June was a busy month for me personally because I closed on and moved into a new house! So there was a lot of packing and unpacking that took place. As a result, I didn't spend much time blogging or promotion. I'm hoping that won't be reflected in my results. Keep reading to see.
I share my monthly traffic reports partly to hold myself accountable and help me keep a closer eye on my monthly stats. I’m also doing this in the hopes of helping and encouraging other bloggers who are looking to grow their online presence.
June 2016 site stats
- Sessions: 2,778 (+0.18%)
- Users: 2,222 (+0.27%)
- Pageviews: 4,158 (-5.91%)
- Pages/Sessions: 1.5 (-5.66%)
- % of New Sessions: 72.28% (-0.97%)
- Bounce Rate: 81.35% (+3.14%)
June 2016 top pages
- My Relaxed Hair Regimen
- Hair Tip: Pre-poo Before Cleansing Relaxed Hair
- 10 Great Hair Products Under $10
- How To Prep Relaxed Hair For A Day At The Beach
June 2016 top traffic drivers
- Direct
- Google/organic
June 2016 social stats
My takeaways
- Continue with BoardBooster - Yes
- Create a strategy for Instagram - No
- Work to be more consistent on Twitter -No
What worked
Promoting older contentThis month I really started digging into my blog archives to find posts to promote. To promote this older content I
- Used BoardBooster to loop older pins
- Scheduled a few Twitter posts using Hootsuite
- Shared posts in Facebook groups
The result was three of my four top blog posts is content that is a year or older. It's also interesting to note that all of my top posts this month are hair posts. It seems like hair content is more popular among my readers and followers. This could also be because most of my content is hair content and that was the focus of my blog in the beginning.
What sort of worked
BoardBooster and PinterestBy continuing to use BoardBooster I am steadily pinning to my boards and a couple of group boards I joined without having to do much other than finding and add pins to my secret boards a couple of times a week. This netted me more followers, increased engagement and repins.
While the net increase in followers may look good, I did have a few days about mid-June where I had several people unfollow me. At first, I was confused and scared and tried to figure out what I might have done wrong.
After doing some digging I realized those followers weren't true followers. They were accounts that had profile pics of celebrity figures or stock images. They also weren't pinning much of anything much less repinning me. Basically, they were spam accounts and I think since I didn't follow them back they unfollowed me. This put my freak out to rest.
I didn't create a strategy. In fact, I didn't even get around to trying. June ended up being a very busy and kind of stressful month for me so all things blogging ended up on the back burner. I did see some increased engagement (likes and comments) and followers though. This can be attributed to posting a bit more than normal and being more selective with the hashtags I used and using hashtags that have greater reach.
I've joined several groups on Facebook that are about helping bloggers promote their content. How it works is bloggers share their posts on a thread and are then required to comment on and share the posts of other bloggers. I tried to be active in the groups during the month of June and saw increased traffic from Facebook as a result.
I also saw increased traffic from StumbleUpon (if you can call it traffic). Particularly in the last week of June. This resulted in an increase in my bounce rate. The impact on my bounce rate hasn't been significant, but it's enough that I'm now going to specify in the Facebook groups where I want my content posted.
What didn't work
Being more consistent on TwitterFor some reason, Twitter had been boring me and I had little desire to spend time creating and scheduling tweets. While this didn't help my followers increase by much, it didn't have any big negative effect - yet.
How did your blog do in June?
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