I was so excited to hit almost 12,000 pageviews (I was 4 short) in the month of September! I know many bloggers do this and more in a day, but for my little blog this was exciting. This was a huge deal!
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It was completely unexpected considering my pageviews had been really low during the summer months. My goal for September was to get back up to the the 6000 pageviews I had hit in May.
My top posts:
- Laundry is Piling Up! Laundry Day Pretend Play
- Apple Dot Painting
- Ultimate List of Apple Crafts for Kids
- Make This Yummy Caramel Apple Kid Craft
- Fall Tissue Paper Tree
What I did:
- Abby from Just a Girl and her Blog relaunched her ebook, Building a Framework, in June and included video tutorials and expert interviews. Once my two oldest kids were back in school in August, I was able to finally start viewing the videos and implementing her suggestions.
- Based on the recommendation from Building a Framework, I signed up for Board Booster and created campaigns to schedule my pins. At the same time, I went through my group boards, left ones that were not performing, and added new better performing group boards. In the two months that I have had Board Booster, my Pinterest followers have doubled making Pinterest my top traffic source to the blog.
- I submitted two of my kid crafts (Fall Tissue Paper Tree& Paper Plate Apple Tree) to All Kids Free Crafts and they were published on their site. I did not see a lot of traffic right away from these two posts, but I did at a later point.
- Several bloggers with huge Facebook pages shared my Laundry is Piling Up! Laundry Day Pretend Play post. I believe the initial blogger (Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds) to share the post, found it on a Pinterest group board. These Facebook shares brought record numbers of people to my blog for a good week. As the traffic started to decrease from the shares, I posted it on two other Facebook pages. One of two bloggers (Happy Hooligans) shared it bringing more traffic for a couple of days.
- I published posts early. I have read that you are supposed to publish your posts 6-8 weeks prior to the holiday, occasion, special day, or season. The is especially true if Pinterest is your biggest referrer to your blog. It takes time for your pins to get around Pinterest and get repined by others.
- I participated in a giveaway with several other bloggers that started in late August and ran for a month. I had a hard time finding giveaways after I participated in one for Mother’s Day, but as I joined more Facebook groups over the summer, I was able to find more giveaways looking for bloggers. The giveaway I did during this month was tied to my Ultimate List of Apple Crafts for Kids post.
- I started a weekly link party with three other bloggers called Made for Kids. By the 5th week of the link party we had 100+ link ups. Read about how we launched a successful link party here.
- I put in many, many, many hours. I published seven posts many weeks.