We’re back again for another month of reporting on the status, growth, lessons learned, and reflections from September. In September we wrapped up our Kansas City series, highlighted a few local favorites here in Fort Worth, shared our day trip to Deep Ellum, invited a guest blogger for his first post on a layover in Vienna, and started our series on Paris. We’ve been busy! All of us are very much looking forward to October and the continuation of the Paris series–David and Rebekah have a unique way of storytelling and beautiful photos that I’m excited to read.
Our hopes and reason for sharing our “State of the Blog” is to be transparent, so we can reflect on what we’ve learned, the mistakes we’ve made, and to gather your thoughts as readers for suggestions we might make to improve. By no means do we claim to know all there is to blogging, but we do hope, especially for those other bloggers out there, that you find it helpful and encouraging.
Numbers
First, let’s get into the numbers for September. Overall, our numbers are fairly steady compared to August, we had very similar numbers in the categories of Sessions, Users, Pageviews, Pages/Session, and Average Session Duration. We are slightly disappointed those numbers haven’t bounced back to the boost we saw from July, however, the slow and steady growth is nothing to be too upset over. We did see some positive growth both in having a lowered bounce rate which is great; the number in August was just over 13% and it was lowered to 4%. We’re encouraged by that because it means that visitors are exploring the site a bit more and not just single-page visitors. We also saw a bit of an increase in new visitors, up almost 4% from August.
As far as traffic sources go, our number one referral is still the direct typing of our URL., followed by Reddit, Google, StumbleUpon and Facebook to round out the top five for September. I referred to StumbleUpon in August not being as popular as a traffic source, but it is back in our top five as we saw the difference with being active on that platform. Both Reddit and StumbleUpon have proved to be very resourceful tools, however they also have particular “rules” that must be followed for posting content. While we’d like to engage in promoting From Texas to Beyond, the requirements for staying active on both platforms has encouraged us to research other bloggers and become more active in searching out other markets/styles/writing focus.
What Worked…And What Didn’t
It’s hard to tell if perhaps our transition to less posting per week has impacted our traffic; the data is a bit confusing here. Our last full month of posting five times per week was in May, however we saw tremendous upticks in traffic in both June and July with some backsliding in August and September. The traffic sources when comparing those months indicate that we had a very strong presence on StumbleUpon and Reddit, but as I mentioned previously, it hasn’t been easy to maintain being active participants with the guidelines outlined by each. Both seem to be significant drivers of traffic to From Texas to Beyond, but how do we continue that traffic involvement yet also abide by the posting requirements? Any suggestions here?
We’ve also decided that for now, we’ll be not utilizing the two platforms of Flickr or Pinterest; we will maintain a presence on them both, however we are going to direct our energies to the social media sites that we’ve found people are more drawn to: Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter. Perhaps we will revisit them as time/energy allows, however we’ve found (and shared with you in the past) that for the world of travel blogging, they don’t seem to be as popular. If you recall last month, a theme was “quality over quantity”, which is the direction we’re heading as we try to keep things rolling and focusing energies on productive means of keeping blog traffic up.
Reflections & Summary
A few months back, we had the suggestion of a reader encourage us to thoughtfully consider that we can’t be “everything to everyone”. I think after gathering a few months of data and ultimately seeing the fruits (or non-fruits) of our labor, we’ve made decisions to help the blog overall by focusing more on utilizing Reddit and StumbleUpon while not continuing to engage on Flickr and Pinterest; we are hopeful that this will help us as we think about how to more productively use our time and strategies to drive interest and traffic to our site. Isn’t it wonderful to keep tabs on these things?
And now putting everything together…From Texas to Beyond has been a joy, a challenge, a growing opportunity, and a wonderful way to bring the four of us together. We’re so encouraged by the growth and progress we’ve made as we reflect on starting the blog, figuring out “jobs” for everyone, a schedule that works for our busy lives, and the tremendous blessing of having family, friends, and now people we don’t know supporting us. In the last seven months of blogging and sharing our updates and travels with you, we’ve grown as individuals and as a team to produce something that we’re all very proud of. I share with you now that Matt and I are sad to be transitioning out of the little team we’ve created; demands of family, work, school, and life are the root cause. For any conspirators that think we’re leaving on bad terms, I tell you we have sad hearts to be transitioning out, but have full confidence and wish success for David and Rebekah; to be honest, they have some wonderful skills to take From Texas to Beyond farther than Matt or I could!
You may see Matt or I posting from time to time as guest bloggers or fill in writers for David and Rebekah (who also have very busy lives!), but we’re stepping out of our roles as co-owners as our final transitions are made and as we pass our batons of responsibility over to them. I’ve enjoyed blogging, learning how to build a website, becoming familiar with social media platforms, and all the other behind the scenes tasks we’ve been involved in! We wish nothing but the best for you, David & Rebekah!
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