Bloggers are voyeurs

Blogging stats

Bloggers are voyeurs

We’re curious creatures by nature, but I know bloggers specifically like to peek at other people’s junk.  By junk I mean stats. 🙂

It’s a benchmark for all of us to see how we’re doing.   No one size fits all, but at the end of the day, size does matter.

This blog serves two purposes for me, to help educate others and to help me educate myself.

I must say, while encouraged, my numbers are still anemic.  Let’s see what we can do to pump up these numbers in the coming months.

The numbers

While I only had 678 page views and 277 visitors, both of those numbers beat the previous months benchmark.  I’ll just let you eyeball the numbers in the chart and see where it’s going.  Even though the blog was up for over a year, I’ve really only started seriously tending to it since July 2017.   The bounce rate is still not that great at about 65%, but the percentage of returning visitors continues to grow.

Short term plan

I recently, rebranded my blog from MyCareerReboot to FinanceAfter50.  That transition was fairly seamless, thanks to my amazing web host WPEngine.  Their support is truly unbelievable.  However, my Alexa score and Domain Authority score will now be re-set, so I’ll need to wait to build up some web-cred with Google, link building, etc.

This month, I’m putting together a serious Media/Editorial calendar that will include goals for social media and content creation.  I’ll share some of that, and how I intend to track it, and hold myself accountable by the end of this month.

Small wins

I posted more frequently than any previous month ever, and it’s really helping me develop my voice.

I had 3 people actually comment on my posts.   Two of them were bloggers that I admire.  That was really a rush for me and should be for any new blogger.

I picked up and am digesting a book on building a “Link Building” program through various methods.  I was sad to find out that one of the author’s, Eric Ward, who was a leader in the industry for years, committed suicide in October.  We never really know what people are going through, but I’m going to try to honor him by applying some of his time tested advice. Here is a link to a donation page that supports his family.

I actually used my own advice and pulled the trigger on an investment that made me 20% in about a week.  If I had held it for another few days, that would have been 30%.  The day after I made that post, the stock had a big buy recommendation. Sometimes you have to follow your gut.

Lessons learned

I did an Amazon giveaway promotion, which was easy to set up, and only cost me about $25, and it garnered about 200 additional twitter followers.  Granted, now that I’ve rebranded my Twitter account to, I’m starting from scratch, but I’m really liking that process of starting with a clean slate in my feed.  If you haven’t followed me on twitter, you can find me here.

From the beginning, I’ve been experimenting with GoogleAdwords.  This is to gain knowledge as a business tool, but also to drive traffic.  I’d say my overall costs have been about $100 per month on this.  It definitely works, but I’m waiting to build up some more content, and am tweaking a strategy, before I invest in a true recurring budget for this.

I ran a small promo, instead of using GoogleAdwords, I created a “Landing page”, that offered people $5 at Starbucks if they signed up for my email list.  I more than doubled my subscribers from 6 to 14, but I quickly shut down the promotion, as I detected some fraudulant activity.  First, at least 2 people, tried to signup 3 different email addresses.  I could tell this because their origin IP address was all the same. Also, the email addresses they used were only slightly different.  I emailed the person and told them they’d only be receiving one promo and they were ok with that.   Second, traffic spiked from Brazil, which was very rare occurrence for my normal traffic.  (The promo was only offered for those in the continental US)    Overall, the promo cost me about $30 total, but it was a great experiment from beginning to end.  This has given me several good ideas for “qualifying” hurdles for future promotions.

While the chart is not exactly a “tower of power”, I’m happy with most of this progress so far, and continue to learn.

While I still don’t intend to monetize this blog yet, I don’t want it to be a money pit either.  So my goal is to continue to grow the numbers, but also learn, so I can help others, myself and my family.

What do you do to keep yourself encouraged?

 

 

 

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2 comments

    1. Thank you. This month is on target for another little boost from the previous month. I’m thinking about shifting it back to the old name “MyCareerReboot” but “Featuring” Finance after 50. I find many more topics that broadly relate to career shifts and/or re-entering the workforce. The Domain Authority on the former name scores higher too. So, we’ll see.

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