I’ve been wanting to grow my site more and more, and have always been wanting to focus on the Blog. Since I’d like to look into blogging full time. I’m an INTJ, and actually enjoy writing content. It comes natural to me, I just don’t do it often.
Over the years, as I’ve been experimenting with my Website, and learning about affiliate marketing. I’ve been wanting to transform this website into one where I can blog full-time.
I’ve been interested in developing my traffic. My “main” portion of the site is HTML based, and this side of my Website gets around 70,000 hits per month in terms of traffic
My blog side is fairly low, because I’ve never worked on it.
I’m going to be more focussed on developing my blog with the Website in order to attract more traffic towards it. I’ve got ideas in terms of the content.
Currently my blog averages the following in terms of traffic (every 30 days or so). My stats are a bit skewed because they’re merged with awstats. This is the data from my Monster Insights dashboard
- Sessions : 1957 (Current avg 65 per day, 83 max)
- Page Views : 3928 (Current avg 131 per day, 443 max)
- As a note, I need to amend/investigate this figure. I have a Website page showing Jobs in North East England. I’m not sure if a robot is crawling it. The traffic appears to be every Sunday. Although this could be times when I was posting on LinkedIn. It’s kinda messing up my figures tbh, which is bloody irritating.
- Avg. Session Duration – 56s
- Bounce Rate – 86.67% (This tend to vary between 80 and 95%)
A bit more details
I’ve done some calculations (since I now use an Excel spreadsheet), and I’m recording my figures daily. My “starting” figures are as follows (based on Jan 17th 2021 post date)
- SESSIONS (Daily Avg : 65.85 | Monthly Avg : 2002.79) (+4.4% Growth)
- PAGE VIEWS (Daily Avg : 135.15 | Monthly Avg : 4110.96) (-2.42% Loss)
This to me is way too low but it’s a start. I’m also recording the statistics here so I can check how my Blog content improves over time.
I want to get the Bounce rate down on my Website to around 60%, anything better than the above is an improvement really. I always like to see the changes over time when it comes to my Website however, because I can monitor the results then and see as it improves.
In terms of the above figures, the form a baseline for the Website before/after. It’s a bit difficult for me to monitor. I’m using MonsterInsights, not Google Analytics for my SEO monitoring of my Blog. As I don’t use the Pro version of this, it makes it kind of hard to monitor everything properly. The major problem is that MonsterInsights (non Pro), only shows you your statistics on a rolling average over 30 days. So you will never find out how it grows unless you purchase it.
I’ll update Google Analytics for correct monitoring eventually, one of those many changes I need to do on my Website. I planned on purchasing Monster Insights Pro further down the line with my Website. Although I tend to prefer “lifetime” packages, rather than “yearly”. Mainly because I’m a small Web hosts, recurring fees become expensive for me unless this site develops an income.
My Excel spreadsheet now tracks it, my current rolling average is growing on my Website, so I know it’s gaining traffic, and I’ll continue to write more and more content as I migrate to Blogging. I’ll keep updating this post as I go to determine new Website figures
How to grow traffic for the blog
Simply put, I’m going to keep writing content. I’m also going to improve upon existing content that I’ve already wrote. One of the most succesful articles that I wrote on my blog was about Engine Oil.
This post was ranked #1 in Google for a few days, and frequently was in featured snippets. So I achieved good numbers in terms of traffic to my website because I’ve this.
I intend on going through all previous articles, updating the content to refresh them, and expand on it further. One thing I’ve noticed is that longer articles tend to be more favourable for bloggers. It tends to keep the users attention and interest more.
Another thing I will be doing is spending more time with internal links to other articles that others may find interesting on my blog. I don’t particularly do this, but it’s a great way for user retention and overall bounce rates
How am I monitoring my goals?
Primarily my goal monitoring will be done through my Monster Insights dashboard. I’m also going to be looking at integrating some further analytics for tracking over the Website to monitor the bounce rate. Everytime I carry out a site update now, I also record the date of the action in an Excel spreadsheet, and what action was undertaken. This helps me target what changes were made on the website that improved it. Experimentation is certainly the key to Website design and Marketing it.
I want to experiment with my links to. When I go to external sites, or want to link to internal pages. I tend to use _blank, so that a new window is opened. Maybe this affects my bounce rate on the website too. I’ll have to experiment. Normally when I open new links I do it myself with the middle mouse button, or a right-click. However I realise users may not be clued up on doing this.
What are my goals
The primary goal for me is user retention. I want to keep people browsing my website for longer in order to keep the content more interesting for them. Increasing returning visitors, and reducing the overall bounce rate.
