This will be new series focusing on the state of my blog. Every 3 months, I will write a blog post to cover the following topics:
How successful is my blog in terms of visitors?
Successes and challenges in the past 3 months
Upcoming blog posts
State of the blog #1 timeframe will be mid-October (blog launch) to End of January 2021
How successful is my blog in terms of visitors?
As I was new to the blogging game, I had no idea what to expect in terms of site visitors. Health, Biohacking, Self-development are all popular topics, it’s hard to stand out.
The first 112 days statistics provided by Monster Insights looks like this (Spikes happens when I publish blog post and market it):
Sessions mean one visit on the site, it can be either a new visitor or returning. When the total number is 5822 and we divide that with the timeframe, we get 52 sessions in the day. I am very happy with this number as this is just a beginning.
That said, It’s more relevant to look monthly views to understand the growth.
We can see steady growth from November. Simultaneously, time spent with blogging increased; over 2000 sessions in January took some work.
On average, visitors spend 1 minute and 27 seconds on my site. Usually, my blog post is longish, so you cannot finish them 1m 27 seconds. It is challenging to captivate the reader’s attention, especially when there are so many distractions. I know this myself; many times, I glimpse through the article without giving it full attention.
According to databox [1], the reasonable benchmark is 2-3 minutes. I’m a little bit behind this so I need to focus on the post title and introduction part.
Where do my visitors come from? This is one of the most important questions to understand the possibilities of growth
Unfortunately, most traffic is direct/none, meaning google analytics doesn’t recognize the source (ex. someone typing URL or clicking the link on social media apps). It doesn’t give us anything.
I rely heavily on social media as my blog is new, and it doesn’t have the strength yet in the google rankings. Facebook has been my bread and butter (I market my content to different groups), but I cannot rely on one source.
In green color (January), we can see that my presence has grown on Reddit, Instagram (over 1000 followers now), and Twitter.
I’m most excited, however, about the growth of google because that is the most important one in the long run. I had at least 120 sessions from google in January.
What about my content? What did they read most?
I really hit the nail with 1000 days with the Oura ring article. It was one of my first blog posts; content-wise, there is room for improvement (I should update it), but the title was perfect.
Veristable blog post took time and effort; I’m happy to see that it’s closing up with number one. I would have expected more interest in the HRV comparison post (number 3), but it didn’t take off as I expected.
When I looked at the top 5 list, I realized how big a role Oura ring has on my content. In all 4 posts, Oura is mentioned (mainly related to HRV).
Successes and challenges in the past 3 months
Let’s start with challenges; there’s so much to learn with building and maintaining the website, let alone speed your website and search engine optimize.
I hired a website optimizer from upwork.com (150 dollars), he improved my google page speed score. One week after the job was done, I noticed some technical problems that weren’t present before the work. I learned here that I should fully test my site before closing the deal. I’m trying to tackle this issue next.
Another challenge is time. I would like to spend more time creating content and improving the website, but time is limited (daytime work, calisthenics, social life). 2 posts per month are realistic now. I’m really waiting for the summer holiday where I can give more focus to my blog.
For every challenge, there are multiple success stories. In January, I started to use Grammarly, the AI-based writing assistant. It makes writing much easier as English isn’t my native language. A real game-changer in terms of efficiency.
My content has been published in Reminder media, a Russian internet news outlet focusing on health topics. Their editor translates my post into Russian on their website. I have received some nice extra traffic from there. The Breathing post went semi-viral from the Reminder Media Facebook group; there were over 60 link shares on Facebook.
My Oura-focused posts have been well received in the Oura community, but I also have received positive comments, likes, retweets from Oura management.
Publicity is nice, and all, but the most important thing is everything that I have learned in the process. There’s lots of research, data digging, and reflection involved when I create a blog post. Each post gives me some valuable insight, new revelations or enforces the current understanding on various topics.
Upcoming blog posts
Currently, I don’t have a strict editorial calendar, but I have some topics that I want to focus on in the next 3 months.
There have been some interesting studies on red light therapy – I will review a product and test how it works for me.
Airofit breathing trainer is something I have owned but haven’t tested yet fully; this will also be a focus on in the next upcoming months.
Meditation and quantifying it will be a fascinating topic that I have been working on on-off a few months.
23andme and other service providers review is a topic that is on my list.
I haven’t discussed sleep much yet, but I have a 30-day experiment in mind that I want to write about it.
So, there are lots of things to write about, that won’t be a problem 🙂
Thanks for reading, and see you in March. Stay healthy!