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Today I’m sharing my month 3 blog growth report with you, to hopefully motivate you to grow your own blog and share exactly what strategies I’m using to grow mine.
This month was great for me in terms of the content that I’ve put out. I worked my bum off to post a lot and it definitely gave results.
Pssst. If you don’t already know, I also created a FREE 7-DAY Challenge on how to start a blog.
I don’t know about you, but I have read tons of content on the topic of blogging and how to grow a blog.
And while all stories are inspiring, the ones that share their analytics and exactly what strategies they used to grow – those helped me the most.
I want to give that back and share my own process in the hopes that it inspires you too.
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1. Analytics
Let’s start, as usual, with Google Analytics. I love having a look at my analytics every once in a while to see how I’m doing and what’s working. It’s the best way to see how you can improve, really.
This month was amazing. I more than doubled my blog traffic compared to the previous month.
These are my analytics from last month:
Here’s my progress so far:
- September: 765 pageviews
- October: 1,224 pageviews
- November: 3,157 pageviews
A few things I’ve noticed when comparing this month to the previous one.
I was mentioning last month how I’m trying to drop the bounce rate lower by installing a Related Posts plugin, as well as posting a lot more content within certain categories.
Well I think it worked, because my bounce rate has started to drop from 74.27% to 70.84%. Which is great, it means people are starting to spend more time on my blog.
Obviously, the average session duration has gone up. From 1:04 to 1:40 minutes. Yay!
The goal is to get this bounce rate as low as possible and to get the session duration higher.
I am so pleased with the growth this month and I’m definitely feeling motivated to keep going.
Email subscribers
I only started my email list last month, not really knowing what I’m doing. I’ve read quite a bit on it, about the basics, how to get started and what it’s useful for.
Let me know if you’d like to see some posts on growing an email list in the future. Because there’s a lot to talk about that I won’t be covering in this post today.
I imported my previous tiny 30-subscriber list into my ConvertKit account last month. I didn’t really get a lot of growth with my list last month, because I wasn’t actively doing anything to promote it.
Update: Since writing this blog post, I have decided to switch from Convertkit to Flodesk. If you would like to know why, I wrote a whole blog post about it.
However, this month I reached 329 email subscribers.
I was floored.
That might not be much for some people, but I was amazed at how fast my list grew from just a few key incentives.
The main way to grow your email list is to offer an incentive. A reason for them to subscribe. A freebie. Whatever you want to call it.
I had put up a few in place on my blog during this month, but the main one was this: Free Lightroom Preset Bright Minimal.
I already had a few posts about growing on Instagram on my blog and I also intensely promoted that post on Pinterest. And it worked so well!
During November I also had a blog post get picked up by the Google search engine, and it is now ranking #1 in Google search for the keyphrase toddler must haves 12 months.
If you want to know how I did that, I wrote more details about how to rank in Google in this post.
I think these factors combined really helped my blog get a boost in views this month.
2. Pinterest
My Pinterest also went up a bit. Last month I had 81.87k monthly viewers. This month I went up to 96.64k monthly viewers.
It’s not a huge growth, but it’s still progress.
I know what I need to do to get more eyeballs on my Pinterest, but it’s quite time consuming and I haven’t had that time this month.
I’m hoping to get more consistent with pinning and joining group boards in the next months. Those are two great ways to grow on Pinterest.
I’m currently analyzing my pins to see which ones perform better and I’m trying to make them more eye-catching in the future.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I might be investing soon in a pin scheduler tool like Tailwind (which is very popular nowadays). Because manual pinning is sooo tedious and takes so much time. I’ve heard people have great success with this tool, so I’ll get the trial run for now and see how it goes.
3. Number of posts
This month was super productive for me. I published 12 blog posts. Yay! *pat self on the back*
My main goal for this month was to post-post-post. I wanted to post 2-3 times a week, which I definitely accomplished.
As you can see, a lot of the posts go into one category – Instagram tips. As I mentioned in my previous monthly blog report, I wanted to focus on one category at a time and batch content for that specific topic.
It makes people spend a longer time on your website, because they have more content to go through. And obviously, the more quality content you put out there, the more chances of people finding your blog.
4. Strategies I used
Here is what strategy I used this month.
I knew I wanted to create a freebie to grow my email list. And I also knew I wanted to start posting about Instagram tips, because I felt like I had a lot to share about that. So I decided I will make my freebie an Instagram Lightroom preset. A lot of people are selling these presets online.
But I thought I will do something different.
I am going to give it away for free, because my main goal at the moment is to offer value and help my readers. Monetization is going to be part of my strategy later on, but right now I’m focusing on growing an audience that I can actually help with these tips.
I shared my Bright Minimal Preset. And then, since December was coming up, I decided to create a Christmas Preset as well. I also posted a step-by-step tutorial on how to install these presets.
So what happened?
People who stumbled upon the presets obviously joined my email list to download them and then they also went on to read how to install them. And then some were also interested in the free Instagram highlight covers I posted. And I also posted this month how to create your own highlight covers easily.
So my readers started going from post to post, which more than doubled my views from last month.
I am starting to see that having a series of inter-connected posts is key for growth and I’m going to try to apply this strategy in the next few months as well.
This is what goals I’ve set for myself last month. Let’s see how I did:
- Post at least 2-3 times a week – Yep, nailed this part.
- Keep in mind the SEO checklist for each blog post – I did my best with this one too.
- Post my Instagram series with the freebies (Lightroom presets + Instagram highlight covers) – Yes, they’re all up!
- Start growing my email list with the freebie incentives above – It definitely grew so much in this past month, I did not expect it at all.
- Continue creating at least 1-2 pinnable images for each blog post – I did and I made it a point to post them a few times to my Pinterest.
- Have at least 5-10 group boards joined on Pinterest – Ugh, not yet. I’m putting this on next month’s list again.
- Share my blog posts on socials (Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest) – Yes, I made sure to share them.
5. Goals for next month
- Post consistently.
- Start planning the next series of posts. I want to start some series on blogging and growing a blog.
- Create three posts containing blog post ideas. I want to incorporate these for the future How to Start a Blog series that I’ve got planned, as I think they would be useful to some of you (here they are now: 100 Lifestyle Blog Post Ideas, 100 Mom Blog Post Ideas, 100 Fashion Blog Post Ideas).
- Join 5-10 group boards on Pinterest.
- Carry on with SEO checklists, sharing on socials and creating 2-3 pin graphics for each post.
Do let me know if you found my month 3 blog growth report helpful. And if you’d like to see more.
How are you growing your blog?
What strategies do you plan on using this month?