Hey y’all! So last month I mentioned that I had set specific monthly goals for growing both my traffic here, and the number of downloads to my podcast. What I’m going to do is every month this year I will give you an update letting you know if I hit my goals for the previous month, and also letting you know what my goals are for the current month. I’ll also share with you the most important lessons I learned over the past month. I want to do this to hold myself accountable to the goals I’ve set, but to also give you a way to learn from I’m doing. So many people and companies want to know how to grow its blog readership, and podcast audience. This year we’ll look at my efforts to do both.
First, here were my goals for January:
Blog – Traffic of at least 50,000 visitors.
Podcast – At least 750 downloads.
Breakdown of My Blog Traffic
My blog traffic for January was 53,783! So I comfortably hit my blogging goal for January! Pretty excited about that.
Posts written – 12 (At least 2 every week, which was my goal)
Most popular post written in January (based on views) – The Most Boring Answer to the ‘How Do I Build More Traffic to My Blog?’ Question
Detailed Analysis of Traffic Sources
Here’s where my traffic came from in January:
Organic Search – 83.46%
Direct – 9.15%
Referral – 4.19%
Social – 2.93%
Email – 0.19%
Other – 0.08%
Two things jump out to me from these numbers: For me, organic search is way too high, and social is way too low. I would like to see search fall to around 70% and Social rise to 10-15%. I just worry when my traffic is that dependent on one source.
Something else that’s interesting, check out the numbers for time spent on site:
Average time a visitor spends on this blog – 47 seconds
Average time a visitor coming from search spends on this blog – 41 seconds
Average time a visitor coming from social spends on this blog – 71 seconds
Average time a visitor coming from Twitter spends on this blog – 74 seconds
Average time a visitor coming from Facebook spends on this blog – 73 seconds
Interesting, huh? A visitor coming from a social media site spends about 80% more time on the site versus a visitor coming from search. This suggests that the search visitor is just coming to get something and leave, while the social visitor is more likely to look around a bit.
Also, I’m noticing that the engagement numbers I am seeing on Twitter are surprisingly low. According to Twitter, even though I have over 50,000 followers, most of my tweets are seen by less than 1,000 people. Yikes! I’ll probably be spending a bit more time on Google Plus to see if I can raise social traffic and engagement there, since I have a much larger network there versus Facebook or LinkedIn.
Now my goal for February is to hit 54,000 visitors. This looks like it should be easy since I almost did that in January, but don’t forget that this month only has 28 days. In fact I am currently on pace to only hit 50,000 visitors for the month. So even if I miss my goal for this month I’m not too worried due to it being a short month. However, I am going to try to get back to writing 3 posts a week starting next week. Just in case!
Podcast Numbers and Overview
If you listened to this week’s episode of #FanDamnShow you know I already did a breakdown of how the podcast did in Jan, and my key takeaways. Please check out that episode if the podcast stuff is what you are interested in.
Goal for January – At least 750 downloads
Actual number of downloads for January – 737
I missed my goal by 13 freaking downloads! Ugh! But still very close and my goals for the podcast growth was really aggressive. For reference, the podcast had 133 downloads for all of December, and 737 in January. Still, a massive jump.
Here’s daily downloads for August 1st, 2014 through January 31st, 2015:
As you can see, very low daily downloads, typically less than 10 a day, until the end of December and through January on the right. That’s when I started putting out new episodes on a weekly basis. From August 1st through December 29th, I put out 3 new episodes of the podcast. From December 30th through January 31st, I put out five new episodes of the podcast, one every week. If you are wanting to build an audience for your podcast, consistency is key. Putting up a new episode on a regular schedule is vital to your show’s success, as this graph proves.
Two important lessons I learned from doing the podcast in January:
1 – It’s very important to script out the flow of each episode before recording it. I didn’t do this for the first couple of episodes in January, and I noticed my thoughts were kinda all over the map. When I started writing down a script, just the key points I wanted to talk about and in the order I wanted to talk about them, it really helped the flow of the episodes, and it made it much easier for me to keep my thoughts organized.
2 – It’s very important to thank the people that are promoting your show. What I noticed was that each week people were promoting the show for me, especially on Twitter and Facebook. So I made a point of doing a shoutout to them on each show, then I let them know I did so after the episode went up. Just a small way to say ‘Thank You’, but everyone loves to be appreciated, right?
So that’s how my January went, and what I learned. Again my goals for February are:
Blog – At least 54,000 visitors.
Podcast – At least 850 downloads.
I’ll be back here in a month to let you know how I did!
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Mack, congratulations for hitting your goals and thank you for sharing the results of your first month. I love your transparency and open data approach.
I have a question: have you changed the type of content you’re sharing? Or are you posting more from your blog now and less of other people’s content or vice versa? Perhaps that is playing a role in the difference of reach of content.
Really interesting. Look forward to Feb’s stats!
Kelly
Thanks Kelly! Are you talking about engagement on Twitter? I started closely watching it in early December and its always been low. Seems like traffic from Twitter goes up IF I can invest 2-3 hours to spend sharing my and other people’s content AND chatting with others. But as you know it’s tough to spend more than even 30 mins on there most days. IOW I don’t think the modest increase in engagement is worth the amount of time you have to sink into Twitter to get it. At least not for me.
Hi Mack,
Yes, I was speaking specifically about Twitter and yes, I agree that investing three hours a day to yield a bit more engagement isn’t really worth it.
But here’s a thought I want to share. I’ve been following my Twitter account with fascination the past three months with the opposite story of yours:
I classify myself as a small fish in the big sea of “number of followers” so from time to time I play around to see what advice works and what doesn’t.
Back in August I was fooling around with posting times to see what worked best. You know, everyone talks about “best time of day to post” so I thought I’d check it out. Honestly, it didn’t seem to matter when I posted, I wasn’t getting a whole lot of traction. So after playing around with times, I set a schedule and tried posting a few tweets a day to it.
Not a whole lot happened and I didn’t change anything. I gave up. I’m not going to spend my time trying to find out how I can increase followers. I was only interested if tips and advice really worked.
But all of a sudden in November I saw a huge surge in my Tweets being shared and follows. I hadn’t changed my sources, topics I share, or frequency. My followers continued to grow in December, and January was outrageous.
The only difference in January is that I started my own blog, but seriously, we know how slow I am in posting so my one post hasn’t made a difference and, we let’s be honest: I’m no Ann Handley. My blog post is not the cause of an increase in followers.
So this is my theory: In September Twitter announced a few algorithmic changes in promoting Tweets from people that you don’t follow, along with “other” tweaks for better engagement. That began rolling out sometime in Oct/Nov.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Twitter tweaked its algorithm to help out people with smaller followings in order to get their content more visible. This would encourage “more” engagement, more sharing. Engagement has been a big issue for Twitter and it’s been on their radar to find ways to encourage people (people = who are not active or who don’t have big followings to be more active)
I’ve changed nothing and I’ve jumped up 200 users in the past 40 days. Perhaps something has changed where your content isn’t as “visible” as it used to be, or, people with smaller followings are being promoted more, with the thought process of: anyone over x amount of followers is already pretty set, so let’s work on increasing followers of people with lower followings.
Today Twitter announced a partnership with Google. Tweets will now be indexed and show alongside Google searches. This is going to be really powerful for people who are spot on with Tweets and link sharing. My bet is that this will boost your Twitter following/engagement over the coming months because your topics/sharing is 100% spot on with customer advocacy, loyalty and brand building. Your tweets will be seen alongside Google search results.
I have no idea if any of this is relevant. I just find it interesting that for the same time you’ve seen a decrease, I’ve seen an increase and we are at opposite ends of the Twitter following scale not changing anything.
Kelly that’s very interesting news! I will definitely be checking into this more, and how Google will select which tweets to index.
Something unrelated that I noticed: I went back and checked the number of impressions Twitter said I got for my tweets this week and noticed something bizarre: The number of impressions for each tweet I left with the #Bizheroes hashtag were impossibly low. In fact, Twitter says only *16* people saw my first #Bizheroes tweet where I joined the chat and asked how everyone was. I find it impossible that with over 50,000 followers that only 16 people could see one of my tweets. And for the rest of my #bizheroes tweets, the impressions on all of them were 200 or lower for each, most were under 100. If that’s somehow accurate, it suggests that maybe Twitter wasn’t serving up my tweets with the #bizheroes hashtag to my followers? Maybe only people watching the #bizheroes hashtag could see them?
No idea, but very wonky.
That is interesting and definitely something wrong there. #glitch!
You’re rockin’ it, Mack! Proud of you. I don’t know many people in this space who’d put their traffic numbers out there.
I’m surprised people don’t browse more on your site. You have a lot of content that relates to certain topics, especially brand ambassador programs. Does your site suggest related posts, or is the navigation intuitive in terms of guiding people to related content? Just a thought.
Fantastic work, darlin’! You’re well on your way to meeting your goals for 2015.
Thank you Kerry! It does have related posts at the end of each post, but I do need to change the navigation at the top to get away from Social Media 101 to focus more on Brand Advocacy. Per Kelly’s suggestion 😉 Appreciate both of you helping me promote #FanDamnShow especially!
We’re #FanDamnProudFans! 🙂
And how, Kelly! Love Mack. 🙂
Love you both!
Nice job on the podcast! Just starting to get back to the consistent schedule myself. I’m going to have to start taking your lead on scripting each episode ahead of time. I usually have a list of questions I want to ask guests ahead of time, but it’ll help stay better focused if I script things out a bit more.
Thanks Ricardo, the scripting really helps. Plus it helps you with time management and you can set aside how much time you want to talk about each point.