I have officially completed the first month of my blog! Technically it wasn’t a full month as I started the site on March 8th but that didn’t stop this month from being action-packed.
I started this blog to provide greater detail on my dividend growth journey and to inspire others to begin building their dividend income. It is my hope that the transparency of my real-money portfolio and real-time tracking of my portfolio transactions will provide reassurance to prospective investors. It’s hard grasp just how strong the force of compounding and dollar cost averaging can be until it’s demonstrated visually. Although each of my transactions are typically small, the shear volume of transactions and their distribution across numerous days creates a mountain of added future dividends. My real-time transactions tracker backs up this claim, adding $130 in future dividends throughout the month via 33 smaller sized transactions.
The purpose of this blog isn’t just to grow dividends however, it is also intended to add additional streams of income. In order for my blog to have any sort of capability to generate noticeable income, I will need to first build up my site. This is exactly what this month has been focused on. I have dedicated the majority of my focus to creating quality posts and tools along with exploring ways to leverage my already developed follower base on Seeking Alpha.
Blog Metrics
- Total Traffic (Page/Post Views): 1,174
- Number of Visitors: 722
- Newsletter Subscriber Count: 12
- Number of Posts/Pages Added: 15
- Number of Countries Reached: 51
All in all, not a bad first month. This seems to be in line with other blog reports for their first month of operation.
Methods that I have implemented thus far for traffic growth include adding links to my blog in my Seeking Alpha articles, installing essential plug-ins on WordPress for optimizing SEO and analytics, and exploring the capabilities of Reddit.
There was a clear spike in traffic and engagement once I added links to the blog on my most recent Seeking Alpha article. I am hoping this trend continues with future articles. To grow traffic even further I’ve begun testing out methods for increasing my presence through Reddit. I only have a few weeks of data to go off of but it seems apparent to me there is a substantial opportunity to drive visitors to my blog through posts and comments in dividend focused sub-Reddits.
To retain blog visitors, I made sure to implement a subscription offering for a weekly newsletter. While I only garnered X subscribers in my inaugural month, it is certainly better than 0.
Next Month’s Goals
Next month, I would like to increase my total traffic to 1,400 and number of visitors to 775. Additionally, I’d like to see an increase in my subscriber count. Ideally, reaching these metrics would allow me to begin implementing display ads for revenue.
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