Last month I started this topic thread documenting the status of the blog, and it’s performance. It helps me keep focus on the goals per month to achieve and also celebrate our milestones. Here we step back from the food, and focus on the site and what works and what can be improved upon.
January Traffic Metrics & Sources
Sessions: 1000
Unique Visitors: 861
I could see last December how close the blog was to 1000 page views a month, and how tempting it was to reach it. We finally did it! Couldn’t have been without your support.
As far as users, we were averaging just under 200 users per week and slowly climbing. Little by little is the motto.
Posts overview:
Looking at the pages report, I can see that The Ultimate Charleston Red Rice is still the best performing post. Though the dish is very specific to the lowcountry region of South Carolina, it’s #1 on Google Rankings for Exact match search.
And #3 on Phrase Match. So good SEO and a very niche post helps us rank high on Google searches.
The next top performing posts include the recent posts, which can be noticed due to their position in the Latest & Greatest header tab.
What we did this month:
Last month we tried different types of posts, especially because we were able to go to NYC and share a little bit of our lives on the site. The travel related posts offered a wide variety of locales in NYC and New Orleans to link to, and the stories afforded a different kind of qualitative experience.
Furthermore, we focused on the cooking classes aspect of the site, adding possible menus that prospective clients can use as inspiration for their own classes and show what we are capable of teaching. That has already shown success, we’ve seen an uptick in Cooking Class requests in Feb. Down the line, I expect to migrate these classes online and provide videos showing how to make the dishes.
Strategies for February:
Moving into February, beyond the blog’s recipe schedule, we look forward to improving the way ads show on the site, as well as Affiliate Link relationships with companies that we already use:
Bluehost is the company we use that hosts our content on their servers. They’ve been very good with maintenance and the site has experienced no down time in the year+ we’ve been with them. Its especially useful for people that want to start a blog and don’t know where to start.
Adobe Creative Cloud we use this extensively to edit photos, videos, create graphics for the site, and make sure all our content is done at a professional level. I’ve found the subscription very reasonable to use, automatic updates of new features help make editing easier. And while it does have a learning curve, there is a lot of support to pick up the skills easily. A big plus, students get a big discount!
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Moreover, to create further channels of traffic, I’ll be doing research on RSS Feeds and Pinterest Traffic Strategies to the Blog.
So in the middle of all the good things happening to the blog, I’m moving to a new apartment with Alicia! So bear with me on the posting schedule as I get a new setup going.
Onwards and upwards,
Maury
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