Blog Traffic Report: How My Traffic Skyrocketed In A Year and What I Did

Why You Need PageViews

If you’re a new blogger, then chances are you’re struggling to grow your pageviews. There are bloggers who will tell you that page views don’t matter.

While I agree, that you shouldn’t obsess over your stats. But if your pageviews are not increasing on a regular basis, then no one is seeing your products, services or clicking on your affiliate links.

You need people to come to your blog and read your awesome content. Otherwise, there’s no way that you’ll ever see the success you want.

You don’t want to check your Google Analytics stats on a daily basis. It is important to know what’s actually working to grow your blog.

That’s why I love writing these blog traffic reports. I use it as a time to reflect on the month to see what’s actually working and what isn’t.

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Why I Am Focusing On Pinterest

You’ve probably heard so many bloggers say how Pinterest is where it’s at. I’ve been using Pinterest for a year now, but to tell you the truth all I was doing was scheduling pins to go out without me lifting a finger.

I didn’t even know anything about popular pins until late last year. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to say that Pinterest was where it was at.

It wasn’t for me. This year, I’ve decided that I am going to stop doing those things that don’t bring any results and focus on the things that are actually working.

Why?

Because I am tired of freelancing and if I keep trying to do everything, I am going to end the year NOT accomplishing anything.

I don’t know about you, but I want to reach my goals this year. My biggest goal is to walk away from my freelancing business.

My hope is that by the Summer, I can finally tell my clients that I can no longer do any of their work. I’ll still have to finish up the contract for one client.

That’s okay. As long as I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that will make me so happy.

So, at the beginning of the year, I sat down and went through my Google Analytic stats to see what’s actually driving traffic to my blog.

It Wasn’t Guest Posting

Now don’t get me wrong, I love guest posting and have gotten some great traffic from a few of the blogs that I’ve guest posted.

Then there are others that I gave away my content and didn’t get anything in return. I know what you’re thinking, at least your building your authority.

True, but building my authority through guest posting is NOT going to help me walk away from my freelancing business by the Summer or at least by the end of the Summer.

I still managed to write one guest post for last month. I’ll still be writing guest posts, I just won’t make it a part of my normal monthly routine for a while.

Instead, I am going to spend this month focusing on improving my Pinterest strategy. Once I get that figured out then I will move on to the next thing.

I’ve Dropped What Isn’t Working

The only way that I’ll be able to grow this blog is to focus on what’s working and drop what isn’t working. This doesn’t mean that I won’t ever go back and do those other traffic methods.

It just means that right now, I choose to focus on what’s actually helping me grow my blog. So if you’ve subscribed to my YouTube channel, you won’t be seeing any videos for a while.

There are currently 59 videos on my YouTube channel and if you need help with WordPress, you will find some tutorials that will help you out.

I just can’t afford to put my attention on those tasks that are not helping me grow. Sorry, but I’ve got some big goals and that means I need to get serious about reaching them.

YouTube just wasn’t working for me, so I’ll have to go back to it later on.

You Know What’s Going to Help Me?

Pinterest is going to help me walk away from my freelancing gig.

How do I know this?

Well, take a look at my stats last month compared to January in 2017. You can see that I’ve had a huge improvement in my traffic in a year.

It’s not as big as some other bloggers. But like I said, I haven’t really focused on Pinterest. I’ve been doing it half-assed, therefore, my results showed it for the first year.

My Pinterest case study started on January 14 of last month. In such a short amount of time, I’ve been tweaking and trying to improve it, but it takes time to learn how to do these things.

Take a look at what my Pinterest reach was before I started really focusing on Pinterest. Here is what my Pinterest reach numbers looked like before.

That was the highest I had ever been able to get my Pinterest reach. After a year of. pinning like crazy, I had never been able to crack into the 200,000 Pinterest reach.

Not to mention, but the activity from my own blog sucked. Take a look at what the activity looked like for my blog before I started really paying more attention to Pinterest.

As you can see, it wasn’t anything to be proud of. Yes Pinterst was my biggest traffic referrer out of all the social media channels. That’s actually one of the reasons that I decided that it was time to really learn more about it.

Now Take A Look At My New Stats

Remember, I just started really learning more about Pinterest on January 14 of last month. My new stats are not groundbreaking, I am finally starting to see some positive results.

Not to mention, I have also finally been able to break my Pinterest reach over 200,000. It’s nowhere near what other bloggers are seeing, but it is nice to see some positive results.

Especially, since I am still learning. Just when things seem to be going good, things change. There’s always something to learn but this is the first time ever that I’ve ever gotten my Pinterest reach so high.

Quick Pinterest Success Story

Oh and I’ve noticed two of my pins on the Trending and Tech section of Pinterest. That’s definitely never happened to me before.

I have no idea what it takes to get a pin to trend, if you know then let me know in the comments below. Take a look at this.

I was at the salon one day getting a haircut and highlights. While I was sitting under the hairdryer, I thought I would continue my Pinterest education.

If you’ve never looked at Pinterest from your mobile phone, you should take the time to do it. Most of the traffic that comes from Pinterest is from mobile traffic. (at least mine is)

Before I started spending some time manual pinning, I had never seen any of my pins on the Trending or Tech tab. I definitely owe it to the Pinterest Strategies eBook and for actually taking the time to implement what it teaches.

It was extremely exciting and I have no clue how they got there? Maybe it’s because my engagement is improving on Pinterest? Who knows?

But it’s pretty cool because it does help you get more traffic.

Anyhow

I still have a long way to go, but I am focused this time around and I have no doubt that I’ll figure it out. Just like anything else, it just takes time and persistent action on a daily basis.

Of course, if you’re on my email list, then you know about my Pinterest traffic crash. I haven’t written about it on the blog yet, but plan to if I get time.

But as I continue focusing on Pinterest by using the strategies from the Pinterest Strategies eBook, I am loving what I see. It only gives me hope that I’ll finally be able to walk away from my freelancing gig by the end of the Summer. Yay 🙂

Continuing to Write Long Form Content

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that long-form content has been working very well for me. So nothing is going to change with the type of content that I write.

If you visit my blog on a regular basis, then you know that I decided to increase my blog content. Instead of publishing two posts per week, I am publishing three per week.

When I ran my 11-day blog series I saw how it improved my traffic and email subscribers. I figured since that experiment worked so well, I am going to increase my blog content.

Things Can Change

I’m no fool, I know that things can change at the drop of a dime. That’s what happened to my blogs in the past. But I’m not going to focus on the negative.

Instead, I am going to put my head down and focus on the tasks that I am using to grow this blog. It’s definitely taken some time to finally break 4000 pageviews, but I have no doubt that my traffic will continue growing.

That’s why it’s important to continually test things out and see what works for you. I’ve recently started a Pinterest case study and you can read more about it here.

Let’s Look At Last Month’s Traffic

Okay, so now let’s go to my Google Analytics dashboard and have a look around. If you’re like me, I love this part of my blogging journey.

It’s the time when I show you what’s working and what isn’t working on my blog. As I’ve mentioned every month since starting these blog traffic reports.

Okay now that you know I’m not an expert, let’s check out my stats and how they grew for the month of January.

Google Analytics Dashboard Stats

Okay, so here is a snapshot of my blog traffic for last month. As you can see, I finally hit over 4000 pageviews. The one thing you will notice is that my bounce rate is higher than normal.

This is because of the Pinterest traffic. I’ve learned that Pinterest traffic is normally higher than other traffic. At least that’s what I’ve read and that’s what I am seeing.

That’s okay though because I still managed to grow my subscribers. (more on this later)

Overall, I am very happy with the way that my traffic grew for the month of January. As I mentioned, if you’re traffic isn’t growing, then you’re going to have a hard time making money on your blog.

One thing you’re going to notice is that my bounce rate is high. I’ve read that when your traffic comes from Pinterest, your bounce rate is going to be higher.

I’m NOT stressed about it as I was able to increase my email conversions thanks to Pinterest traffic. So as long as I am getting conversions, my bounce rate doesn’t bother me.

The Stats That Really Matter

So while increasing your pageviews is fine and dandy. It really doesn’t mean much if you’re not converting your traffic to subscribers.

I can say that this has been the best month for gaining email subscribers. For the month of January, I gained 58 subscribers.

In the past, I was lucky to get 10 subscribers per month. Talk about a huge increase and thanks so much for subscribing, I appreciate you.

So What Changed?

You’re probably wondering what I did differently? Well, I owe it to the PostGopher plugin which has helped me increase my subscribers. It has helped me increase my email subscribers without lifting a finger.

I purchased the plugin on December 15 and I’ve only added it to a few of my posts. If you don’t know what the PostGopher plugin is, you can read how it helps me make the most of my blog traffic.

So I won’t be covering everything about this plugin. All I am going to say is that this plugin allows people to download your blog posts as a PDF, without you having to do anything but add shortcode to the post.

The shortcode allows me to place the download button anywhere on my blog post, but you will need to purchase the Extension Pack which is offered as an upsell.

When I purchased the plugin, it cost me $27 and the upsell I believe was $27 as well. To tell you the truth I was a little hesitant to spend money on another plugin, but I am glad that I did.

Check out the analytics stats on the plugin to see how it’s helping me grow my email list. The best part is that once you set it up, you don’t have to do anything.

If you’ve been struggling to grow your email list, I highly recommend this plugin. I have no doubt that you’ll love it as much as I do and will see a return quickly.

You can buy the plugin here and get the extension here.

Working On Improving My Email Open Rates

One of the things that I need to work on improving this year is my email open rates. I’m not sure what a great open email rate is, all I know is that mine hovers around 28 – 30 percent.

I really don’t know if that’s a good percentage or not. All I know is that I would love to improve it.

Dealing With Unsubscribes

While I don’t really get a lot of unsubscribes, I have had them. I’ve learned that it’s just a part of the process and I used to get upset when someone would unsubscribe.

I would think that maybe I did something wrong. Now I am happy to see unsubscribes leave because they are helping me cleanse my list.

If you don’t want to be on my list, then I don’t want you on my list. My goal is to provide as much useful information for my subscribers to help them grow their blog business.

It’s still sad to see them leave, especially, when it has taken me so long to grow my email list. But I’m learning how to cope with the loss.

Organic Traffic

It’s every blogger’s dream to write a blog post and then starts seeing some love from the search engines. SEO is important for every blogger.

I always make it a point to properly optimize my blog posts. But it wasn’t until about 3 months ago that I really started using LongTailPro to help me find those low competition keywords.

My blog is still new according to Google The last time I checked my DA score was 26. Now I really don’t know that much about DA score or Page Authority.

All I know is that I can’t expect my blog to rank for highly competitive keywords. If I want any chance in hell to rank on Google, I need to take the time to find some keywords that I stand a chance to rank on.

I already wrote a tutorial called Long Tail Review, that walks you through on how I am using the keyword tool.

I’ve started making sure that the keywords I write people are actually searching for and I have a chance to rank.

Of course, I still can’t guarantee that Google will rank my post on the first page. But as long as I’m doing my part of properly optimizing my posts and choosing the right keywords, I am at least giving myself a fighting chance.

So here’s how my Google traffic looks compared to January 2017. Of course last year at this time, my blog was only 3 months old.

It does take a while to start seeing traffic from Google. But don’t overlook the power of optimizing your blog posts today so you can benefit from your hard work later on down the road.

Plus it’s nice to see traffic on both Pinterest and Google. This way all your traffic isn’t coming from just one source. You NEVER want to have your blog traffic coming from one source.

Just like you don’t want your blog income coming from just one source.

Blog Growth Numbers

So let’s dive into my blog growth numbers. While I don’t really focus on social media followers, it’s nice to see if my numbers are increasing or not.

Here are the numbers from December so you can compare them to January.

December Blog Growth Numbers

• Email Subscribers (new opt-ins for the month): 27
• Overall List Size: 147
• Twitter Followers: 1230
• Facebook Followers: 38
• YouTube Subscribers: 80
• Pinterest Followers: 558
• Page Views: 3,202

 
I included my December 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.

January Blog Growth Numbers

• Email Subscribers (new opt-ins for the month): 27
• Overall List Size: 205
• Twitter Followers: 1266
• Facebook Followers: 41
• YouTube Subscribers: 92
• Pinterest Followers: 605
• Page Views: 4,960

 
As you can see, my email subscribers increased more than any other month since I’ve started this blog. Overall, I am very happy with the growth that I saw in January.

Now let’s see if I can improve on those numbers this month.

We’ve Come to The End

I think I’ve pretty much-covered everything that I am working on this year and why I’ve stopped stretching myself too thin on getting traffic.

Hopefully, you find this blog traffic report helpful. I’ve tried to be as thorough as I could be and show you my stats and what I’ve been working on.

Final Take Away

If you’re a new blogger, don’t make the same mistake that I made last year. Start learning as much as you can about Pinterest and using it to help you get some traffic.

Don’t be scared to spend money on products and services. I am currently using the methods in the Pinterest Strategies eBook. Although I am taking it a little bit further and testing things out on my own.

You can’t expect to just buy a course and expect things to work perfectly. You have to keep testing things and see if you can improve your results and find a better way.

While I haven’t experienced quick results like some other bloggers. I am finally starting to understand why so many bloggers say that Pinterest is where it’s at.

I have no doubt that as long as I continue working my blog promotion plan, I will be able to reach my goal of walking away from my freelancing gig by the end of this Summer.

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Are you using Pinterest for your blog growth? How long did it take you to finally start seeing true results with it?

I’d love to hear how you feel about using Pinterest to help you grow your blog.