10 Ways I Doubled My Blog's Monthly Page Views

I've been blogging five years and I'm learning things everyday. It wasn't until summer last year that I started to take my blog seriously and invest more time into it. When you start a blog you don't expect many people to be reading. But when you've been going a while it gets really disheartening when people still aren't reading your blog. I had some great posts and some PR's were happy to work with me but a lot of the time my stats let me down. I just couldn't understand what I was doing wrong. I tweeted my new post a couple of times a day and every now and then I would upload to my very underused Facebook page but I would be lucky to make 100 page views a day. I couldn't understand so like anyone I took to Pinterest and Google and found out a few articles/blog posts that pin pointed exactly where I had gone wrong. I started to implement them slowly and my stats are definitely up! It has taken a lot of hard work but it's great to watch my hard work pay off.

I thought that I would share it all with you as I would have loved a post like this back then, it's given me a real kick up the bum and pushed me in the right direction with my blog.

My monthly page views for the last 6 months are as follows:

September 2016 - 8,289

October 2016 - 12,885

November 2016 - 9,101

December 2016 - 9,003

January 2017 - 20,506

February - 24,865

The reasons for the huge jump? I've listed them below.

1. Join in Linkys - Honestly this is one of the best things you can do. You get instant page views and engagement too. It's also a fantastic way to gain new followers. My favourites are Sharing The Blog Love, Big Pink Link, Blogger Club UK, Foodie Friday and The List, to name a few. A one point I was taking part in at least 2 a day.

2. Facebook Pages/ Pods - Little did I know that there are loads of blogger groups. Places you can share you latest blog posts, social media and gain likes and engagement on Instagram. All of these have boosted my blog's stats. I'm part of Blogger Club UK, Tribal Chat, Instagram Bloggers UK and UK Instagram Support. Just make sure you complete what is asked with each Thread. Your guaranteed at least 15 or so RT's a day.

3. Create a Newsletter - I did wonder at first who would read it. People do. I share our weekly shop on mine and add links to my latest blog posts. I use MailChimp. It's a great way to keep readers engaged.

4. Use Canva & Pinterest - This a big one. Create big images for your blog posts, add text and a nice layout on Canva and upload to Pinterest. Pack your pin full of keywords that relate to the blog post.

5. Get Yourself a Social Media Scheduler - I started off using the free version of Buffer that let me schedule 10 posts at a time. You can set the hours for the posts to go out. I only really used it for Twitter and it used to get quite time consuming. So I invested in Socialoomph. It's a game changer. It costs but it saves you so much time it's totally worth it.

6. Schedule Your Social Media - Guess what? Posting your new post just 3 times a day doesn't cut it. I have loads of tweets going out a day now and it works. With Socialoomph you can set it up to go out every hour/two hours etc and then amend depending on how the tweet is doing or if the tweet isn't relevant anymore.

7. Engage - Talk to people of Twitter. Reply to comments (I'm bad at this one as I often run out of time!) Get a conversation going. People will discover you. Liking things is not enough. Talking to people works. And what's the worst that can happen, someone will ignore you?

8. Make Your Blog Accessible - Easy to read, simple layout and quick to load are all winners. Also make sure your social media buttons are easy to find and contact email too.

9. You're Probably Not Spending Enough Time - I wasn't. I thought that by posting a few times a week I could sit back and watch the page views roll in. Nah-uh. It just doesn't work like that.

10. Run a Giveaway - I have run one giveaway a month this year and I'm hoping to continue doing this. It naturally attracts people and it works as great thank you to your readers. Life Unexpected has a great guide to running a successful giveaway.

So this is what I've been doing and it seems to be working. I'm going to carry on and I've still got a few more ideas to improve even more. I hope you've found this post useful and they are things you can do. There's nothing worse than a post with a clickbait title that doesn't tell you exactly what they did.

I'd love to know if you've got any other ideas or secrets to improve page views and let me know if you give any of these a go!