Welcome to the page views and social media report for July 2017.

Similarly to how publicly traded companies release quarterly reports, I publish blog reports and dividend income updates regularly on this blog to keep blogging and investing as business-like as possible. Essentially, you can think of these as my very own corporate quarterly reports.

It’s almost as though I’m tryna sell the readers on investing in this blog. And I guess, to an extent, I am tryna do that.

As someone who aspires to reach financial independence through a combination of blogging, dividend investing and freelancing, the goal is to bring blogging opportunities to me.

But as I always mention as a disclaimer, it’s not for the purpose of greed, it’s because I want to spend my time working on what suits me best.

There’s also a surprising amount of knowledge to be gained from publishing monthly blog reports.

After writing and analyzing page views on this blog for more than a year now, I’m seriously considering publishing a post about SEO. Based on these reports, and based on tracking blog traffic on Google Analytics each day, there are clear-cut activities that a blogger can do to help bring in more organic search traffic.

However, I’ll save those tips for another post. For now, below is the monthly page view, blog traffic acquisition and social media numbers. Admittedly, I had to put in extra work sharing older content on social media to beat the page views set in June 2017 because I only published 2 posts during July.

Nevertheless, I was still able to increase page views slightly while continuing to build the social media community. Here are the results:

[bctt tweet=”Page views & Social Media report for July 2017″ username=”reversethecrush”]

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📈 Page Views in July 2017

compared to June 2017 Blog and Social Media numbers**

All time page views on Reverse the Crush — 42,994

Page views in July — 1211 (up 6 | 0.5% increase)

Total users in July — 305 (Down 127 | -29.4% decrease)

Total sessions in July — 508 (Down 141 | -21.7% decrease)

All time blog posts published on rtc — 189 (as of August 8, 2017)

 📊 Acquisition Overview

Breakdown of how blog traffic sessions were acquired during July 2017

Social Media — 202 sessions

Organic search — 134 sessions

Direct traffic — 125 sessions

Referral traffic — 47 sessions

📍 Social Media Traffic Breakdown

1. Twitter — 168 sessions (83.17% of social traffic)

2. Pinterest — 32 sessions (15.84% of social traffic)

3. Other — 2 sessions (1% of social traffic)

🐦 Social Media & Email Subscriber Growth

Twitter — 1877 followers (Up 57 | 3.13% increase)

Pinterest — 384 followers (no change)

Google+ — 14 followers (down 1)

Email subscribers — 37 (no change)

Total social media followers and subscribers — 2312

I greatly appreciate all of the followers and subscribers! Thank you.

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🙏🏻 Conclusion

The most interesting thing noticed in this months report was that organic search traffic generated the most users. As I was running through the page views on the Google Analytics App, I noticed that only a small number of users find this blog through social media each month. Basically, a small group of social media followers keep coming back—the 80-20 rule—80% of my social media traffic comes from a small group of followers.

To be honest, I was surprised to realize that nearly 3 times the users found reverse the crush in July through organic search compared to social media.

You could view it in a positive light on one hand, because I’m doing something right when triple digit users are visiting the blog from organic search. But on the other hand, it’s possible that I’m not retaining enough subscribers and/or social media followers. In my estimation, though, I’m making progress with search engine optimization, and I’m creating potential for opportunities to come my way in the next 5 years.

In conclusion, as I continue to work towards financial independence, my personal ambitions continue to become more clear. The more clear my goals become, the easier it becomes to focus on areas that can make the most impact. To put it bluntly, a renewed focus and appropriately directed efforts has the blog numbers for August already off to a fantastic start.

Moreover, an increased effort on blogging could potentially lead to reaching FI faster than I even anticipate. Yes, it’s important to focus on saving money and building my dividend portfolio. But after reflecting on what I’ve already been able to accomplish with blogging, and after seeing how much I’ve been able to learn, there’s no reason to think I couldn’t be full-time blogging in 5 years or less.

Questions for the readers: How was your blog results in July? What have you learned from blogging? Has anything about SEO become more clear to you?