Blogging Report (July 2018)- Busy Month But Steady Traffic Results

Blogging Report (July 2018)

Welcome to another blogging report, this time for July 2018.

Let’s jump right into it…

July was a busy month for me.

I had to buy a new car (actually used but new to me) since mine completely broke down and wasn’t worth the money to fix it…This involved a dreaded DMV visit and the tasks that come along with that.

The car I bought was a used 2009 Honda Accord with 94K miles. Surprisingly, this is a big upgrade compared to what I was driving previously which was a 2004 Nissan Altima with high mileage.

I’m all about reliability and do not need a big nor fancy car. If you’ve read some of my other posts, like the one on minimalism, you know that I do not care much about material possessions.

Anyways, here’s a picture of my new (well it’s new to me) Honda below:

I also went on a mini vacation in July with my girlfriend to hit up the wineries in Long Island, NY.

We took a long weekend to sample and taste some of the best wines in the area. There’s close to 40 wineries within a 15-20 mile radius from each other and although we didn’t stop at everyone, we tried a whole bunch of them.

It was a really fun trip and definitely a location I would travel back to in the future.

Here’s a photo I took of one of my favorite wineries of the trip which was right on the water.

I also had a bunch of doctor appointments in July which I’ve been overdue on that made my month a bit more chaotic.

To top it off I had many plans/obligations with family and friends, a busy day job to take care of (doing SEO) and my various online projects that I run.

It’s safe to say that July was pretty jam packed for me.

Unfortunately I didn’t get as much work done on my blog as I would’ve liked to, but August is a new month.

So enough of me rambling, let’s get into the analytics.

Organic Traffic (July 2018)- 168 Visits

Organic traffic for July 2018 came in at 168 search visits, which is pretty consistent with the last few months.

As busy as I was in July, I was still able to publish 6 blog posts which is great.

2 posts were content that I produced, and 4 were guest posts from other contributors.

That’s an excellent benefit of accepting guest posts that I’m realizing as I’m writing this…I had enough content queued up where I really could have taken all of July off if I wanted to.

Just another reason why blogging is such an excellent business model.

What I would have loved to do more of though is link building.

In fact, I am planning on hitting link building really hard to finish out the end of the year.

Let’s take a look at my monthly traffic chart below:

Organic Traffic all-time (by Month)

So maybe a little bit of a plateau here since May came in at 170 organic search visits, June came in at 169 organic search visits and July now at 168 organic search visits.

However, since I’ve had a lot of SEO experience, I know that plateaus do indeed happen…even dips in organic traffic can happen as well.

Plateaus normally tell me that I need to push a bit harder in order to continue my growth.

For August, the plan is to take care of any crawl errors on my website (404 errors, unnecessary redirect chains etc.), publish at least 6 blog posts and acquire 2-4 fresh backlinks.

This will serve me well in the months to come.

One more note on this…The “plateau” I’m talking about here is when comparing month-over-month.

So it’s not the most accurate measure of organic growth.

Now we’re about to compare year-over-year which is a better benchmark to see how you’re site is doing organically overall.

And boy is this a different picture.

Year-Over-Year Organic Traffic Increases (July 2018 vs. July 2017)

Analyzing year-over-year data in Google Analytics is as simple as clicking the “Date” area in the upper right hand corner, ticking the “Compare to” box and selecting “Previous year”.

Let’s take a look at my year-over-year increases below:

The blue line represents this year’s data (July 2018) and the Orange line represents last year’s data (July 2017).

You can see that I was just trying to gain some traction at this time last year. But now with the work I put in, a steady flow of organic traffic is coming in daily.

Organic traffic is up 572% when comparing year-over-year.

A year-over-year increase of 572% in Organic Traffic is not too shabby if you ask me (168 visits vs. 25 visits).

I realize we’re dealing with small numbers here, but remember that I built this blog totally from scratch and it’s going to take a while to build up my domain authority for bigger traffic results.

With that being said, I’m very pleased with the growth I’m seeing thus far.

Strategy For August To Help Generate More Organic Traffic

August shouldn’t be as busy a month as July was which means I’ll be able to focus on moving the needle more as far as my blog goes.

What I plan to complete in August:

1.) Link Building: I am going to strive to build 2-4 natural and quality back links for my blog. More importantly, I am going to attempt to build these links from websites which have a domain authority of 40 or higher.

2.) YouTube: I plan on producing 1-2 videos in August of high-quality training on either SEO or blogging. Although this won’t really generate organic traffic to my blog, it can generate organic traffic to my YouTube videos, which can potentially drive more referral traffic to my blog.

3.) 6 New Blog Posts: In total in August, I’d like to have at least 6 new blog posts published to my website and at least half of them to come from me. At the time of writing this, I’m already up to 3 for this month!

4.) Address Crawl Errors: I noticed a few lingering crawl errors in my Google Search Console account and will be fixing those in August. Addressing issues like 404 errors, redirect chains, duplicate content etc. is an SEO best practice and can sometimes be a quick win.

As you can see, blogging in combination with SEO, definitely takes some time to see results, however once you gain some momentum it can really be exciting.

As my traffic increases, I have been noticing more comments on my blog, email subscribers and clicks to my links.

It’s exciting to see the progress of my journey when looking back over-time and makes me realize that all the hard work is worth it.

If this at all motivates you to start a blog of your own, take a look at my post here.

It will give you everything you need to get a blog up and running as quickly as possible.

That wraps it up for my July 2018 blogging report.

If you already have a blog, how are your results?

What strategies do you have in place to take things to the next level?

Check out the YouTube version of this blog post below: