How I Dealt With A Blog Traffic Decline In Nov 2017 (29,064 Views/mo)

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Welcome to my 8th month blog traffic report!

As 2017 is coming to an end, I can’t help but feel so excited for 2018 and how my blog will do in the new year.

I experienced a traffic decline for the first time in November.

There are three main reasons for this dip in pageviews:

1. The Pinterest magic wore off in November with 4,087 views compared to 7,703 views in October (a 3,616 decline in pageviews).

2. I saw a significant decline in pageviews in the week of Thanksgiving.

Some bloggers also mentioned the same problem on the Rockstar Finance forum, so I guess I’m not alone.

I myself wasn’t as active during Thanksgiving since I was spending more time with family and friends.

3. Although I recovered from the blogger burnout and decided to continue blogging in October, the lack of energy and enthusiasm in this whole endeavor still lingered.

Seeing that my Pinterest referrals declined significantly from October, I thought about recreating more Pinterest images for my popular posts.

But I simply didn’t want to. I wanted to take a break from constantly writing content and promoting my posts on social media.

If you are wondering how I feel about the decrease in pageviews, my answer is simple: I feel a bit sad, but life goes on.

If it were me in my 4th month of blogging, I might have a nervous breakdown because of this setback. But now that I’m so burned out from blogging, I really don’t care that much about traffic anymore. My blog sis Lily at The Frugal Gene would agree with me.

What’s more important for me at the moment is that I won’t get so demoralized to the point where I quit blogging altogether.

If you missed the previous reports, you can check them out below.

Oct 2017 Blog Traffic (7th Month) – 31,104 Views (+16.3%)

Sep 2017 Blog Traffic (6th Month) – 26,737 Views (+34.5%)

August 2017 Blog Traffic (5th Month) – 20,378 Views (+22.8%)

July 2017 Blog Traffic (4th Month) – 16,600 Views (+25.6%)

June 2017 Blog Traffic (3rd Month) – 13,242 Views (+20.2%)

May 2017 Blog Traffic (2nd Month) – 11,014 Views (+97.7%)

April 2017 Blog Traffic (1st Month) – 5,572 Views

Overview

Pageviews: 29,064 (-6.6%)

Pageviews/day: 969 (-3.4%)

Users: 10,258 (+0.81%)

Bounce rate: 67.19% (+2.7%)

Returning visitors: 19.4% (+0.06%)

New visitors: 80.6% (-0.01%)

Breakdown of channels (# of sessions)

Top 5 sources of traffic

Top 3 referrers

Top 10 posts

“If It’s Yellow, Let It Mellow” – Is It Worth It?

How Hubby & I Discovered We Will Be Millionaires By Doing One Thing

The Pros & Cons Of Our Dual-Income Family

5 Things We Refuse To Do To Save Money

How A Family Of 4 Feed Themselves On $487.9/mo – Oct 2017

Is My Husband Frugal Or Cheap? I Can’t Decide.

How Our Lives Have Changed With A 128% Increase In Income

How I Went From 0 To 31,104 Views/mo In 7 Months

Apr 2017 Food Expense Report – $80.39

How To Get Over A (Personal Finance) Blogger Burnout

Top 10 countries (by # of users)

Blogging schedule

I reduced the number of blogging time from 20-25 hours/week in October to 10-15 hours/week in November mainly due to the blogger burnout that I have not fully recovered from yet.

However, I think 10-15 hours/week might be just the right amount of blogging time for me from now on. I can spend more time with family and resume other fun activities in my life (i.e. hanging out with friends, watching YouTube videos).

In November, I spent the majority of my blogging time writing new content. Although I got tired of blogging, writing new posts was the one thing that made me feel like I was productive and wasn’t falling behind.

I now see my blog more as an outlet for my sometimes confused emotions and thoughts than a tool to increase my traffic or to make money. I also slowed down on commenting on other blogs and promoting my blog on social media in November.

I currently have 63 posts and 10 drafts scheduled until May 23, 2018. Prior to launching Frugal Asian Finance on March 21, 2017, I did not have any posts written beforehand.

The 10 drafts are blog traffic and food expense reports for future months. I would love to finish them all, but I have to wait until the end of a particular month to complete them.

I don’t like doing things last minutes, so writing such reports really tests my patience and my ability to complete things right before they are due.

I started the blog and spent most of the first two months writing new content nonstop for the site. You can check out how I spent my first month blogging here.

Many of you have asked me how I manage to stay on top of my posting schedule. You can check out my tips on how to produce massive content for your blog.

I continued to publish three times a week (MWF) at 6:00 AM.

Related: The Glorious Life Of A Personal Finance Blogger

Features

I have been so happy and fortunate to be featured on various blogs of other fellow personal finance bloggers. Sometimes I don’t know that I’m featured until my blog sis Lily at The Frugal Gene tells me. I have set Google alerts to let me know when my blog is mentioned online, but the alerts have not worked out very well.

I got featured on Rockstar Finance for the very first time with a post about flushing the toilet (that’s right!). I was so surprised when I found out.

First, the topic is one of the most mundane things you can think of: How often we should flush the toilet to save money. I got curious about how much money I can save by not flushing the toilet so often and dived into the math (gotta get the numbers right!). Second, the post has fewer than 500 words while most of my other posts are 1,500-2,000 words.

Below were my features in November (in alphabetical order):

5 Similarities Between Weight Loss & Debt Payoff –  Retire By 40

“If It’s Yellow, Let It Mellow” – Is It Worth It? – Rockstar Finance

How Hubby & I Discovered We Will Be Millionaires By Doing One Thing – Think Save Retire

How I Lost 36 Lbs With A Cheaper Diet – Money with Meow

How To Deal With Spousal Envy – Mr. Jamie Griffin

How To Get Over A Blogger Burnout – The Frugal Gene

How We Bought Our First Home – Chronicles of A Father with Cents

My thoughts on being frugal v. cheap – Kongtemplate

The Pros & Cons Of Our Dual-Income Family – Physician On Fire

Guest post

In November, I had two great guest posts:

— Real Estate Scam, Overpriced Stock Seminar & Investment Lessons by Jalpan at Passive Income Engineering.

— How We Manage Our Rental Property Out of State by J at MillennialBoss.com

If you are interested in guest posting on my blog, you can see more details below. I’m always open to new ideas and proposals.

Length: 1,000 – 3,000 words. My posts are usually roughly 1,500 words or longer.

Topics: Anything related to personal finance.

Style: The post usually starts out with a personal story and then offers lessons learned. You can read more about my blogging style here.

Others:

1. Willing to revise the post based on my suggestions.

Sometimes it can take 4-5 rounds of revision to change anything from the wording to the structure of the post.

My main goal is to explore different aspects of the guest post from my perspective as a reader. If I have questions or am interested in certain details, I think others might also feel the same way.

2. No plagiarism.

3. Please send your FINAL version only. No first draft please.

Social media

Twitter: 1,821 followers

Pinterest: 279 followers

Facebook: 52 likes & 64 follows

Subscribers: 98

1. Pinterest

I didn’t get as much traction from Pinterest in November as I did in October.

Some of you asked me how to start with Pinterest. You can check out the steps below to take advantage of this amazing platform for bloggers.

Step 1: Sign up for a business account on Pinterest

— A business account will give you access to Analytics.

— Install a Pin It button plug-in for your blog. I use jQuery Pin It Button for Images. I usually don’t use this button as much as the button from Sumo (the sidebar list of buttons on the right of the page). This makes it easier for you and others to pin your images to Pinterest.

— Apply for Rich Pin, which shows a brief excerpt from your post under the image.

Step 2: Create Pinterest images for your posts

— I get free stock photos from Pixabay and make the images on Canva.

— You can go on Pinterest to look at other people’s designs and decide which one you like and create your own.

Step 3: Create boards for your images

— You should have one board that is a collection of the pins for your own posts. This is where people can find out what posts you have written on your blog. You want to move this to the top of your board list.

— The rest of the boards should correspond to the categories on your blog (i.e. blogging, relationships, investment). This is where you can pin your own images and any imagines you find intriguing on Pinterest.

Step 4: Request to join group boards

— You want to join group boards since once shared on these boards, your pins will be seen by hundreds and thousands of each board’s followers. You can find the group boards in your niche on PinGroupie or by looking at other bloggers’ group boards.

— There are three main ways to make your request.

1. Check the creator’s instructions on the board. Oftentimes you will need to email them to join the board. Check out this article for more details. I spent two whole weekends looking up boards and sending requests to the board creators.

2. If there are no instructions, you can send them a direct message or leave a request on one of their most recent pins. Some groups are closed to contributors, so you just need to move on to the next one.

3. One way I found particularly helpful is trading your group boards with other bloggers. I personally feel comfortable reaching out to them if I know I have some boards to offer to them in exchange for them inviting me to theirs. Some boards allow only the creator to invite new contributors.

Step 5: Start following others

— You can go to other bloggers’ Pinterest profiles and start following their followers and those they follow. You can also click on the list of group board followers to follow them (This is actually faster since the Follow buttons are readily available for you to click.)

— Pinterest has a limit on how many people you can follow over a certain period of time, so just wait for an hour or so to continue if you have reached the limit. Only some will follow you back, but just keep trying.

Step 6: Start pinning

— You want to put your images out there as much as you can. But try to follow each board’s rule regarding pin limits, otherwise you might be removed. Also, you want to pin others’ popular images since it can boost your rating by Pinterest.

— I usually pin others’ imagines to my own boards and pin mine to group boards. Group boards allow a limited number of pins each day, so I want to make sure my images are seen by the boards’ followers. I might change this strategy in the future once I increase the presence of my images. After all, pinning the same things on the same boards probably won’t get me very far.

2. Twitter

Below are the four main strategies I implement on this platform:

— Retweeting their posts. If you only tweet your content, your followers will see it. If others tweet your content, their followers will also see it. That’s the power of scalability. There’s no better way to market our content by helping others promote theirs on Twitter.

— Leaving thoughtful comments on others’ tweets. You don’t have to leave comments that are sentences long, but saying something that contributes to the conversation will help you build a connection with other bloggers. It will also draw attention and thus traffic to site.

— Liking others’ content. You don’t want to go on a liking spree and like everything tweeted, but a couple of likes here and there show other bloggers that you care what they have to say.

— Retweeting old posts. I retweet 2-3 of my old posts every day. I want to make sure that the followers don’t miss what I published a long time ago. Some of my old posts got retweeted multiple times, which pleasantly surprised me.

3. Facebook

I have not been very active on Facebook since I can’t join groups and interact with other bloggers anonymously. I usually just post new content on my page and leave it as that.

4. Instagram 

I just uploaded all of my Pinterest images on Instagram from my computer using Gramblr.

5. StumpleUpon

I have been posting my articles frequently on StumpleUpon and have gotten some traffic from this platform. However, it is definitely not comparable to Pinterest or Twitter.

Conclusion

That wraps up my blog traffic report for November. With Christmas and New Year’s coming up, I’m not holding out much hope that traffic will go up. But I’m excited for the new year and new adventures with my blog in 2018!

Update on 12/26/2017: Some readers have mentioned that my blog traffic reports are getting repetitive. I always take the reader’s comments seriously, especially when they are constructive. As a result, I have decided to put the reports on hold until I have major changes to my blog to share with you all. Thank you for being understanding!

Related:

How To Produce Massive Content For Your Personal Finance Blog

How To Get Over A (Personal Finance) Blogger Burnout

5 Things I Stopped Doing Thanks To My Personal Finance Blog

3 Frugal Bloggers Turned Millionaires Overnight

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