Growing my Personal Blog

Full disclosure – I have never successfully or intentionally grown a blog. Most of my suggestions are speculation until proven.

My personal blog has been more of a personal portfolio and a collection of thoughts rather than an audience focused area. But, going into 2018, perhaps it is time to change that and turn it into something more structured?

What is my audience reading?

On jeffikus.com I’ve trawled through my historical analytics for 2016-2018 in both Google Analytics and using Jetpack WordPress.com Stats, and there’s a simple truth that I discovered – the most “popular” posts on my site are;

• open source downloads, and
• tutorials about open source products.

My other post categories are not getting anywhere near as many views as those topics.

Where are my readers coming from?

Most of my posts views are coming from links from other sites, while organic Google search is not a relevant factor at the moment. This has been consistent over the past 3 years, with the only exception being since I tested implementing Jetpack Related Posts, after which I have seen a small increase in the number of cross-post viewing, but nothing dramatic.

When are they reading?

In terms of publish times and days, historically posts published between Wednesday and Friday after 4pm UTC+2 seems to have the highest volume of readers, and this has improved since I started using Jetpack Publicize straight to my Twitter feed.

Going Forward

1. Blog more frequently, at least once a week, between Wednesday and Friday.
2. Publish posts after 4pm UTC+2.
3. Write more open source tutorials.
4. If the tutorials contain code snippets, release them as free downloads as a supplementary post.
5. Continue using Publicize to distribute content to my social channels.