Analysis of being on self-hosted WordPress
22nd of February marked one month that this blog has been on self-hosted WordPress. I never really believed sites that said if you want more traffic or to rank higher on Google you need to get off wordpress.com and start self-hosting.
After one month I can tell you its true, over this last month my daily visitor count has doubled from 10-12 readers daily to 25-30 readers coming along to read my blog which I still find quite strange as to why anyone wants to read my stuff but hey maybe it means I am improving.
When I publish a new article my readership shoots up considerably to well over 100 readers and trails down as the post begins to age.
My monthly page views have doubled from around 300-400 to over just over 1000.
Part of the reason I believe for this growth is the excellent plugins that become available to you once you start a self-hosted WordPress site. SEO plugins allow me to ensure my posts meet baseline SEO standards helping me rank higher on Google and in-turn have more clicks and growth and just, in general, keeping me on the right track.
I’ve also ramped up the posting a little and started trying to post twice per week rather than just once which can account for the increased baseline of traffic as it never gets an opportunity to slump all the way down to the lower levels.
Next Challenges
Further growth on this small-time self-hosted WordPress site is something I would like to see but my own knowledge of what I can do to grow is running dry this is purely a hobby so I can’t really dedicate enough time to be always posting and on top of that one of the biggest challenges I face is coming up with blog post ideas I’ve deliberately left the doors open to post about everything and anything but still I find it a struggle to come up with post ideas.
All of the “how to be a blogger” sites now dictate that I should be reaching out to others in my niche for guest posts and trying to grow a following via a social media or email list to attract a consistent following/readership but I find this area extremely difficult as I don’t really know a lot or where to find other bloggers (fancy a guest post allmyfriends… or steve.in?).
More Thoughts
SEO on a self-hosted WordPress site is a dark art, is paying for a profession worth it? I am a pretty small blog I know this, I rank reasonably well on some keywords but if I pay a professional SEO expert ranking higher will get me more traffic and therefore increase readership but the big question I am debating is whether it’s worth it.
A short post this week I am still managing to post every week on a Saturday and slowly introducing a Tuesday post as well, so far I’ve kept this up during its initial weeks but its been more of an information type dump than any long-form post so far, I’ll consider a Tuesday post as optional at the moment and see where my growth goes over the next few months. Until next time now am off to the bank as Google is making me rich!
Leave a Reply