My new content strategy is working - Blog stat for August
In last week's issue, I wrote about my concerns about Twitter's engagement model and why I don't feel it's working for me anymore. You can read it here.
That was my first stab at expressing my thoughts on why this engagement-driven growth hacking thing doesn't help me achieve what I ultimately want.
That is, to build credibility in the industry through sharing helpful knowledge.
Thanks to Hashnode's blogging contest, I spent more time thinking about this topic.
It's effortless to say you don't like something.
It's much harder to specify precisely why you don't like it.
If you want to improve things, you also have to propose a solution.
This is what I did in the following article.
I'm building my blog! — akoskm.com If you want to make a living out of writing in the future, like me, I believe long-form content is where you should focus. Platforms such as Twitter are great for finding people in your niche. However, my research shows that it's essential that you b...
This strategy worked for August pretty well.
As my website moves from the sub-50 daily visits to the 50-100 range, it's still easy to spot these big spikes.
The one before August 14 that you see is daily.dev picking up my Electron app building article.
These stats are not included, but that article alone generated 4k views.
The next spike you see around the end of August is the article I published on August 24.
That also generated 4k views and was featured both on Hashnode and daily.dev.
Increased reading time
What I'm especially happy about is the increased reading time for my new content. From the first chart, you already see that people spend twice as much time on my blog. This is mostly because of my recent, long-form blog posts.
Sources
What I'd really like to see being improved is the source of my traffic. Right now it's pretty much Hashnode and the daily.dev aggregator, but direct hits aren't lagging too much behind.
This will improve as my site ranking improves and Google begins to rank me higher - I assume at least.
Right now, I'm on the first page for Google for some stuff that's a year old, so it takes time for the new stuff to kick in.
That's it for now! If you liked this newsletter style, I'm willing to share more stats and behind the scene things about my blog as I'm growing it.
See you in the next one! 👋