End-of-year planning for the Buffer blog and our recent stats

Quick Summary

In November we had 529,184 unique visitors, a little less than in October. We published the same number of posts (15), and had 3 times as many posts republished elsewhere.

How did the blog do overall?

Total uniques: 529,184 (-3% from Oct)
Total posts published: 15 (10 in-house, 5 guest posts)
Total posts republished: 12 (TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Business Insider)
Top 3 referral sites: Facebook (70,173 uniques), Fast Company (12,596), Twitter (10,149)
Top 3 keywords: “how to make yourself happy,” “best time to post on facebook,” “habits of successful people”
New email subscribers: 1,876 (-16% from Oct)

Here are our traffic graphs from October and November, for comparison:

Which 3 posts performed the best?

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

94,623 uniqes, published in August

10 Things To Stop Doing Today to Be Happier, Backed by Science

34,038 uniques, published in November

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

28,147 uniques, published in October

Notes from November

Our traffic overall was lower this month, but one metric that caught my eye in particular was that Twitter referrals dropped 72% from October.
2 out of the top 10 most popular posts this month were social media topics. All the rest were lifehacking/productivity topics.

Looking ahead to December

We’re planning to adjust our strategy slightly to be more focused on topics around social media, blogging and marketing, and a bit less on lifehacking and productivity.
We’ve been working on a book of social media tips over the last few weeks and we really want to ramp this up in December and move closer to completion.