Sparkling Letters 1st Blogversary : A Statistical Analysis & Lessons Learned

Hello everyone! ♥

Last week Sparkling Letters just celebrated its first year blogversary on March 2. YAYYY!!! However, I had no idea how to celebrate and was swamped with work, hence the late celebration. Plus I already had an ARC review scheduled for March 2 🙈

I know everyone says this on every blogversary post of ever but I never thought I’d be here for a while. Blogging has always been my hobby since I was 14 (I’m 22 now) but I did it sporadically. I thought this time would be no different. I thought it was gonna be just another phase that I’d outgrow soon. But last week I hit another big milestone : 1st year blogversary. I mean, IT’S HUGE! A lot of things had happened in a year and I’m proud of myself and my achievements.

So today, we’re going to look back to what I’ve achieved and learned in this past year 😀 I’m gonna do some statistical analysis of my stats because I’m a huge math nerd and it’s just fun hahaha I hope you could also learn something from my experience ♦

I created this blog on March 2 but I didn’t start blogging seriously right away. I only posted once in a while and my first few posts weren’t even about books. For the first couple of months, I planned this to be a lifestyle/beauty blog (haha). My thought was that I didn’t want to be confined to one specific niche because wouldn’t it be boring? Or so I thought. But after about three months, I realized that when it comes to makeup and lifestyle, I didn’t have that many things to talk about. With books, however, I have many.

That’s why I finally decided to be a book blogger. Here are my stats for the past year :

I probably don’t get as many views as other bloggers who have been blogging as long as I do, but I’m pretty proud of my stats. You could see that my stats were low and unstable on the first 3-4 months, mostly due to my unclear niche and irregular post schedule 😂 I got really serious since August, because that was when I graduated from university, hence I had a lot of free time. Ever since August, my stats always increase every month and that’s really all that matters!

I never set an exact goal for my stats but my monthly goal is only to be better than the previous month. As long as I achieve that, I’ll call it a win hahaha now I’m down to >100 views a day and I’d love to keep it up and improve ♥

Where do people find my blog?

I don’t know about you but when I first started blogging, I went through a phase where I look for and try lots of blogging advice 😂 one of the top advice is to share our posts. I tried this. I shared my posts on social media and even sites like StumbleUpon, but still, for the first few months of blogging most of my referrers are WordPress reader. Which means my readers are only those people who already follow my blog.

However, now my referrers have varied and I couldn’t be happier. Take a look at this chart

Okay so naturally, wordpress reader still wins by huge margin. Buuuut there are a lot of other equally important referrers!

1. SEARCH ENGINE. I also went through a period where I learned about SEO to improve my blog rank on the internet. It’s safe to say, I still haven’t mastered it. That’s why I’m pretty surprised to see that search engine brings lots of traffic to my blog. I’m not an expert but I’ve learned a thing for two about it, I might talk about it on one of my future posts 😀
2. LINKUP. If you haven’t joined any linkup, DO IT NOW! Brief introduction : linkup is a place where blogger could drop link to their post/blog. Some of my favorite linkups (that bring most traffic to my blog)
   1. Saturday Situation by Lori @ Pure Imagination
   2. Top Ten Tuesday by The Brooke and Bookish
   3. Monthly Discussion Challenge by Shannon @ It Starts at Midnight and Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction
3. TWITTER. Sharing your post on Twitter is useful, even if I rarely ever do it unless you count that automatic share when you publish a post. But even more useful is when a fellow blogger shares your post on their own Twitter! You’re all amazing people and I can’t thank you enough ♥
4. BLOGLOVIN. Again, if you haven’t signed up on Bloglovin, do it now. It’s a great way to connect with bloggers from different platform.
5. OTHERS. Okay this category covers various referrers but one of the most important source is other people’s blogs. I noticed I received a lot of visitors from Reg, Cait, Lauren, Fadwa, and Jordon’s blogs. How do they get to my blog? Lots of ways. Tag, wrap up posts, comments, blogrolls, etc. Interaction with other bloggers is a must ♥

Where do they come from?

My visitors come from all over the world and here’s a map to show you where they’re from!

I’d say this map looks pretty great but there are still several countries where I never receive any visitors from and I’d like to change that. I want to conquer the world with my blog 😛 just kidding… or am I?hehe anyway, here are the top 10 countries! ♣

So obviously the first place goes to United States. No surprise, I guess, considering most bloggers seem to be from there?ahaha coming in second is my own country, Indonesia! I’m proud and anxious at the same time because which Indonesians read my blog?? Are they fellow book bloggers or my friends from real life? 😂😂 next we have United Kingdom, Australia, India, Canada, Philippines, Germany, Morocco, and Belgium. Yayyy! ♦

Which posts are the most popular?

Now this is a truth universally acknowledged : reviews always receive less traffic than discussion posts, or any other kind of posts. Even compared to tags, book reviews still receive less traffic, I guess. But today, I’ll show you how significantly less it is. Take a look at the two charts below. The first chart is my top 5 discussion posts and the second is my top 5 reviews.

As you can see from the chart above, discussion posts generally receive 100 views, 10 likes, and 40 comments more than review posts. It’s a scientific proof hahaha however for me, book review is the heart of a book blog and I actually love writing them, that’s why I’ll never get rid of it even if it receives less traffic than other kind of posts.

In case you want to know, here are my top 5 discussion posts :

1. Why We Need More Positive Girls Portrayal in Books
2. The Diversity Corner #1 : February News, Muslim Representation, and March New Releases
3. For Some of Us, Libraries Might NOT Exist
4. Blog Hopping: For Fun or Necessity?
5. My Stance as A Diverse Book Blogger & Introducing New Feature : The Diversity Corner

And here are my top 5 review posts :

1. ARC Review : The Inexplicable Logic of My Life // Lyrical, Beautiful, and Heartwarming
2. Review: Salt to the Sea // Hate to be the Black Sheep Here, but Well…
3. Review : The Sun is Also a Star // Way Too Insta-Lovey for My Taste
4. Review: The Crown’s Game // Didn’t Expect to Love it But I DID!
5. Review: More Happy Than Not // More Like Depressing Than Happy… but in a Good Way!

To conclude this post, I’m gonna list down a few things I’ve learned from my 1st year of blogging ♥

(1) Quality content is a must, and it’s actually the one thing that will get you far. As you’ve seen from my analysis above, I receive a lot of traffics because people share my posts on Twitter and on their blogs. I believe that most people only share the posts that they like so I assumed they share my posts because they like them? 😛

(2) Share your posts! Use twitter, pinterest, join linkup, link your posts whenever other bloggers ask you to! The result will mostly depend on the number of followers you have on social media but it never hurts to try. P.S. use hashtag when sharing your posts on Twitter (i.e. #bookblogger, #diversebookblogger, etc)

(3) Write more discussion posts. You’ve seen the proof, discussion post receives A LOT MORE traffic than review does. Not telling you to stop writing reviews (I won’t!) but it might be great to balance them out with some more discussions. I wrote a post about why we should write more discussion posts & tips and tricks to nail them 😛

(4) Interaction with other bloggers is beneficial. Not only it will drive traffic to your blog, you’ll also get new friends and if there’s one surprising thing I experienced from blogging, it’s the friendship. I never thought I’d be close with people who live a thousand miles away from me. Here are some of my fantastic blogging friends : Tasya, Fadwa, Lauren, Marie, Melissa, Reg, Cait, Molly, Becca, Pamela, Anisha, Cilla, Jeann, Nicole, Shannon, Kat, Gerri, Danielle, Becky, CW, Anushka, Madalyn, Mikaela, Sara, Swetlana, and every other person who makes blogging easier and more fun! I’m sorry if I missed you but please know that I appreciate all of you ♥

(5) At the end of the day, it’s not only about stats. As I said above, my stats might not be as high as other people’s but more important is the fact that I am happy with it. Being happy will get you far 😀

That was the end of my blogversary post! I never thought I’d blog this long and now I feel so accomplished. The numbers might not be as high but I’m so proud of it and I can manage 😀 how long have you all been blogging> What lessons have you learned so far? Do you like this post and did you learn anything useful? I’d love to hear your thoughts ♥

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Find more of me on my social media ♦

Tumblr • Instagram • Twitter • Facebook • Goodreads • Pinterest • Linkedin