To recap the last month, below are my top five posts for April 2012 and some observations based on the data from WordPress Site Stats and Google Analytics. It was a different month as far as post frequency and number of posts as I essentially took the last half of the month off because of the birth of our daughter on April 21st. Now, with her being more than two weeks old, we are getting into a bit of a rhythm in our household and thus back into the swing of things regarding the blog.
Graphic courtesy of Wordle.net
Because of the break I took, April ended up being what you might call a “hold its own” month. Had I continued my normal post frequency, it looks very likely that my blog would have continued the growth trend it has seen every month to date for 5 months previous, which is 35% growth each month. Thank you for reading!
Here are my top five posts:
- 5 Lessons I’m Learning About Life From A Very Pregnant Lady
- Why Being At Peace With a Decision Isn’t Always A Good Thing
- The Calf Path: Who Do You Follow?
- Resolved in the Resurrection
- 5 Keys To Making Molehills Out of Mountains
A few observations to help you with your own blog traffic:
- One of these top five posts was written in a previous month. This underscores the importance of optimizing your blogs posts for search engines as the traffic for this post was almost completely referred by Google searches related to its topic.
- In followup to that point, I cannot encourage strongly enough the search optimization of images in your blog posts. Facebook and LinkedIn continue to reign as #1 and #2 respectively in my blog’s referral traffic but a close third is Google Image Search. I believe this is due mostly to the use of the All in One SEO WordPress plugin by Semper Plugins. If you have a blog and don’t use this plugin, you’re missing out enormously on search engine referral traffic.
- There was a good amount of referral traffic generated from a friend and colleague posting a link to one of my posts as a guest post on his blog, Monday Ministry Minute. I have set a goal to further investigate the benefits of guest posting based on this and recent articles I have read that promote this action.
- It was interesting to observe which country Google Analytics shows as number three in highest ranking of visitors from that country: the U.S. and Canada are numbers 1 and 2 respectively (no surprise there) and the United Kingdom is number 4 (again, no surprise) but tucked right in there at number 3 is… Germany. Who would’ve thought? I’ll take it though.
Any thoughts or insights on this? I would appreciate your comments below. Thanks! - Lastly, 1 in 4 pageviews (24%) happened on a mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.). Bloggers cannot ignore numbers like these; you must have “mobile on the mind” as you develop your theme and coding, not to mention content.
Thank you again for continuing to read. I count it an honour and privilege to use this medium to… “help people live a pattern of deliberate personal growth and challenge others to do the same.”
