Thursday, April 4, 2013

Personal Blog and Twitter Stats & Some Observations

I get a lot of questions about my blog and Twitter following. I know when I first started blogging I wished I understood what was considered to be "good" traffic, and what wasn't.

For the record, my following / hits are only modest in the grand scheme of the internet superhighway. I've got a stronger following that many unpublished authors, but in terms of a professional asset, my current platform is merely considered a "good start".

With that in mind, I thought I'd give you a few stats about my blog and my Twitter following. I'd love to hear from you guys about yours, and how we compare, and any ideas for growing blog followers in particular. My blog stats keep improving, but my followers have been stagnating for months.

Keep in mind I started blogging and tweeting in August / September 2010. So stats for 2010 are scewed since there's only 4 months worth of work there.

So...here we go:

2010 (Aug-Dec)

Best month on the blog: 2,841 hits (average 95 hits per day)
Blog followers at year end: 81
Twitter followers at year end: 900ish.


2011 (full calendar year)

Best month on the blog: 3, 951 hits (average 127 hits per day)
Blog followers at year end: 486
Twitter followers at year end: 1200ish


2012 (full calendar year)

Best month on the blog: 6,430 hits (average 214 hits per day)
Blog followers at year end: 596
Twitter followers at year end: 3,300ish


2013 So Far...

Currently trending up.

In February I had 5,886 hits (average of 210 hits per day). In March I hit 6,153. At this point I'm sitting just under 3,500 Twitter followers. However, I've gained less than a handful of new blog followers this year.


Some Observations:

I definitely have a stronger, more consistent following on Twitter than I do on the blog. I believe this is because of the combination of the ease of Twitter following (it's just what you do on there), and also because I get a lot of RT's from published / well known writerly types. I have a "reputation" for lack of a better word. I get more direct contact (emails, DM's, etc) from Twitter followers than from blog followers. And my Twitter following continues to grow consistently, while the blog following growth has slowed (yet blog hits keep rising - from Twitter traffic, I'm sure).

Since I link my blog posts off Twitter (and most of my traffic comes from those links / RT's), I think many writers choose to only follow me on Twitter, rather than adding me to their blog feed. Why? Not sure... I know personally, adding a blog to my feed feels like a great commitment. I'm getting pickier and pickier about who and what I will follow. So maybe that's true for everyone?

But I'm also a lot better about keeping in touch with others on Twitter than I am about reading and commenting on blogs. So that probably contributes too.

I want to be clear that I'm not putting these out there to impress anyone. I'm very aware of the modesty of my following. But I know when I was just starting out, I wished authors would be more open with this kind of information, so I had a gauge on how I was doing in developing my own platform. So hopefully this is helpful (or interesting) to those of you in that position.

Your Turn: Thoughts? Questions? 

6 comments:

  1. Such an interesting post, Aimee! Especially because it's a reminder that there are different ways of building a "platform" for a writer. I actually keep my blog and my Twitter activity quite segregated: I rarely tweet about my blog. It means that at the end of the day, I don't have huge numbers of followers (400ish for the blog and 800ish on Twitter) but having both allows me to interact with different people.

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  2. I've been thinking about this recently as well. I've got a very modest following on my blog of just over 100 followers, and when I started the blog I know that I started it for me as a place to improve my writing rather than with a thought to building a platform. But more recently I started a wordpress blog for my academic writing since this has a very different purpose and tone to my personal blogger blog. I get next to no hits and have almost no followers on my wordpress blog and I didn't think that would bug me quite as much as it does. I post all my blogs, both personal and academic, to twitter and I can see the rise in post reads when I do this but like you I'm not getting a lot of blog followers from it. I think if people know that I'm going to update twitter/facebook when I post a blog they don't need to follow another way. I tend to do both, as I'm a bit of a social media obsessive and I'm worried I'll miss something.

    I'm trying to remind myself that it took a good year to build up my blogger following, and I just need to be patient with the wordpress blog. The best advice I've seen on getting a better following is to make it easy to do so with subscription info on the page, to interact with other bloggers/tweeters and to keep putting out good content.

    One thing I'm thinking about looking at is the mobile version of my blogs, and making them easy to view and quick to load on phones and tablets.

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  3. These stats are very interesting, thank you for sharing. It's also making me realize how very slow my blog's growth is. How did you get to such a strong start in 2011? I'd love to hear more about your outreach tactics to build your base of readers.

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  4. This is such an interesting post, Aimee, thank you for sharing. It's so hard to know where you stand when you have nothing to compare to. I have to look and see what my stats are - not as good as yours I don't think. I certainly have fewer blog followers - 460 - but they are wonderful and loyal and do visit and comment - I treasure each and every one. I am terrible at twitter - I don't really get it, and I'm very erratic in my tweeting. I've been on twitter just shy of a year and I have low 200s following.

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  5. Thanks for sharing! I find it odd that you have 3,300 TWITTER friends...but only twice that in monthly views...best scenario. I've only been blogging for 8 months...and only have about 350 Followers TOTAL from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.....yet I trend upward every one of these 8 months, and will be hitting 10,000 this month.
    I believe that with the zillions of emails we all already get from everyone else...most prefer to just go back and check your site at will. If you post weekly, people seem to come back and take a peek. My next goal is to it 30,000 views per month and I am excited for each person that comes back! I have a lot of plans for the blog and I find it fulfilling, but at the same time decided NOT to worry too much with stats.

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    Replies
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