Update: Blog Traffic and Content Evaluation

May 13, 2014

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In the past few months, we’ve flooded our followers with loads of information about how important it is for their company to blog, the benefits they’ll be rewarded with and even suggested topics they can write about.
Having done all of that, it was about time for us to evaluate our own blog post performance here at MayeCreate.

We are currently working on evaluating and re-working our blogging strategy in terms of content and delivery so that our blog followers and others interested in the information we have to share can access the most relevant, valuable industry information. Taking the time out of our schedule to do this means that our blog posts for the next month or so will be a bit more scarce, but we believe this assessment period will result in our team producing higher quality blog posts that reflect what YOU want to hear.

So until then, we thought you might be interested in our performance so far this year.

Published Blog Posts

Update: Blog Traffic and Content EvaluationIn 2013, MayeCreate published 109 blog posts for an average of about 9 posts per month. We thought that number was decent, but with the start of the new year, we revamped our efforts.

Between the months of January and April of 2014, MayeCreate published 63 blog posts. That puts us at an average of 15.75 blogs posts per month, so far surpassing our 15 blogs per month goal for this year. The reason we aimed for generating that many blog posts is because a HubSpot study revealed that “companies that blog 15 times or more per month get 5 times more traffic than companies that don’t blog”. Click here for more startling statistics that will change your mind about blogging.

Average Monthly Traffic

Knowing that we successfully increased our quantity of blog posts per month, we were interested in seeing how this impacted traffic to our website.

Traffic 2014

In 2013, we averaged 1,362 visitor sessions per month. So far in 2014, we’ve averaged 2,880 visitor sessions per month. That means we’ve more than doubled our traffic, which can be contributed in part to our increase in blog content.

Our Most Visited Blog Posts

The top 5 most visited blog posts published since the start of 2014:

  1. Major Logo Redesigns of 2013 – Visits: 1,177 Published: January 10, 2014

  2. 5 Great Website Designs for Commercial Construction and What Makes Them Awesome– Visits: 210 Published: February 7, 2014

  3. Why do WordPress Sites get Hacked? – Visits: 132 Published: January 26, 2014

  4. Hacker Alert: Is Your WordPress Site at Risk? – Visits: 91 Published: January 16, 2014

  5. 7 Signs You Need a Mobile Website – Visits: 70 Published: January 24, 2014

Top Visited Blog Post Overall

E-blast, Don’t E-bomb: The Dos and Don’ts of Email Marketing – Visits: 4,218 Published: March 13, 2014

This blog post has experienced tremendous success in comparison to any of our other posts based on the page visits. Because of the outstanding number of views this particular post had received by the end of 2013, we took a closer look at how visitors were behaving while on the page. We were disappointed to find out that this page was experiencing a high bounce rate (85.43%) and a high exit rate (83.94%). These figures meant there were many missed opportunities where we could have been developing relationships with the visitors.

Bounce and Exit Rate Remedy

These rates were putting a frowny face on our performance and we needed to do something about it. We decided our solution was not going to be about changing the content of the post but rather about changing and upgrading the content surrounding the post on the web page. After integrating HubSpot with our website, we upgraded the page by adding the following things:

  • Calls To Action in the sidebar and at the bottom of the post
  • Links to related blog posts
  • A form where visitors can subscribe to our marketing blog

With these changes in place, we reevaluated the E-blast, Don’t E-bomb post performance. Between the month of January and May of 2014, the bounce rate had dropped to 12.21% and the exit rate dropped to 45.01%. Thanks to HubSpot, we also discovered that this post assisted in making 24 conversions for us. Success!

It’s truly outstanding and rewarding to know that a single one of our blog posts has the potential to be viewed literally thousands of times. However, we’re still proud of our posts that don’t receive nearly that many views. In fact, out of all the blogs we’ve posted so far this year, a majority of them were spread evenly between being viewed 22 to 70 times. We hope to raise the lower end of this spectrum as we learn more about our reader’s interests and discover intriguing topics to write about.

How are people finding our blog posts?

Social Media:

For every blog post we write, we post about it on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. As part of our new social media strategy, we are posting to each social media site at least twice in reference to the same blog article. We know people are active on these sites at different times and on different days, so this strategy will help us reach as many of our audience members as possible.

  • 2013 Social Media Source = 1.2%
  • 2014 Social Media Source = 3.0%

Email Marketing:

Along with the social media posts, we also send out emails to our blog subscribers alerting them about the new information we have available.

  • 2013 Email Marketing Source = 0.07%
  • 2014 Email Marketing Source = 7.6%

Referrals:

A visitor is counted as a referral when they are directed from another website back to our site through links.

  • 2013 Referrals = 6.0%
  • 2014 Referrals = 8.8%

Direct traffic and organic searches are other ways people are able to find our blog posts. The percentage of people finding our content through these means has actually decreased from 2013 to 2014. However, this trend is to be expected due to increased sourcing from social media, marketing emails and referrals from other websites.

What do YOU want to read about?

So now that we know what the statistics say are our most popular blog posts, we’re ready for your feedback. We encourage you to give us your feedback by taking a few seconds to respond to the survey below. The information we collect will truly help us help you.

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Who Manifested This Madness?

Monica Maye Pitts

This fabulous human, that's who.

Monica Maye Pitts

Monica is the creative force and founder of MayeCreate. She has a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture with an emphasis in Economics, Education and Plant Science from the University of Missouri. Monica possesses a rare combination of design savvy and technological know-how. Her clients know this quite well. Her passion for making friends and helping businesses grow gives her the skills she needs to make sure that each client, or friend, gets the attention and service he or she deserves.

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