A Couple Travelers By The Numbers – June ’12

Added by Dave on July 4, 2012

Last month I gave the update for may. This was not the first month the site had been live BUT it was probably the first month we had actually dedicated fully to posting, updating, etc. Now we’re on month two and things are looking up!

Social Media Summary: Our biggest gains this month were in twitter and pinterest. I think Vicky is very active on these and somewhat “gets” them. Also, in many cases it seems that if you follow someone on twitter they are likely to follow you back. This is NOT the case for facebook (in our experience). We haven’t really cracked the code on facebook likes and rss subscribers and it will be a focal point of the next month so I’m interested in what July has to offer.

Traffic (google analytics): Disappointingly, we’re up only slightly month over month. One major factor is that in May we had a really BIG traffic day (like 4-5 times our daily average). Therefore, while we are not up significantly this month, our traffic is a lot more consistent day to day.

We’ve been trying a lot of different avenues to see what reliably drives traffic to the website - article submissions, website submissions, etc. My goal is to try a bit of everything enough to get a sense for whether it works or not and weed it out from there. I’ll be writing an article soon about these submission websites to summarize my findings. I have a few new sources I want to try this month and I’m optimistic about the outcome. Other than that we’re just focusing on quality articles (a recent article I wrote on 5 ways to save was pinned and tweeted several times, which is big for us).

Advertising: We currently aren’t doing any advertising. I’ve been looking into it because for Vicky’s food blog it is a possibility, but for acoupletravelers it’s months out at best.