Buffer blog stats and ideas for December 2013: 493,253 Uniques, 16,518 Email Subscribers

It’s been a very interesting month for the Buffer blog in December, 2013. We’ve  made a few changes to the content we publish, how we work as a team and are hiring a new content crafter right now.

Let’s dig into some of the most exciting things happening:

Quick Summary

In December we had 493,253 unique visitors, a little less than in November. Overall, that’s been an interesting trend to observe, which we’ve documented a bit more further down under “ideas”.

How did the blog do overall?

• Total uniques: 493,253 (-7% from Nov)
• Total posts published: 13 (-2 posts from November) (8 in-house, 4  posts from Joel, 1 guest post)
• Total posts republished: 13 (TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Business Insider)
• Top 3 referral sites: Facebook (58,471 uniques), Reddit (25,349), StumbleUpon (15,819). Here’re all top 10:

• Top 3 keywords: “how to make yourself happy,” “best time to post on Instagram,” “best time to post on Facebook,”

• New email subscribers: 1,532 (-17% from Nov)

Here is our traffic graph from December. What’s interesting here, is that towards the later 2 weeks of December, with Christmas and New Year approaching, we saw a natural dip in traffic, as well as less published articles from our end, which helps understand the decline in traffic for December:

Which 3 posts performed the best?

10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science

70,334 uniqes, published in August

Why We’re More Creative When We’re Tired and 9 Other Surprising Facts About How Our Brains Work

55,900 uniques, published in November

8 Surprising New Instagram Statistics to Get the Most out of the Picture Social Network

40,160 uniques, published in October

Ideas and thoughts from December

• Our traffic overall was lower this month, which, coinciding with Christmas and the holidays was partially expected, as can be seen in the last two weeks.

• We started a series with articles from Joel, CEO here at Buffer, which has had some great success, grabbing more than 30,000 uniques combined. It’ll be interesting to continue with business and lifehacking advice from Joel.

Ideas for looking ahead to January

• Focusing less on visits, more on conversions: We’ve had a terrific brainstorming session with one of our most valuable advisors, Hiten Shah. One of the things Hiten mentioned to us is to focus slightly more on getting better conversions from our blog to signup. We’re going to make this more of a focus, instead of general hits to the blog

• Focusing less on lifehacking, more on social media, blogging, email marketing content: About 1 year ago, we made a big change to the blog’s direction with more lifehacking content. Whilst this still works really well for us we’re starting to double down more on social media and other marketing content. I envision a split of 70% social media and other marketing content and 30% business advice, lifehacking content, etc. Of course, this is all subject to our results from tracking conversions better, especially with the new Buffer for Business we have in place.

• Hiring more team members for the content marketing team: We’re currently looking for the next Content Crafter at Buffer, which will be a key focus in January, to get Belle some help with cranking out awesome content.

I think this’ll be an exciting time for the Buffer blog in 2014, with tons of new things coming up and a new, closer social media focus.

Oh and the last thing, a big highlight for us was Google Analytics retweeting our article about Google analytics: