I set some really ambitious 2017 goals for myself. I posted regular monthly updates for my goals through May and then continued to work on the goals through the remaining seven months of 2017. I’m sharing my overall outcome with my 2017 goals before sharing my 2018 goals.
Goal #1 was to reach five figure monthly page views. Spoiler alert: I did not reach five figure monthly page views. Here’s my breakdown for 2017.
January – 5,561
February – 3,505
March – 6,079
April – 7,533
May – 4,875
June – 4,019
July – 2,969
August – 3,163
September – 3,039
October – 3,254
November – 4,085
December – 5,238
The screenshot below is from December 2017.
It’s not a secret that this blog took a bit of a backseat during the second half of 2017 after Tommy was born. Since mid-July, I’ve created very few evergreen posts. Most of what I’ve published here has been of a more personal nature. I’ve also stepped back from the level of promotion and networking that I had been maintaining for the eight months or so prior to his birth. I don’t think pushing ahead full steam for the second half of 2017 would have automatically translated into five figure monthly page views. But stepping back didn’t help.
Going into our first weeks with Tommy with absolutely zero content scheduled for the blog definitely contributed to the dip in traffic from July through October. I’ll be honest: I didn’t check my Google analytics or even my Jetpack site stats (which is what I rely on more day to day) very regularly after Tommy was born until I started to see an uptick in traffic again in November. It was depressing, and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
The first three months with Tommy in which I got almost nothing accomplished in my life aside from the bare minimum for survival was…tough. Growing this blog is still really important to me. But I’m not crushed that it didn’t grow quite as quickly as I’d hoped in 2017. Blogging is a slow burn. I know there are a zillion articles about how to scale up quick and make a ton of money in a matter of weeks, if not days. But the truth is most people who make it big spend years growing their following.
There are a few key positive takeaways from my uptick in traffic toward the end of 2017, which are as follows.
- All of the effort I put into creating evergreen content, scheduling social media shares, and networking with other bloggers the first half of 2017 continued to pay off even when I dialed down my efforts.
- The final months of the year when I was posting more regularly again did help my overall traffic, even when many of the posts were of a more personal, less shareable nature.
- I have more and more steady traffic days, again thanks to all of my early year efforts and continued regular posting. A lot of my best traffic numbers in 2017 came from random Pinterest spikes and a few posts, mostly seasonal/holiday, that did exceptionally better than my other posts. I haven’t had any of these spikes in a while, but I’m experiencing more steady traffic with higher daily numbers. You see this in the analytics graphic for December, which I posted above.
Also, I’m excited that I reached a high of over 7,500 views in one month in 2017. While it’s not 10,000, it’s close enough to give me hope that I will achieve this goal.
I’ll talk more about my game plan for growing this blog in my 2018 goals post. I’m finally at a point where I can think about creating regular evergreen content and putting more effort into weekly, if not daily, promotion again. As such, I am pushing ahead with a page views goal again for 2018. I look forward to sharing that goal and my strategies for achieving it later this month.
Did you set a blogging page views goal for 2017?
I’d love to hear about which blogging strategies did and didn’t work well for you!
