It’s been two months since I re-launched my blog back in January and since I’m about to take a brief vacation, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at some of my stats during that time period. Note that these months do not provide a true apples-to-apples comparison, since I technically re-launched my blog mid-way through January, and March is not over yet.
Overall, I’m averaging about 20K page views per month and about 14K-15K visitors per month. I’m thrilled by this performance, and this level of readership has made the entire enterprise of re-designing the blog feel worthwhile.
By far my largest source of traffic is my Twitter page. This is not super surprising, as Twitter is able to surface my links quickly and reliably to anyone who’s following me. Plus, retweeting someone is not as huge of a commitment as sharing someone’s post on Facebook — I’ve seen some of my posts get good traffic that way. Traffic to archival material from search engines is also performing relatively well, and this blog’s Facebook page is slowly growing as a traffic driver.
Based on my observations, here are the posts that are likely to get the most traffic on this specific blog:
Any time I am one of the first to post about a video or a piece of content — I’ve been lucky to help surface some interesting videos on this blog, and any time I’m one of the first, I’ll usually be shared pretty frequently. Examples of this include these La La Land BTS videos, and this Breaking Bad movie (now taken down). But even if I’m not the first, sometimes people just want to check out specific pieces of content, as with this re-blog of SNL’s La La Land sketch.
Anything topical that people are interested in right now — posts on topics like the Oscars attracted significant attention right after the event. Any time you can tap into something people want to read about, think about, and discuss immediately, it’ll likely garner more traffic.
Any post that answers a specific question that people might be asking — After people watched Get Out, many of them wanted to know about the meaning of the Asian character that shows up seemingly randomly halfway through the film. My post addressing that question is on the first page of Google results for related queries.
***
I have a lot of ideas for how to grow the blog further, but I think that’ll have to be another post. There are several things I could be doing that I think would really help things (e.g., integrating AMP and Facebook Instant articles for starters).
In the meantime, I’m very grateful to my brother for helping with my blog re-launch, and also for anyone who has taken a look at the blog in the past few months. Thanks for reading, and if you want to follow along for regular updates, I’d recommend you follow me on Twitter or follow follow blog’s Facebook page. Or just check back here every day or two — I’ll usually have something new up (when I’m not on vacation).