Blog Traffic Growth Why My Pageviews Did Not Increase

Another month where my blog traffic growth takes a turn in the wrong direction. So many new bloggers struggle with growing a blog. I’m no different, it’s never been easy to grow my blog. This post is going to share what I’ve done to grow my blog and what caused it to take a turn for the negative.

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Growing A Blog Takes Time

We see them all the time, those income reports that claim you can make money quickly blogging. While some people are forunate to get into profits quickly.

The truth is that it takes time to grow a blog. How much time?

Well, it’s different for everyone. No one’s blogging journey is the same. Unfortunately, for some people it can take years to grow a blog into a profitable business.

Let’s take a look at some bloggers who will tell you it took them a while to see results from blogging.

Now, I am not saying this to discourage you from starting your blog. I just want you to know that you shouldn’t expect to start a blog this month and be in profit next month.

It Still Amazes Me

I am a member of a few Facebook Groups and while I don’t spend a lot of time in Facebook Groups. I do make a point to get into some of them to network with other bloggers.

I’ve seen so many posts from new bloggers who say something to the effect. “I started my blog last month and I am still not making any money or getting any visitors.”

The funny thing is that I used to think like that when I started my first blog back in the day. If only it was that easy of just setting up a blog and the traffic and money rolled in.

More people would pursue blogging because they would know there is no way they could fail.

Blogging Takes Time

Unfortunately, it takes time to grow a blog. I’m not saying that it will take you a year to grow your blog. But you definitely need to give yourself time for your blog to grow.

There are a lot of factors into growing a blog. One of the biggest ones is how well are you promoting your blog?

Most of us who start a blog have never done any type of digital marketing. So it’s new to us and this means that we have to actually take the time to learn how to promote our content.

I recommend starting with Pinterest. There is a learning curve to it and there are constant updates, but everything online changes overtime.

Related Pinterest articles to get you started:

Pinterest for Bloggers

My Traffic Fell Last Month

Yes Pinterest made a bunch of changes last month and while my traffic did take a dip. I am happy to say that I did not lose all my traffic.

That’s one of the reasons that I always make sure that my Pins are optimized for both Pinterest and Google. I want to make sure that I am NOT just focusing on Pinterest for my traffic.

You never want to put all your traffic hopes on just one traffic source. You don’t have control over what Pinterest does and the last thing you want to do is lose all your hard work because Pinterest made some changes.

Anyway, now that I’ve discussed why you shouldn’t focus completely on Pinterest, let’s dig into my traffic stats for last month and see how my traffic fell.

Inside My Google Analytics

As you can see, my traffic definitely took a hit after Pinterest made their changes. The only thing that I am proud of is that I didn’t lose all my traffic.

If you take a look at my Analytics from last month, you’ll noticed that my traffic fell. Unfortunately, that’s the thing with blog traffic.

While we can work hard to get more traffic, you can’t control the numbers at the end of the month. All you can do is make sure that your blog is optimized for conversions.

What I Did Last Month

Last month was no different that any other month. I focused on both Pinterst and SEO. I don’t plan on changing anything up as I move forward into May.

Like always, I published 3 blog posts per week. The only difference is that I’ve changed up my content strategy. I am now focusing on publishing content that I know is popular with my readers.

We’ll see how this works on improving my traffic. I am sure that it can’t hurt it.

Let’s Look At My Pinterest Traffic

Pinterest went through a bunch of changes and if you spend any time in Facebook Groups, then you heard a lot of bloggers talking about how their traffic was affected. Some people got more traffic and some people got less.

Unfortunately, I was one of those that ended up getting affected in the negative way.

I’d love to have been the one who got more traffic, but it is what it is. The only good thing is that my blog was able to take a hit and while I did take a drop in page views, my blog didn’t lose it all.

So yah, it’s nice to know that my blog can still survive a Pinterest update.

As you can see, compared to March, my Pinterest traffic definitely took a drop.

I am still focusing and learning how to use Pinterest according to their new updates. If you’re brand new to Pinterest or confused by their updates, here’s a great video for you to watch that will tell you everything you need to know.

Google SEO Traffic

We all pray for the day that our organic traffic starts to take off and we don’t have to rely so much on social media traffic. This doesn’t mean we won’t use social media anymore.

It just means that we can start to relax a little bit because all our hard work is starting to pay off. Well, that’s how I feel about organic traffic.

Unforuntately, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time for Google to start sending you traffic. Your job is to make sure that you’re properly optimizing your blog posts and doing everything you can to be ready for traffic from Google.

Related: How to Use Yoast SEO Plugin Everything You Need to Know

I can say that Pinterest is still my biggest traffic referrer. Google does send me some traffic, but it still hasn’t caught up withPinterest.

The cool thing is that I did get more organic traffic in April than I did in March. Not only that, but there was less calendar days in April.

Of course it’s my fault as I didn’t take the time to do keyword research with Long Tail Pro when I first started my blog. So I’ve written a lot of posts with keywords that are extremely competitive.

I’ve been making it a point to focus on keywords that I’ll have a much better chance to rank for. Now I don’t actually build backlinks to my content or stress my rankings in Google.

Instead, I just focus on writing long-form content that actually helps people and am hoping that’s enough. I don’t want to spend my time building backlinks and try to push myself up in the search engines.

I’ve got better things to do than spend all day on my computer building backlinks. How do you feel about building backlinks?

Submitted a Guest Post

I haven’t written a guest post in a while and one of the reasons that I haven’t done so is because my guest posting results are not worth the time and effort I put into it.

I know that a lot of people say that they owe it to guest blogging that they grew their blog. For some reason, guest posting has not been my biggest traffic referrer.

Maybe I am guest posting on the wrong blogs? Honestly, I am not sure.

But I can tell you this. Guest posting is a lot more work than focusing on Pinterest and SEO. You’re writing amazing content and then giving it away to someone else.

I guess if it’s the right blog, then it’s worth it. For me, I don’t plan on doing anymore guest posts for awhile. Instead, I am going to focus on my blog growth and keeping my content.

You might think that’s the wrong way to think. That guest posting helps you build your brand and authority. Hey that’s okay, you can still guest post if you want.

Me, I am taking a break from guest posting for awhile. Unless of course I find a blog that gets a ton of engagement and traffic. The only way to know if it’s worth guest posting on a blog is to look at SimilarWeb.

Unfortunately, I never did that before I gave away my content. So my loss and their gain. Oh well, life goes on, thank goodness I enjoy writing and am already 2 months ahead on my own content 🙂

Blog Commenting

I still make it a point to take the time to comment on other people’s blogs. I stayed extremely busy in April and didn’t take the time to comment as much as I have in the past.

So I lost a lot of my referral traffic last month. Hopefully, this month I’ll make it a point to be a little more consistent with my blog commenting.

The one thing that I love about blog commenting is that not only does it help you get referral traffic. It’s a great way to meet some bloggers that eventually become your friends.

I’ve met some great bloggers that have notified me when something is wrong with my blog. Plus it’s nice to have someone to reach out to and talk to when you get lonely.

We all know how lonely blogging can be. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having some blogging friends you can reach out to when you just need someone to talk to.

10k Blog Challenge

On April 18, I started the BBC 10k Blog Challenge. I have been working on this blog for long enough and I feel like I should have already hit my first 10k page views.

So I decided that it’s time to stop messing around and really focus on growing it. One thing I did was sit down and break it down.

If I want to reach 10,000 page views in a month, this means that I need to get 333 page views per day. Now I know that I won’t be able to get 333 page views everyday.

We all know that traffic tends to fluctuate. Sometimes you can have a good day and sometimes you feel as though you’re not making progress.

But I’ve decided that I am going to do everything in my control to reach my first 10,000 page views. My goal is to do it in 60 days, so only time will tell. Now I am taking some weekends off, after all a girl has to have a life.

With the warm weather here, I don’t want to spend all my days in front of the computer. So stick with me and I’ll keep you updated on my challenge.

Let’s Look At The Growth

Okay so now it’s time to break it down into numbers. Just so you know, I don’t focus on social followers numbers. I put them in here just so you can see the growth. The only thing I am concerned with is my email subscribers growth. (which I am working on improving the conversions)

April Blog Growth Numbers

• Email Subscribers (new opt-ins for the month): 84
• Overall List Size: 388
• Twitter Followers: 1334
• Facebook Followers: 46
• YouTube Subscribers: 127
• Pinterest Followers: 904
• Page Views: 6,802

I included my March 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.

March Blog Growth Numbers

• Email Subscribers (new opt-ins for the month): 88
• Overall List Size: 320
• Twitter Followers: 1321
• Facebook Followers: 46
• YouTube Subscribers: 119
• Pinterest Followers: 765
• Page Views: 8,857

Milo Tree Update

I signed up for the free 30-day trial of the Milo Tree plugin to see if I could increase my Pinterest followers. Well, that 30 days is over and when I signed up for the free trial I only had 754 followers and I signed up on 3/31/18.  I just got billed for the first month on 4/30/18.

So during the 30 day trial, I got 150 new followers. You could probably do a lot better than me if you’re Pinterest strategy is up to par.

They even provide you a cool little graphic that shows you that you are actually growing your followers.

If you want to give it a try, here’s the link for your 30-day trial of the Milo Tree Plugin.

What You Should Take Away From This Blog Growth Update Report

Growing a blog takes work, you can’t expect it to happen overnight. Unfortunately, traffic ebbs and flows and we don’t have full control over it.

Sometimes it can get so frustrating when you’re doing everything that you’re supposed to be doing. But yet, you’re still not seeing results.

All you can do is keep working on your blogging tasks on a daily basis. Eventually, you will start to see progress and your hard work will pay off.

Find out which traffic methods you want to use to grow your blog and focus on those. Don’t make the mistake of trying to do too much, otherwise you won’t accomplish anything.

Master a couple of traffic sources and then start moving on to another traffic source. It takes time to start seeing the results you want and it can get frustrating.

The only thing you can keep doing is keep blogging and pushing forward towards your goals.

Before you know it, you’ll look back and see what you created online.

Technical Difficulties

As a blogger, there’s going to be some times when you have to deal with technical difficulties. It’s not something we ever want to face, but unfortunately I did.

I woke up one morning and I had an email from Sucuri saying that I my site was down. Yup, it had been down for over 9 hours.

For a minute, I thought it was a mistake. When I typed in my domain, this is what I saw.

As soon as I saw that, I had to get on customer support with SiteGround. I jumped on the support and they quickly told me that I had gone over my CPU limit.

Their support was nice enough to get it back up and running while I was on chat with them. During our chat, they did tell me some things that I could do to control the CPU usage.

If you’ve never had to deal with these issues, hopefully you won’t have to. Here’s a great article that will explain the biggest limitation of SiteGround.

Update

Hopefully, the problem has been resolved with the things that I did. Only time will tell this month as I believe that the CPU usage gets reset at the beginning of the calendar month.

I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I just switch hosts.

Well, I thought about it. But the thing is that I paid for 3 years in advance for SiteGround and moving my site would mean that I would just lose money.

I still have over a year left on my current plan with SiteGround. My goal was to grow my blog on their hosting and then by the time my three years was up, my site was getting enough traffic and making money to pay for better hosting.

We’ll see if what I did takes care of the problem. I do believe it did as I was able to finish the month of April without going over the CPU limit.

Final Take Away

Chances are you started your blog because you want to earn some money. You’re not alone, thousands of bloggers are working hard on their blog in hopes of turning it into a profitable blog.

The great thing is that as long as you don’t quit, I have no doubt that you’ll get there. Just be prepared to roll up your sleeves and work hard.

Whatever you do, don’t listen to those naysayers who say it’s not possible. I totally believe it’s possible. It’s just going to take a lot more than just writing amazing content.

You have to get out there and promote it. Without promotion, it doesn’t matter how great your blog content is.

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What are you working on to grow your blog traffic? Use the comment box below to share what you’re working on to grow your blog and let’s start a discussion.