A blog post about blogging
Tags: beginners, meta, learninpublic, learning
Published: 2021-10-05 10:41:58

I published my first blog post [why you should put your code on an opensource platform](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/developer-basics/why-you-should-put-your-code-on-an-opensource-platform/) on the 20th of January in 2019. And I thought it was a good moment to reflect on how blogging has been for me so far. In this new "meta" category I am planning to dedicate a few blog posts to what I have learned in my blogging journey. In this first blog post, we will dive into some of the statistics. How many people have read my blog posts and which ones are the most popular? Let's dive in!

## Traffic
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/17j066v9jqui21mal4en.jpg)
Total amount of page views

From 20-01-2019 until 03-10-2021 I have had **3.364** page views. I've had some spikes that I will explain later, but on average the page views are between 80 - 150 views per month.

The traffic can be divided into the following categories:

- 57% Comes from direct traffic
- 18% Comes from social (Thank you Twitter)
- 14.3% Comes through organic search
- 10.3% are referrals, mostly other Socials and clicks from other platforms like dev.to

## Most viewed blog posts
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/znzuqsy134c4it2bc8vn.jpg)
Most viewed blog posts

My most popular blog post is the [4 lessons I learned as a starting scrum master](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/lists/4-lessons-i-learned-as-a-starting-scrum-master/). It has 982 pageviews which account for almost 30% of all page views! Most of these page views are thanks to Reddit. I shared this post there and it kind of blew up. This still brings in a small part of page views.

The second best blog post in terms of page views is the [Movie retrospective](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/retrospective/movie-retrospective/). 170 pageviews and about 5% of traffic.

The third best blog post is the [Eisenhower retrospective](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/retrospective/finding-your-priorities-with-the-eisenhower-retrospective/). Actually the first retrospective I wrote a blog post about and was the whole inspiration for the [retrospective challenge](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/retrospective/retrospective-challenge-2020/). With 152 page views and 4,5% of traffic.

## SEO

If my job was SEO specialist at a company I would probably already be fired. I have 22.271 impressions on Google and just 156 clicks. That means my click-through rate is 0.7%. To keep it positive, that means I have a lot of room for improvement in the future.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/t2gq8rdd9l4dl4s76ryn.jpg)
Clicks in Google

In terms of clicks, there is 1 content king. The movie retrospective. I'm not sure how or why, but this page lands almost 54% of all clicks on Google. Nice!

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4fqu2z5dnppukbkpeo48.jpg)
Impressions in Google

As you can see, the pages that get a lot of impressions are not getting the same amount of clicks. Interesting and an interesting area to take a look at in terms of improving click-through rates.

## Newsletter

Almost every blog dedicated to improving your blogging mentions having a newsletter. Get e-mail addresses of people that are interested in your content. And send them emails once you write new blog posts. This will drive recurring customers back to your blog post. This sounds good on paper, but I **_ab-so-lutely_** hate serving popups to visitors to subscribe to the newsletter. I have a menu item at the top, but that does not seem to drive a lot of traffic. If you are interested in joining the newsletter, you can [sign up here](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/newsletter-signup/).

In terms of how many people actually signed up? Just 1, Thanks [Bart](https://twitter.com/bartveneman), you are the real MVP!

## Earnings

If there is one thing I hate more than popups asking you to sign up for a newsletter, it is ads. Luckily I found a great replacement called [Coil](https://coil.com/). You basically pay Coil 5 dollars per month and install a browser plugin. Whenever you visit a website that has Coil, you pay a small part of your 5 dollars to that website, depending on how long you spent on this website. This makes sure your subscription goes to the websites you really visit. And the longer you stay the more they will get.

In this period I have earned **€4,63** with Coil. Almost 1 month of hosting. This amount fluctuates, there are times where I earn 80 cents per day, and there are times where I earn 1 cent in 2 months.

Those are the statistics on my blogging journey. Do you have any tips or any other metrics you would like to see? Let me know and I will answer them in one of the upcoming meta posts.