Four months down and many more to go! In an effort to give you a peek behind the curtain, we are back to share with you something very near and dear to our hearts: The State of the Blog Report.
Just as a reminder from the first report, we intentionally make known our status reports as a way to share with you and the blogging community what we have found that works and what doesn’t. It is a way for us to see what our baseline is and how we need to improve.
We do these posts because it is helpful for us to see where we have come from, where we need to grow, and hopefully help others who are starting their own blogs. We do not claim to know it all, we simply and humbly share with you our results saying this is where we have come from, this is what we are building on, and where we hope to keep growing. This is a way for us to share with other bloggers and travel writers what we have found that works and what doesn’t work, as well as pass on helpful tips and tricks from our experiences.
Let’s look at the numbers and see how this blog is doing.
Numbers
This past month was our strongest one yet as we have been blessed with tremendous support from our audience and other sites. After the Prague series finished up, and a feature on Caravaggio, we brought it back to Texas with a feature on Fort Worth, a short-series on Houston, an initial Chicago series, and an international series on Cesky Krumlov.
The amount of sessions is up 11%, users is up 21%, and the pageviews is up 14% over all of last month. Another item of note is that our percentage of new users jumped 3 percentage points as more people continue to find us and our content. Looking at the graph, there were several days that had high pageviews and sessions for us. Also, we did not have as many low days where no one came by. (For a description of what all these words and terms mean, check out the first post as Rachel described them there).
As for where the readers came from to get to the site, Facebook has been our most popular again this month. However, we have started seeing increasing traffic from Google searches. New to the charts this month is Reddit. David has been actively involved in Reddit and promoting the site, as well as other cool links, as best as one can on there (for anyone looking to “friend” him, check him out here).
What Worked…and What Didn’t
As mentioned in last month’s State of the Blog report, we have really focused more on social media and this has helped us in many ways. This month, we have focused on different Facebook groups that have really been good as far as not only generating traffic, but also seeing what other travel writers are doing. If you are a travel writer, I would encourage you to look at the following groups as they have been so beneficial to us: Part-Time Traveler Talk (social media), Travel Bloggers Mega Share, Travel Blogged, and Twitter for Travel Bloggers. Other non-travel related groups that are helpful are: Social Media Network Group and Blog Society. There are several others that we would like to join or are trying to join but have not been able to as of yet. (If there are any groups that you suggest we join or look into, please let us know as we would appreciate the help.)
What has been great about these groups is that they have had different “threads” (essentially a post) that focuses on a blog exercise or a different social media approach. These threads help us meet other travel writers so that we can learn from them. Whether you are looking to do travel writing or something else, I would highly suggest looking into these groups for your style/type of blog.
As far as social media goes, both Twitter and Instagram continue to be great ways for us to connect with our readers, other bloggers, companies, organization, and professional writers/photographers. We have truly been amazed and humbled by all the support we have received and so we say a big THANK YOU! Rachel continues to work diligently with our Pinterest page as that has steadily grown this past month as well.
We have added a couple of new features on the blog that you may have noticed. We joined Bloglovin’ so please feel free to follow us there. There is a new button on the sidebar that will help in following. We have just started this out as we have noticed many other bloggers using this service so we hope to provide our thoughts on it in the coming months. Also, we have added our Facebook page to the sidebar as well for quicker access to it that will have some extra info, pictures, and ways to communicate with us.
Another item to note, as you may have noticed, we have scaled back our posting from five days a week to three days a week. Some weeks there will be four due to our continued Feature Friday series or the new “In Case You Missed It” summary post on our different series.
Summary
We continue to be humbled and thankful for all of the support we have seen. The Facebook groups have been amazing to us and have seen some growth from Reddit. It is great to see how this little blog is picking up momentum and growing. We realize that it is beyond us and our efforts and is due to something greater than us. We do not know what the future holds, but we hope that you enjoy our upcoming series on different cities both local, near, and far.
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