Welcome back to the blog traffic report and welcome to this special edition: the first-year complete report.
I started this blog on May 22nd, 2023 and it's now officially one year old.
It's important to say that this whole year was me learning how all of this works, trying as best as I could to keep consistency, testing different strategies I come by online, and doing everything organically. I also didn't pay for any blogging courses but took on social media ones here and there.
Oh, here is the last report for your viewing pleasure: 8th Blog Traffic Report
Wix Traffic Overview
Views over the year
In one year, I had 392 post views and 160 overall visitors. I'm not focusing on the subscribers here because this was not a goal for the year and because they are basically my mom and a couple of friends (thanks girls). Engagement was low, as I expected.
If you haven't got it by now, blogging takes time to show results. You'll invest many many hours and much energy without seeing results for quite some time and that's normal.
The folks at Income School have a special blogging program called Project 24 for which the main selling point is to help you make full-time income in 24 months with your blog. And they know what they are doing. I don't, for the most part.
Back to the data, you'll notice a peak in August of last year, when I shared a post on a WhatsApp networking group and some people clicked.
You'll notice from this graph and from the other reports I published that although I had this peak, I also had bigger periods of no visitors or views. The later months, closer to the one-year mark see more consistent and regular views. This is the natural course of organic movement.
Site sessions and visitors over the year
Regarding visits to the blog, you may see at the starting period of this chart, that I had a lot of them right? That's actually me checking it every day and Wix not excluding any IP from the overall visits. Once I figured that out, I stopped checking it as a visitor and stayed on the backend side. Again, in more recent months, they have been a bit more frequent and consistent. And they tend to grow going forward.
Google Search Console
I think this is the best graph to illustrate the growth I had this first year.
The more time passes, the more Google understands what the blog is about and the more it recommends it to the correct search terms.
For example, the content that better performs for me is the Blog Traffic Report. Upon checking search results for "blog traffic report" on Google, I finally saw one of my posts in the first position. One that I wrote one year ago.
It. takes. time.
Pinterest was the tool I expected a lot from. I started super well in the first few months posting between 5/10 posts every day. I had a peak when one of my posts started performing super well and I got to 1,5k views in one day.
But to me, Pinterest became a vanity metric hub. It's the one I have the most views on, no doubt, but that didn't translate into blog visits, which is what I was looking for.
It's important to note here that the impressions on Pinterest count every time your post appears on someone's screen while they are browsing. They don't necessarily notice your post is there.
As with the other data sources, Pinterest has been showing more engagement in these last months. By that, I mean more post saves, likes, and profile visits, although the views got a lot lower.
Another important note to make: since creating the blog's Instagram, I've been seeing way better results there than on Pinterest, so my attention is geared towards the first and that's also why my post frequency diminished on Pinterest.
Unfortunately, Instagram is the only tool I cannot get the data from the whole time it has been live. The biggest period it shows me is 90 days. For reference, I created the account in December 2023.
My main stats are profile visits, taps on external links, and followers. All of them did ok in the last 90 days, for the current standards of growth.
On Insta, I've been getting about 10 to 15 followers per month on average and the most effective strategy is engaging with other content creators. Commenting on several posts, liking them, watching stories, and overall interacting with everyone I find interesting. Funny comments or deeper thoughts tend to yield the best results.
Final Remarks
Developing this blog over the year taught me some valuable lessons about patience, building my online presence, how the many algorithms work, consistency, and discipline.
I learned to find joy in the process instead of the results and that changed my whole mindset about building my own business.
As I wrote once, one year makes no one an expert at anything. It's just one year of training, trial and error, and figuring out what is the best course of action based on the experience you had. It's hard, it takes energy, dedication, and many hours of effort for you to put together a foundation to grow from.
But it's also incredibly rewarding to get comments from people saying they found my posts calming, that I was able to grab their attention, and that my texts were inspiring.
Looking back on my library of posts, I sometimes have to pinch myself and think: Oh, I really did that, didn't I?
Seeing my own development, both in terms of my writing and all I was able to write about and share, a bit more shamelessly with each post, makes me proud of it all, even if only 69 people also got to see that with me.
I'm so eager to see where the second year takes me.
X.O.
IAS
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