my blog is to share what I am doing. Plus my hope is that by sharing what I am doing to grow this blog, it will help you grow your blog.

So let’s dig in.

Now Onto My Blog Growth Stats for November 2017

If you are struggling to grow your blog, I feel your pain. I’ve been blogging for a little over a year now and I still don’t get a lot of traffic.

Maybe I entered an extremely competitive niche? To tell you the truth, I only started in this niche because this is what I have expertise in. WordPress is my bread and butter and I’ve been working with it for over 8 years.

Everyone always says to start a niche in something that you are passionate about. I figured why not share my tutorials with you. After all, my WordPress freelance clients pay me for this information.

So I know that it’s valuable and can help others who are brand new to WordPress.

Disclaimer: I am NOT a traffic expert. I am learning to grow this blog and am sharing what I am doing to see my blog growth. Feel free to follow along and let’s grow our blogs together. Hopefully, with me sharing what I am doing, will help you grow your blog. I can only share with you what I know and what’s working for me.

So now that you know I am NOT a traffic expert, let’s get busy and see how my blog did last month.

Video Walk-Thru of My Google Analytics

I’ve created a video that will show you the inside of my Google Analytics. I am only showing you this because I truly want to share what I am doing to grow my blog.

Plus, I am using it as a journal to help me keep track of my blog growth. If you’d rather not watch the video, I discuss my analytics below.

 

A Quick Look at My Blog Analytics

Here is a snapshot of what my blog growth looks like for November. As you can see, the traffic feel compared to last months blog growth update.

Maybe because there were only 30 days in this month compared to 31 days last month? It could be also because of the Thanksgiving holiday?

My traffic was pretty much non-existent during the Thanksgiving holiday. I don’t know about you, but I had a nice long weekend and didn’t spend a lot of time on my computer on Thanksgiving.

Growing My Email List

The last couple of days I’ve been spending more time trying to improve my email opt-in conversions. I have to admit, I haven’t been placing enough emphasis on growing my list.

I’ve never been that good at growing my email list. Well last month, I finally made a few changes and created a couple of content upgrades for a couple of my popular blog posts.

Hopefully, that will help me increase my conversions. Growing my list has been a slow and painful experience. It’s easy to get discouraged when I see so many people growing their list faster than me.

I guess that’s one of the reasons that everyone says you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. But I’m only human and sometimes it’s hard not to look at other people’s stats.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Starting a blog is half the battle, focus on growth #GrowWithSusan at susanvelez.com” quote=”Starting a blog is half the battle, focus on growth #GrowWithSusan at susanvelez.com” theme=”style4″]

Guest Posts Written In November

I am still using guest posting on this blog. Last month, I was able to write 5 guest posts. I actually love creating guest posts because it helps me get in front of other bloggers’ audiences.

All the blogs that I’ve guest posted for have a bigger audience than I do. When I first started guest posting, I made the mistake of just trying to guest post on a blog.

I ended up guest posting on a blog that was newer than mine. The results were that I didn’t get any traffic or exposure from that guest post.

So if you’re going to spend time guest posting, make sure that the blogger gets more traffic than you do. Otherwise, you’re just giving your content away and you won’t get any traffic or exposure.

As you know, I’m not guest posting for the backlinks. If you start guest posting, here’s a great article that I found that will help you get started guest posting the right way. It’s a great read and I know you’ll get some value out of it 🙂

Related: Grammarly Review My Experience and WalkThrough

My Organic Traffic Fell

In October I went back and changed out several of my anchor texts. I think this month, I felt the effect of making those changes.

My organic traffic fell quite a bit. If you’re going to make some changes to your blog, I suggest that you make a few changes at a time.

This will help you see if those changes help you or hurt you. I’m not going to go back and change those links because personally, I think it would be a waste of time.

I don’t have a lot of extra time throughout the day to make those small changes. So from this point forward, I’ll just make small tweaks at a time.

My YouTube Channel

One of the things that I have been doing on a consistent basis for the past year is that I’ve been creating videos on my YouTube channel.

When I started my channel, I wasn’t posting on a regular basis. Now I upload a new video every Wednesday. Like my blog posts, I batch my videos and schedule them using the YouTube scheduler.

Yeah, I had no clue that YouTube allows you to schedule your videos in advance. This makes it easy for me to publish my videos without me having to actually hit publish the video to go live.

Especially, since I spend a lot of my morning exercising and I am not in front of my YouTube channel when my videos go live on Wednesday at 9:30 AM Est. If you want to subscribe to my YouTube channel, you can subscribe here.

Videos Published in November

1. October 2017 Blog Growth Stats
2. Install Google Analytics On Genesis and WordPress
3. How to Find Out Which Social Media Sites Are Sending You Traffic
4. WordPress Dashboard Tutorial WalkThrough for Beginners
5. Step-by-Step Tutorial On How to Update The Genesis Framework

Last month, I picked up a couple of courses from Udemy to help me improve my YouTube channel. Not sure when I will actually have time to implement the courses as I have been busy with freelancing work.

Maybe, catching up on the Walking Dead series and take a couple weeks and watch these videos that I purchased to see if I can improve my YouTube channel.

I have over 50 published videos right now and only 72 subscribers. Of course, I know it’s because I don’t spend time promoting my videos the way that I should.

My Promotion Strategies

Nothing really changes from month to month. I’m pretty much doing the same things over and over each and every day.

There’s really nothing new in my toolbox. Other than the fact that I purchased some Udemy courses on YouTube to see if I can improve my videos.

I’ve learned that there is no secret sauce to growing a blog. Just a lot of the same tedious things every day.

Using Pinterest To Grow My Blog

Pinterest has never been easy for me. I’ve heard so many bloggers say that Pinterest is sending them tons of traffic every day.

Me, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Pinterest doesn’t come as easy for me as it does for other bloggers. It’s definitely been a work in progress for me.

The only reason that I keep at it is that it does drive some traffic to my blog. In fact, it’s the social network that is sending me the most traffic.

What I’ve Started Noticing

One of the things that I’ve started noticing that is my pins are getting more repins and shares. I now have over 100 pins on Pinterest, and I am getting notifications pretty much every day that my pins are getting shared.

So maybe it just takes time like everything else on the Internet for your pins to get some love. Based on my personal experience, that’s what I am experiencing.

I know that it’s so easy to think that Pinterest traffic happens overnight. While it may happen for some bloggers. That hasn’t been my experience.

Of course, it could be that I don’t focus 100% on Pinterest like other bloggers do. But the truth is that I don’t want all my traffic coming from just one source.

So I’ll continue down the path that I am headed and as long as I continue getting traffic from Pinterest then it’s worth it in my opinion.

Let’s Talk Organic Traffic

We all want organic traffic. Nothing is better than writing an optimizing a blog post and then Google sends you traffic months after writing your post.

I’ve been using the Long Tail Pro keyword research tool to help me find low hanging competition keywords. I’ve written a lot of WordPress tutorials and you know that WordPress is such a competitive niche.

I don’t really spend too much time doing keyword research. However, for the past month, I’ve been spending more time finding keywords for my blog posts.

It takes time for a blog to start getting organic traffic. At the time of this writing, my blog has 120 blog posts, which isn’t a lot.

However, I am noticing that my organic traffic is starting to come. I don’t spend any time building backlinks to my blog.

I don’t think that you have to spend time building backlinks. Plus I don’t want to be accused of doing something bad and get penalized for it.

With this blog, I am more focused on providing the best content I can to help you start, grow and monetize your blog.

The best way that I can do that is by sharing my personal experience with you. This way you can see me out in the trenches with you.

SO HOW MUCH DID MY BLOG GROW

As you know, the techie stuff is a lot easier for me. Anyone can learn the basics, after all, you don’t need to know everything about WordPress to use it as a blogging platform.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Starting a blog is half the battle, focus on growth #GrowWithSusan at susanvelez.com” quote=”Starting a blog is half the battle, focus on growth #GrowWithSusan at susanvelez.com” theme=”style4″]

The hardest things that new bloggers will struggle with is growing their blog. It’s easy to believe that it doesn’t take a long time to grow a blog.

While some people will grow faster than others. The truth is that it takes a long time to grow a successful blog. Once you focus on growth, you’re going to realize that it takes the same things each and every day.

That can get discouraging, especially if no one is visiting your blog. It’s easy to fall into that comparison game and think that you’re doing something wrong.

As long as you continue working on your blog and treating it like a business. Chances are you are NOT doing anything wrong. Keep going and keep promoting and writing, eventually, your peeps will find you.

You’ve started your blog in a sea of millions of blogs. You can’t expect your readers to find you with just 20 published posts.

So let’s dive into my blog growth numbers.

October Blog Growth Numbers

• Email Subscribers (new opt-ins for the month): 17
• Overall List Size: 106 
• Twitter Followers: 1174
• Facebook Followers: 35
• YouTube Subscribers: 63
• Pinterest Followers: 505
• Page Views: 3,523

I included my October blog growth numbers, this will make it easier for you to see how my blog grew. Of course, if you want to see all my blog growth reports, you can see them here.

November Blog Growth Numbers

• Email Subscribers (new opt-ins for the month): 10
• Overall List Size: 116 
• Twitter Followers: 1205
• Facebook Followers: 35
• YouTube Subscribers: 72
• Pinterest Followers: 541
• Page Views: 3,398

One thing that you’re going to notice when you’re growing a blog is that you’re going to have ups and downs. You might have a great month and then the next month you might have a bad month.

This doesn’t mean that your blog isn’t growing. It’s normal to have fluctuations on a regular basis.

So if you monitor your blog growth stats at the end of the month, which I think you should. Otherwise, you won’t know which blogging tasks are actually helping you grow your blog.

I recommend installing Google Analytics to help you keep track of your blog growth. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial that will help you install Google Analytics on your WordPress blog.

Continually Testing Things

As a new blogger, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of NOT testing things out. We tend to think that just because something didn’t work for so and so, it won’t work for me.

Or vice versa…

So and so got a ton of traffic from this method, I’m going to use this method to help me drive traffic.

Growing a blog is hard. This doesn’t mean that you can’t grow a blog, I have no doubt that you can.

However, it’s going to require you to test things out for yourself. Don’t take other people’s word for it. The only way that you will know if something works for your blog is if you actually test it out on your blog.

Don’t be scared to test things out on your blog. If it works great, if it doesn’t at least you found out what doesn’t work for your blog.

Remember it takes time to grow a blog. I’ve got you covered on the techie side if you need a little bit of help and are looking for some basic WordPress tutorials that will help you get comfortable with WordPress.

You don’t have to know everything about WordPress. You just need to keep your blog simple and focus on the content and the promotion.

My Upcoming Case Study

I picked up the Genius Bloggers Toolkit this last time it was on sale. In one of the courses, someone talked about how she struggled with growing the traffic to her blog.

She decided to set up a 12 day series for her blog. After this 12 day series, her blog traffic and income grew.

So I decided that the only way to see if it would work is to implement it myself. Remember I told you that last month I wrote a ton of content on my blog and guest posts.

Well, I decided to set up an 11 day series of blog posts for December. I am going to see if that will boost my blog traffic and income.

It took a ton of time to get everything set up. So next month, I will be publishing 20 blog posts.

Even if this boosts my blog posts, I can tell you that I probably won’t do it again. It was a ton of work getting everything written and prepared.

Final Take Away

Hopefully, you enjoyed my blog growth stats for November 2017 update. I really enjoy creating them because it helps me keep track of my blog progress.

As you know, I don’t have a lot of time to blog. I still have to do my freelance work and still live my regular life.

But my posts are all geared and ready to go. I’ll personally see if this helps my blog grow.

Remember, the only way you will ever know if something works for your blog is to actually test it out.

Hand Picked Articles for You:

• 6 Month Blog Update
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It takes time to grow a blog and I only share these blog growth reports because they help keep me accountable. I also do it because I hope that they will help you grow your blog.

Do you feel like my monthly blog growth updates are helpful? Let me know I’d love to know if you enjoy reading them as much as I love writing them.