Buffer’s July Marketing Report: 35,000+ Subscribers, A Blog Redesign and Lots More

July was a month of big changes and big growth for Buffer’s small but mighty team of Content Crafters. Our blogs got a fresh new redesign that allows each post to shine a bit brighter and load faster, and the changes resulted in a big increase in traffic across the board.

A few milestones: On the Buffer Social blog, we reached 35,000 total email subscribers, while Buffer Open saw pageviews topping 100,000 for the first time.

Let’s take a closer look with a dive into the numbers!

July stats for Buffer Social

• 35,109 total email subscribers (+14.7% from last month)
• 698,886 users (unique visitors) (+13.3%)
• 928,081 sessions (total visits) (+11.8%)
• 1,173,375 pageviews (+10.9%)
• 1,543 direct conversions (+31.3% )
• 22 total posts published (+4)
• • 17 in-house posts: 13 from Kevan, 4 from Nicole
  • 5 guest posts: from Alex Turnbull, Sam Parr, Kelsey Libert, Neil Patel and  Alex Manthei

Here’s what our traffic looked like in July (in blue) compared to June (in yellow).

July’s 10 most popular Buffer Social posts

Four out of our overall Top 10 this month are new for July (they’re marked with an asterisk). Tools, lists and strategy were crowd favorites this month.

1. *The Big List of 189 Words That Convert
2. 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts
3. *How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan From Scratch
4. 10 Surprising and Important Social Media Stats You Need To Know

1. The Psychology of Language: Which Words Matter Most When We Talk?
2. The Best Time for Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails and Blog Posts
3. *10 Time-Saving Social Media Tools for a Productive Summer

1. *20 WordPress Plugins For a More Powerful Blog

You can see how many views each of these top posts received by looking below at our Top Content page in Google Analytics.

Top referral sources

July stats for Buffer Open

• 1,767 email subscribers (+46.2%)
• 63,209 unique visitors (+60.6%)
• 81,426 total visits (+49.8% )
• 103,645 pageviews (+43.6%)
• 23 total posts published (+4)

Here’s what our traffic looked like in July (in blue) compared to June (in yellow).

July’s top 10 Open blog posts

1. Morning Routines: How Successful People Start Their Day
2. The Psychology of Side Projects and Creative Hobbies
3. 9 Science-Backed Methods for a Happier, More Productive Meeting
4. Why No One Will Steal Your Startup Idea
5. Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer
6. The Habits of Successful People: They Work to Understand Context
7. The Habits of Successful People: They Disengage to Renew
8. The Art of Reading, Remembering and Retaining More Books
9. I Have No Idea What I Am Doing
10. My Month of Minimalism Challenge: How I Decluttered My Life

You can see how many views each of these top posts received by looking below at our Top Content page in Google Analytics.

Media syndication stats

• 35 total posts syndicated: (+7)

Here’s a breakdown of how many visitors (and what percentage conversion) syndication efforts brought to the blog in July.

Social stats

Followers

Interactions

Traffic

Thoughts and outlook

New design: What do you think?

Perhaps our biggest change in July was our blog redesign. Some of my favorite things: a search bar so you can quickly find what you’re looking for and a nice clean look that brings focus to our content. We’ve heard from a few of you who’ve had lovely things to say about our new design. I’d love to hear more thoughts in the comments, including anything we can still improve for you to have the best possible experience!

A new SEO focus

If you’ve been keeping up with these reports at all, you might have noticed that each month we hone our content strategy just a bit finer. First we moved from broader lifehacking and productivity content to a tighter social media and marketing focus. As we begin to focus on search engine optimization for the first time, we’ve begun researching key words and phrases and experimenting with writing posts starting with those phrases in mind. I know we’ll be sharing lots more SEO learnings as we experiment and grow our focus in this area.

Pivoting the mission of Buffer Open

The Buffer Open blog has evolved from a repository for Buffer’s transparency documents (like our open salaries and reports like this one) to a way to revive our popular productivity, creativity and lifehacking content. With further thinking and experimenting, we’ve refined that mission even further this month. At its best, we’d love for Buffer Open to be a home for exploring how we work today, with research, resources and insights on creating an outstanding workplace culture and working smarter every day—not harder.

More personal emails

Getting to communicate with each person who has signed up for our email list is such a privilege to us, and we continue to work on ways to make the experience more useful, personable and fun for everyone on the receiving end of a missive from us. Instead of an automated RSS campaign, Kevan is experimenting with sending each day’s new post on Buffer Social with a hand-crafted introduction. He’s also penned a fun welcome email for new subscribers that starts us out on a great note. I imagine these features will migrate to the Open blog soon as well—they’re bringing us lots of joy and many more interactions with our awesome audience.

Your turn: What do you want to know?

What other learnings or strategy specifics would you find helpful for me to share here? Are there any questions about our blogs, our team, or our social media marketing that we can answer? Share them in the comments, I’d love to keep the conversation going.