This month, I decided to take 2 weeks off from my consulting and go in with blogging… hard.
I put out 11 blog posts this month, including my biggest one on this blog so far (4.2k words) my SAPE guide.
Don’t get used to this every month, but I have set a goal of putting out at least 5 blogs a month, as part of my goals for 2016.
Content
This month I wanted to have posts out that could help grow my organic traffic from both social and organic… It’s worked, as I’ve seen a nice growth this month, but we’ll cover the stats later on.
Here’s are the top 5 posts I put out this month, in order of traffic:
- How to Build A Private Blog Network – This guide really kicked off Decembers traffic spikes with over four and a half thousand people flocking to read this post… It’s also been one of my most linked to posts yet on the blog, and the social stats speak for themselves.
- The Biggest List of Internet Marketing Tools EVER – About half the impact of it’s #1 competitor in numbers, but it spread on Facebook like hot cakes. Later in the month I also listed several of the tools that help me be so damn productive.
- The 2015 SEO Survey – A survey I collated by well over 100 SEOs from around the industry, with some VERY surprising results, I got a big wave of traffic from the Thai SEO Board, so shoutout to the readers in Thailand!
- An SEO that does a Different Job Every 3 Months – One of the most interesting people I’ve ever met from the industry, a guy that changes his job, to a completely different industry every 3 months, using his local SEO skills.
- The 2 blog posts with VERY similar numbers, were last month’s traffic report and my 2015 best posts and influencers round-up. Just over 20 pageviews between the 2… Though the latter I’d say will give you a LOT of things to do in the new year.
Here’s a full view of my most viewed pages in December –
I also said a final farewell to God of SEO. #RIP
Features –
I occasionally do interviews, podcasts and get my content featured by other IM’ers around the industry. Here’s the features I got in December:
- Making Money with SEO by Simple Sites – Jesse and Alyssa linked to several of my pieces this month, as well as giving me a feature in their 4 man expert round-up for beginners. Makes for a pretty interesting read.
- Best Black Hat Forum – I had an interesting experience on the forum with someone attempting to try and leech my new eBook, though I quickly got on there (as I’ve been a member for a few years) and changed up the attitude, offering a coupon on there that sold a couple more copies of the book, Gary Vee would be pleased.
Design Change
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the blogs a LOT faster, and in my opinion at least, looks a lot better/more professional than the previous theme – Seems a lot of you guys think so too, considering my time average time on site has jumped by about 45 seconds…
Traffic & Stats
In December, I started developing out the current content on the blog, made a load of OnPage changes to grow my organic traffic, worked on a proper social marketing campaign and started utilizing my email list a lot more.
A Traffic Overview –
Visitors: 16,088 (from 9,341 – 75% Increase)
Unique Visitors: 8,127 (from 6,033 – 35% Increase)
Pageviews: 33,156 ( from 20,441 – 62% Increase)
It seems putting in the work this month has paid off… Big time. Let’s see if the drop off in posts in January, but the improvements to social and search has paid off. I think I may see a small drop next month, as I’m only planning on putting out 5 or so posts..
Top Traffic Sources –
Speaking of traffic improvements, my organic and social traffic has grown massively this month.
Twitter traffic up 1,200%! Search traffic up 30% (I only made the OnPage changes in the later parts of December) and Facebook traffic up 190%!
As I moved God of SEO into an archived state, it’s started passing on quite a bit of traffic, though I currently only have the notification bar on the homepage. I may move it site-wide soon.. Or just add a CTA banner to the site somewhere.
I also started a few threads and did a few comments on Stack That Money this month, after following a few paid traffic guides on there… Which saw a nice little bump in traffic, I may have to try and overtake the SEO section there and aim for mod!
Social Presence –
Every month I detail my social growth across all the platforms I use.
- Facebook Page: 4,293 Likes (3,700 Last Month)
- Facebook Group: 5,947 Members (5,500 Last Month)
- Twitter: 3,180 Followers (3,089 Last Month)
- YouTube: 692 (640 Last Month)
- Google+: 1,523 Followers & 152,677 Views (1,490 & 145,000 Last Month)
- Instagram: 922 Followers (632 Last Month)
(All as of 1st of January, 2016)
Thanks For Reading
I hope you enjoyed this months traffic report, don’t forget to signup to my newsletter here and if you’d like to see anything else in the next months report or any pieces of content out this month, drop a comment below.
