For every month in 2015, I’ve set specific goals for growing my blog readership, and podcast audience. The end goal is that by December this blog will have at least 100,000 visitors for that month, and the podcast will be downloaded at least 10,000 times for December. Every month I am going to write a post like this recapping how I did in the previous month, and share any lessons I have learned. The goal is to help you learn how to build a blog readership and podcast audience as I do.
First, here were my goals for July:
Blog – At least 75,000 visitors
Podcast – At least 3,000 downloads
Blog Traffic Results For July
My blog traffic in July was 38,125 visitors, averaging 1,229 visitors a day. In June, the blog’s traffic was 40,721, averaging 1,357 a day. So an overall decrease of 6%. This is mostly due to the fact that I only posted 9 posts last month, and only 3 of those were new, original posts that weren’t associated with #Blogchat or #FanDamnShow or this update. The goal is to have at least 2 such posts a week, so I missed that goal by 5 posts. Writing those additional posts would have probably given me a slight traffic increase over the previous month.
Here’s how each category of traffic did in July vs June:
Search traffic – Down 1.05%
Direct traffic – Down 5.13%
Referral – Up 6.71%
Social – Down 37.08%
Other – Up 36.87%
Email – Down 87.59%
A mostly mixed bag but I am pleased that Search traffic was barely down, and Referral traffic was up for the 3rd month in a row. Social being down was in large part due to my writing fewer posts last month. Plus I think some of the overall decline in traffic could be due to blog readership falling a bit in the Summer. It will be interesting to see how August does vs July.
One thing I haven’t really talked about so far with this series is the value of new content you create and the impact that new posts can have on your blog. Here’s the Top 10 most viewed pages on this blog for July (according to Google Analytics):
So only 1 post written in July ranked in the Top 10 for views in July, and that post was about my job search. I want to see if I can change that for August, hopefully have 2-3 of the posts I write this month rank in the Top 10.
Podcast Numbers and Overview for July
The goal for July was at least 3,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 3,662 downloads in July. That was actually down sharply from June, but I only recorded one new episode in July, aired on July 1st. I got busy with a lot of side projects and the job search, so I plan on getting back on a weekly schedule starting with this week. Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:
The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually topped 20,000 lifetime downloads last month and has a chance to top 25,000 downloads this month. For the last few months the podcast has been coasting comfortably and easily hitting monthly goals. That’s about to change as the monthly goals are about to take big jumps each month as we’re now in August and the goal by the end of the year is to hit 10,000 downloads in December. This month the goal jumps by 1,000, up to 4,000 downloads total.
So those are my blog and podcast results for July. Here’s my goals for August:
Blog traffic – At least 80,000 visitors
Podcast – At least 4,000 downloads
These were the goals I set for both at the start of the year. So it looks like the blog’s goal will be all but impossible to hit, and it looks like the podcast’s goal is very reachable.
I’ll be back in one month to share my results for August!
