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 June:
Blog – At least 70,000 visitors
Podcast – At least 2,500 downloads
Blog Traffic Results For June
My blog traffic in June was 40,721 visitors, averaging 1,357 visitors a day. In May, the blog’s traffic was 39,000, averaging 1,258 a day. So a slight increase of 4%, which reverses the trend of the last few months. I made some backend changes to the blog back in February, and since that time search traffic has decreased considerably, which was a big driver in the fall in overall traffic. The hope has been that eventually search traffic would rise back to at least previous levels and bring overall traffic levels with it.
Here’s how each category of traffic did in June vs May:
Search traffic – Down 4.82%
Direct traffic – Up 19.85%
Email – Up 8,216%
Referral – Up 5.12%
Social – Up 86.61%
As you can see, search traffic was actually down again, but every other major source of traffic was up. Email and Social had huge gains, and that was due primarily to the popularity of this post: Don’t Sweat the Technique: The Rock Star’s Guide to Content Creation, Content Marketing and Promotion. This was by far the most popular post I wrote last month, and was a big driver in the jump in Social traffic. An interesting byproduct of writing that post was that as it gained popularity on Twitter and Facebook, it caught the attention of Moz, who included it in their email roundup of interesting posts, and that generated about another 2,000 visitors via email. So if I didn’t write that one post, the entire outlook for the month looks much different, traffic is probably down about 5% from May versus being up 4%. It’s a testament to the potential power of every single post you write, and a good reminder to me as well.
Here’s how weekly search traffic has looked through June:
You can see it was very high through mid-February, then the bottom fell out. It continues to slightly decrease, I was hopeful that had ended earlier this month, last week was actually up about 10% and I thought the fever had finally broke. But this week it’s back down slightly, so on we go.
I wrote 10 posts in June, which was about 2-3 lower than my monthly goals.
Podcast Numbers and Overview for June
While blog traffic was down again month, podcast downloads again did very well in June.
The goal for June was at least 2,500 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 4,296 downloads in June. That was actually down slightly from May, but still far ahead of the goals for June. Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:
The numbers were again strong in June. One episode was unique, as I welcomed the first guest to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show as Kerry Gorgone joined on the June 17th episode to discuss the legal concerns of social media. This episode is already the most downloaded one, with well over 2,000 downloads, about 400 more than 2nd place. Obviously Kerry was quite popular as was her topic, but I also think that having a guest helped make the episode more popular so I will look for ways to incorporate more guests into future episodes.
So those are my blog and podcast results for June. Here’s my goals for July:
Blog traffic – At least 75,000 visitors
Podcast – At least 3,000 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 will be all but impossible to miss.
I’ll be back in one month to share my results for July!
