SideGains November 2019 Blog Traffic Stats

The month’s are flying by pretty quickly! This is the fifth monthly activity report I’ve produced so at this point SideGains is no longer a totally new blog. Having said this, I’m still waiting to reach a tipping point of sorts as traffic is still slow… but there are small improvements.

Up to the end of November I’ve published 75 blog posts, almost 100% of which in excess of 1K words. I’ve maintained my blogging schedule of 3 to 4 posts per week and continued working on promoting my blog through social media and building relationships with other bloggers.

In terms of social media, the big changed I’ve seen this month is that my Pinterest impressions have fallen dramatically… I’ll discuss this below.

I’m going to change the way I report on stats from this month onwards and I’ll update all my other activity reports in the same way. Up to now I’ve only been using Google Search Console to present visitor information, but this doesn’t show the full picture. So from now on I’m going to present data from Google Analytics too.

Since I now have 5 month’s worth of data now I’m also going to create a new post that tracks monthly performance in one place. This will have less specific detail relating to specific months, but will be useful to show month on month performance in one place.

Anyway, here’s how November 2019 looks.

If you’re interested, you can find all my monthly reports here: SideGains Blog Traffic Stats.

SideGains Google Analytics Stats November 2019

• Users have increased by 41.95%.
• Sessions have increased by 57.45%.
• Pages Per Session has decreased by 0.05 pages.

I’m happy to have seen an increase in visitors and session in November, especially considering there was one day less in the month than October. Obviously traffic is still very low and as I mention above I’m waiting to see a tipping point as I continue producing posts and promoting them.

Pages Per Session has dropped, but with such small visitor numbers this is not yet a reliable indicator there’s something wrong. This will take on a larger significance when I’m getting thousands of visitors.

SideGains Search Console Stats (Search Type: Web) November 2019

As with October, there are mixed changes month on month here.

• Clicks have decreased by 58.14%.
• Impressions have decreased by 12.03%.
• Average CTR has decreased by 66.7%.
• Average Position has decreased by 1.6 places.

I’m not too concerned about average position because I’m adding more content on probably more competitive subjects. The only major stat I’m concerned about right now is traffic.

Blog Posts & Pages

I now have 75 posts… and it’s tough to keep up the pace!

I made 13 posts in November (1 less than October 2019) totalling 18,511 words (7,251 words less).

I’m still waiting to start seeing a significant change in traffic and I’m still actively trying to increase my profile with blog commenting and social media activity.

Social Media

A little different for me than October 2019. I focussed my efforts mostly on Twitter in November, and left Pinterest alone for a while. This has had an interesting and unsettling effect, which I’ll come onto.

I’ve also sporadically posted in Facebook but these have been literally just sharing my blog posts. Again I’ve pretty much left Instagram untouched for now.

Here’s how my social accounts look at the end of November 2019 compared to the previous month.

Twitter – @gains_side

My follower numbers haven’t risen greatly because I wanted to see how my interactions and followers grew without trying to bump these numbers up simply by following others. You can see this is reflected most notably in follower growth… which shows follow for follow love is a real thing!

I’ve resisted following people as many will just follow you back as a courtesy, but perhaps not then be interested in engaging with your tweets. I may pick this up again, but for the time being I’m just going to see how I grow organically and I’ll follow back where I see our interests align.

My tweet activity is up on October as are my impressions.

Pinterest – @SideGains

My pinning activity dropped at the start of November because I started to see a decrease in impressions and couldn’t figure out why. You can see from the above impressions compared to October how dramatic a drop this has been.

At the minute I’m at a loss to explain why this has happened so rather than continue plugging away adding more pins, I’m trying to understand what has happened. I’ll create a post about this when I get to the bottom of it.

Instagram – @SideGains

No growth at all in November but this is because I can’t spend time on Instagram for the minute as I don’t feel right now it’s the channel to focus upon. My feeling is other channels are better for me to focus upon for traffic at this point.

Facebook – @SideGains

I’ve done little else in Facebook apart from posting links to 3 of my blog posts. Interestingly Page Likes have grown quite a lot for such little activity. I’ll probably push harder in Facebook in December to see what effect this has.

What’s Next?

• I need to understand what’s been happening in Pinterest and whether or not I have some problem with my account.
• Continue posting 3 to 4 posts per week.
• I need to be more methodical in how I promote my posts and will develop a plan to carry out related social media daily to do lists. I also need to start guest posting… I’ll report on how this goes next month.
• SideGains will be 6 months old next month so I’ll also be preparing a six-month update!

It’s still tough to keep the spirits up but I am committed to making this work… you have to practise what you preach after all!

Bye for now and thanks for reading!

Paul

I’d love to hear about your blogging journey. Tell me your story in the comments section below… let’s grow and help others by sharing our experiences!