On August 4th, 2022, I began an attempt to resurrect my ailing WordPress blog. In nine days, I increased the daily visits to my blog from 2 visitors to 126 visitors. In this post, I highlight the actions I took to produce this rapid increase in WordPress blog traffic. Though the actions mentioned are obvious, I will not go so far as to recommend you write quality blog posts. I hope you can use the same techniques I used to improve your own WordPress blog traffic.
Monitoring My WordPress Blog Traffic
I use WordPress to maintain my blog, Author Blog and Reviews. I use the plugin Lara’s Google Analytics to monitor my WordPress blog traffic. This plugin displays website visitor statistics on the dashboard of my WordPress administrative console. For example:
Interpreting My WordPress Blog Traffic
By default, Lara’s plugin displays a graph showing the number of visits, or sessions, per day. The last day in the above display is down because it depicts a partial day which is predicted to break 100 sessions. Obviously, the more sessions you have, the better, but what I think is even more telling is a steady increase number of sessions per day.
A more interesting story is told in the mini-charts displayed along the bottom of the page. Notice that I have 799 sessions this month from 795 users. That means that only 4 users visited the site more than once. The far right mini-chart supports this conclusion, showing that 97.49% of all sessions involve new users rather than repeat customers. Again, Average Session Duration and Bounce Rate also support this conclusion, showing that the bulk of all visitors view a single page. Visitors are viewing fewer that 1.5 pages per visit to my site.
Clearly, I need to do a better job of retaining blog visitors. The most obvious choice is to write better (longer and more compelling) posts.
Note: The Bounce Rate is the percentage of site visitors that leave after viewing only a single page. A bounce rate of 26 to 40 percent is good, 41 to 55 percent average and 56 to 70 percent poor.
In the following sections, I outline the steps I took to produce the significant increase in blog visitor sessions reported in the above chart.
Blog Frequently and Consistently
The more I blog, the better my Google analytics. The longer my blog posts, the better my Google analytics. I try to blog 1 to 2 times per day, writing 600 to 800 word blog posts. I don’t always achieve this goal ;-).
Simply to have blogged frequently and consistently has produced the most significant contribution to my increase in blog visitors.
Promote Your Blog Via Mailing List
Hopefully, you have a mailing list. If you don’t, stop reading this post, go out and read blog posts on setting up a mailing list (I plan on posting soon about setting up a MailerLite mailing list).
Promote your blog via your mailing list. Send weekly digests of your new blog posts. Turn repeat customers into blog visitors so that you can engage with them.
This is a great way to increase WordPress blog traffic. But if you don’t have a mailing list, there’s still a good way to promote your blog…
Promote Your Blog on Facebook Groups
This is the best third best way to promote your blog. Promote your blog on related Facebook groups. Follow these steps:
- Go to your Facebook Home (Click the top left button shaped like a house).
- Click the Groups tab in the left column.
- In the Groups Search field, enter the topic of your blog (e.g. my topic is “writing”) and press return.
- Browse the display of related groups. Join good groups and post to Public groups.
- Copy and paste the URL of your latest blog post as a Facebook post to each of your related groups. Follow the group rules and don’t post more than once per day per group.
I hope this helps and I’ll see you in the classroom,
—Brian
