How Buffer’s blog developed in January: 654,126 Uniques, 18,497 Email Subscribers

January has been an incredibly exciting month for the Buffer blog. We managed to increase our overall traffic by 32.6% compared to December. We expanded the team and we’re working more closely with the growth team to make the blog more data-driven.

Let’s dig into the details! :)

Quick summary

In January, we had 654,126 Unique visitors (32.6% growth over December). There were 839,846 total visits, resulting in 1,061,032 page views. We had a total 59 Buffer for Business trial starts resulting from the blog in January, with 5 conversion to the Business plans.

Traffic stats

• 654,126 Unique visitors (+ 32.6% from Dec)
• 839,846 Total visits
• 1,061,032 Pageviews
• Total posts published: 20 ( +7 from Dec)
  • 16 in-house posts: 13 from Belle, 2 from Joel, 1 from Brian
• 4 guest-posts: 2 from James Clear, 1 from Gregory Ciotti, 1 from Courtney Seiter
• Total posts republished: 17 ( +6 from Dec: TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Business Insider)
• Top 3 referral sites: Facebook (117,541 visits) Twitter (70,302 visits), Feedburner (41,243), Here are all top 10:

• Email subscribers: 1971 new subscribers (11% list growth to 18,497 in January)

Here’s our traffic graph from January. It’s definitely been a massive leap compared to December, with over 32% growth in both uniques and total visits:

The 10 most popular posts

Trial sign-ups from blog:

How many people signed up directly to Buffer for Business from the Buffer blog in January?

• 1 sign-up from “14 Great Tools to Create Engaging Infographics and Images for your Social Media Posts“
• 6 sign-ups from banner ad at the bottom of the post (0 upgrades so far)
• 2 sign-ups from “The secret to creativity, intelligence and scientific thinking: Being able to make connections“
• 1 sign-up from “10 Big, Recent Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Changes You Should Know for a Better Social Media strategy“
• 34 sign-ups from “Introducing Powerful New Buffer Analytics: Google Analytics support, Tracking of Social Account Growth and More” (3 converted, 4 not finished trial yet)
• 1 sign-up from “How the Founder of Buffer Tweets: The System and 5 types of Tweets to Keep your Followers Engaged” (1 converted)
• 1 sign-up from “Content Creation Lessons from Growing 41,231 Newsletter Subscribers“
• 13 sign-ups from “Introducing Buffer for Business: A simpler and more powerful Social Media tool” (1 converted)

• Content: 12 trial sign-ups from general content, with 1 conversions (8.3%)
• Launch posts: 47 trial sign-ups from launch posts, with 4 conversions (8.5%)
• Total: 59 total trial starts in January from the blog with 5 conversions (8.5%)

Thoughts and outlook:

Business trials from the blog
The amount of direct trial sign-ups from the blog has been fairly low, especially if we discount the signups from launch emails.

My intuition would be to try and get more people to sign-up for the Free plans first, instead of pushing them straight onto the Business plans, if they come from the blog. We might leave off the links at the bottom going forward.

Better sign-up tracking

We’ve definitely been catching up a bit with our tracking to understand fully how much the blog contributes to Buffer’s total sign-ups. We’re going to try to put better tracking in place to know both, whether people had touch points with Buffer, before they signed up and if they signed up directly from the Buffer blog and how many.

Improved sign-up flow from the Buffer blog
We’ve been working hard with Hiten on the growth side of things. Our hypothesis is that we can likely bring a lot more new Buffer users over from the Buffer blog. We’ll be testing our ideas with experiments throughout February to see how we can improve our metrics here.

More people on the team and more ideas
With Courtney starting her Buffer bootcamp in February, it’ll be a very exciting time to experiment with more ideas and dedicate more overall focus to the Buffer blog. This’ll mean more content on the Buffer blog, and a few more experiments into different areas. I believe Courtney will be able to help us with the general direction of the blog, content distribution and more, on top of new, amazing content for the Buffer blog.

Quick big highlight from January

A big highlight for us this month, was the amazing mention from Feedly in their article on hiring their own content crafter, stating that they’re “looking for their own Belle Beth Cooper”. The Feedly team rocks!