How To Use Pinterest Group Boards to Increase Your Blog Traffic

Posted on January 28, 2016 by suzie81speaks

When it comes to Pinterest, I’m still very much a newbie. A good bloggy friend of mine, Elena from Fabulously 50 and Living With Batman was (and still is) the biggest influence on my Pinterest activities – after achieving a monumental amount of success with her own account in a very short space of time she very kindly analysed my profile, boards and activity and then gave me a detailed list of things that I needed to do to start gaining traffic to my blog.

And oh my gosh, it works! Within just four months I have gone from receiving 100 views for the month of September 2015 to at least 100 views a day in January 2016. In fact, by the end of this month I’m set to reach 4,000 views just from Pinterest alone. Yes, it’s hardly taking the blogging world by storm, but think about this over the space of a year – with no increase this would mean 48,000 extra views to the blog with minimal effort.

A large proportion of these views have come from group boards. Continue reading →

How to Create Blog Posts That Remain Relevant Over Time

Posted on January 18, 2016 by suzie81speaks

Of my Top Ten most viewed posts in 2015, six of them were posted in the eighteen months before.

This could mean that a large amount of what I created last year was rubbish. Or, (as I like to put a positive slant on things), it could be because these six particular posts remain relevant to an audience regardless of time.

Suzie Speaks has never had a niche – I write about what I feel like, whenever the urge takes hold, and over the last two-and-a-half years I have amassed hundreds of posts that range from my daily experiences, reviews and thoughts, to listicles, ‘How To’s’ and photography.

It is generally the listicles – a list of things on one particular topic – personal stories and How To’s that have proven to be the most popular as time has progressed, and I regularly see posts on Pinterest (my new favourite place on social media) that have been published several years ago that are still being repinned because of their continuing relevance.

For example:

23 Things You Should Do Before You’re 23 was written in 2014 in response to an infuriating article that went viral. At the time of publishing I received a good response, but over several months I noticed that, while the number of views were lower than they were initially, the post would frequently appear in my daily stats without any promotion. Sometimes there would is a spike, where someone has obviously recently read it and shared it on their social media, but as you can see from the stats table it generally remains at a constant of ten to twenty views a day. Continue reading →

Slow Burning Posts

Posted on January 7, 2015 by suzie81speaks

For those who are interested in their stats and want their words to be read, it’s always a buzz when a post immediately does well. However, what I’ve discovered is that some of my most popular posts are not ones that have achieved this instant success. I refer to these as ‘slow burners,’ as they slowly build up my stats on a monthly basis, constantly bubbling away in the background of my weekly ramblings.

A year ago I posted ‘23 Things You Should Actually Do Before You’re 23′ in response to one of the most popular articles of 2013 on Freshly Pressed. It did quite well, being shared across Twitter and Facebook numerous times. However, while it didn’t light the blogging world on fire, over the last year I have found it to be a consistent feature in my daily stats, being viewed between 10 and 50 times a day. I’ve done very little to promote it, occasionally sharing on Twitter during hashtag chats, on my Facebook page and putting a link to it in the sidebar of my blog and the numbers are still there.

For example, if you look at the graph above you can see that it is constantly achieving the same number of views on a daily basis, with the occasional spike when I have highlighted it on my Twitter or Facebook page.

While these number may appear small, they all add up. In 2014 it was viewed a total of 8,710 times.

This isn’t the only post that I would consider to be a ‘slow burner’. Nine Things We Don’t Owe Anybody has followed the same process, again with occasional spikes every few months when it has been shared on social networking sites. In 2014 it was viewed 8,399 times.

46 Reasons Why Women Are Amazing was one of the first posts that I created. I don’t actually like it – my writing style has changed and I find it to be very superficial, but this is a post that receives regular traffic from search engines. I consistently find that sentences like ‘women are amazing’ or ‘why are women amazing’ in my search terms, and am hesitant to remove it based on the views that it pulls in and the positive emails that I receive about it. It was written in July 2013, but in 2014 it was viewed 1,218 times.

Those three posts combined added 18,327 views to Suzie81 Speaks last year.

So, don’t always go for instant gratification and get disheartened if your posts don’t receive the views that you want immediately. Instead, create articles that will consistently appeal to readers over a long period of time and occasionally share them on your social media sites – those ‘slow burners’ may make all the difference to your stats.

What about you guys? Have you had long term success with any of your posts?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog and don’t forget to hop on over to my Facebook page and give me a cheeky ‘like’ http://www.facebook.com/suzie81speaks