The First Year of Blogging: The Stats

Ok ok.  Finally, we’re at the exciting part of the two part series on a look into our first year blogging.  If you missed last week’s post on my reflections after the first year you can check it out here:

The First Year of Blogging: Reflecting on Twelve Months

Last week’s post was about my thoughts and the revenue, or lack of revenue, we made in the first year.  Today, we’re going to dig into the stats and charts for all my fellow number cruncher nerds out there. Let’s dig in to what Google Analytics shows for the time period of our first year: July 9, 2019 to July 10, 2020.

Traffic:

• Users: 9,649
  • Users refers to the number of new and returning people who visit your site during a set period of time.  The first time a person visits our site a Google Analytics cookie is set and a unique identifier is assigned.  This helps Google to distinguish the person as a “new user”. (Yes, Google is ALWAYS watching you!)
• Sessions: 16,627
  • A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame.  For example, a single session can contain multiple page views.  A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.  So a single user could open multiple sessions in a single day if they come to the site, leave, and over 30 minutes later return again.
• Bounce Rate: 50.79%
  • A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your website visitors.  Hence, you want this number low meaning that visitors who come by stay on your site rather than bounce right off. From what I’ve read, anything in the range of 26-40% is excellent, 41-55% is average, and 56-70% is higher than average.
• Average Session Duration: 3 minutes 17 seconds
  • Sum of the total duration of each session over the year divided by total number of sessions.
• Pages per Session: 2.33
  • The average number of pages viewed during a session
• Page Views: 38,696
  • A view of a page on our site

The one time spikes are mostly from the days we had a guest appearance published.  The first pop early on in late July 2019 to start things off was from our first guest blog post with Tread Lightly Retire Early which likely brought in new readers as our blog was brand new then and this guest post on Angela’s blog had a total of 38 comments.  Then the pop in January was from our Forbes appearance.  The largest pop was in February from our Choose FI episode.  And then the most recent pop in July was from our spot light feature on Personal Finance Club’s Instagram page.

Monthly Page Views:

We are currently averaging 65-250 page views a day.  We currently are seeing a little boost in traffic on the days we post new content.  I think the true progress of a blogger is when you still get site traffic on days you leave the site alone.  I don’t want to be totally dependent on the traffic that comes on publishing day, especially if it means having to promote it on social media.  Here’s a look at the breakdown of the page views by month.

• July 2019: 2,065
• August 2019: 2,119
• September 2019: 2,593
• October 2019: 1,430
• November 2019: 2,405
• December 2019: 2,712
• January 2020: 3,047
• February 2020: 5,992
• March 2020: 2,601
• April 2020: 4,584
• May 2020: 2,900
• June 2020: 3,979
• Note that I’m not including July 1-10, 2020 (which would be the true inclusive 1 year stats) and will instead start the year 2 stats on July 1, 2020 to avoid partial month stats.
• Monthly Average: 3,035

As you can see, it’s really hard to see consistency here.  Some months trend upwards and then boom there a nice new lull.  My goal over the next year is to double our average monthly page views to consistently get over 6,000 per month towards the end of year 2.  As noted last week, don’t expect to see any ads here until we cross over the 10,000 page view threshold.  Seeing that we are only averaging 3,000 page views during this first year I can’t imagine we will get to 10,000 any time soon.  In addition to continual weekly posts, in order to bump up our stats in this category likely means dabbling into the world of SEO so I’ll report back on how this new endeavor goes.

Traffic Sources:

Our main source of traffic is direct (aka someone typing in our website or clicking on a bookmark for our website).  I have no idea if this is a good thing or not.  We are slowly building up our traffic from Google searches which is fun to see.  It would be cool to see the organic search section take over 20% of our searches a year from now.

• Direct: 35.8%
• Referral: 26.8%
• Social: 20.3%
• Organic Search: 11.8%

Blog Posts: 47

I made up a goal to publish a blog post each week so I was pretty close reaching this goal.  I can’t foresee myself keeping up with this content creation long term but I am hoping to keep a similar schedule for year 2.  After that point, I likely will shift down to 1-2 times a month.

Subscribers: 193

My goal is to get this over 500 within the next year.  So if you’re reading this and not yet subscribed, get on it! 😉 Or if you know of someone who may benefit from our site, please pass it along! 🙂 The more people who can learn about the powers of financial independence, the better.  We know there are many bloggers out there in the personal finance/FIRE space so we truly thank all 193 of you who find our content relatable and keep coming back for more.  Personal finance is personal so we are hoping to resonate with a few like minded people out there who find our content useful.  Really, we’re more interested in quality subscribers over quantity of subscribers, which leads to the next stat…

Comments: 329

Some may find this stat pointless but it’s one of my favorite stats out there as it ensures we aren’t writing to an empty void.  We love getting comments on our blog posts and hope to see this rise next year.  The more engagement with our readers the better and it truly is the motivation that keeps us going.  Note that this number includes my comments back to any comments we received.  We also love all the messages people send over too, greatly appreciated!  Given that we wrote 47 posts in this first year, that averages to 7 comments per post.

Countries: US, Canada, Australia, United kingdom, Netherlands

This is my second favorite stat to track as I love seeing all the corners of the earth we are reaching.  Again, likely useless but I like it.  I can’t believe we’re reaching all continents – except Antarctica, now that would be cool!  I’m curious to see if the US will continue to be the #1 country going forward or if Canadian readers will outpace the US at some point even though it’s 1/10 of the population.

Average Word Count: 2,896 words

When I finally get in the grove and start writing content, I go on.  And on, and on, and on.  I’d much rather get all my thoughts out and make it a 2,000+ word post rather than rush just to get something published.  While many of my posts are wordy, I hope you find value from them and can relate to my writing style in some form.  I’m trying to get my personality out in writing which requires a certain style.  My shortest post was 903 words and the longest was 6,338 words.  A total of 136,139 words have been written which apparently is the equivalent of a 453-544 page book (depending on the font).  Whoa!

Now really, FIRE can be summed up in one sentence: earn more, save less, invest the difference.  Sometimes I feel like anything I write can likely be found elsewhere on the internet.  And it’s likely true.  But the more people who can catch the FIRE bug, the better – so we hope to see more and more FIRE content creators out there showcasing their stories.

Guest Appearances: 20

Relationships, relationships, relationships.  As noted last week, we are so humbled by all the guest appearances we’ve encountered over the year.  My goal is to do guest posts/podcasts on at least five different platforms each year.  Interacting with other bloggers and podcasters in the personal finance space is very important to me and I’m so happy to have built up such wonderful relationships during this first year.

So far this year we’re teaming up with Walo, The Fioneers, and Market Watch to get some content out on their platforms.

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There we go!  All the juicy numbers revealed!  Morale of the story is that blogging stats are irregular and that SEO matters. Originally I never thought to dig into the SEO side of things but if we want more people to find our content and learn about the mindset needed for FI, we should be focusing on SEO more.

It will be exciting to do a similar exercise next year to compare all the stats again.

Any bloggers out there who keep track of their stats?  Any someday bloggers out there find these types of post useful?  We try to be as transparent as possible over here so we hope you found the last two posts useful.  We’d love to hear your thoughts below!

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We believe in stacking up life hacks to keep your enjoyment levels to the max without depleting your bank account.  Here are some ways to further educate yourself and save thousands of dollars over your lifetime by making some simple adjustments:

• Investing Newbies: Check out our free Investing 101 Series.
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