The Complete September Stats for the Buffer Blog

Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of October. It features our latest thoughts, ideas and questions about content and the Buffer blog. Since we default to transparency with our culture, we thought making this public could be useful for others too.

Quick Summary

In September we published 15 posts on the Buffer blog, 3 of which were guest posts. Our total uniques were 24% lower than last month, and our email subscribers jumped up 7%. Our three best-performing posts (in terms of traffic) were all published before this month.

How did the blog do overall

• Total uniques: 562,361 (compared to 745,811 in August = 24% decrease)
• Email subscribers: 11,934 (compared to 11,135 in August = 7% increase)
• Total posts: 15 (3 less than August)
• Total posts republished: 4 (Lifehacker, FastCompany, TheNextWeb, Women 2.0)
• Total in-house posts: 12 (same as August)
• Total guest posts: 3 (3 less than August)
• Top 3 referring sites: Facebook (167,789 visits), A CUP OF JO – joannagoddard.blogspot.com (15,912), Twitter (14,184)
• Top 3 keywords: “how to make yourself happy,” “things that make you happy,” “body language“

Which 3 posts performed the best?

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

256,951 uniques, published in August

A scientific guide to saying “no”: How to avoid temptation and distraction

42,825 uniques, published in March

A scientific guide to posting Tweets, Facebook posts, Emails and Blog posts at the best time

31,251 uniques, published in August

Experiments from September

• Brian whipped up some excellent author bio boxes for the blog:

Top of blog post:

Bottom of blog post:

• And we stopped using the text-based CTAs with email and Twitter links at the bottom of posts:

• We started suggesting similar posts at the bottom of each one for further reading:

• We tried publishing a personal story-type post: http://blog.bufferapp.com/lessons-learned-from-changing-my-name. We found that the traffic and social signals for this one were quite low, but engagement seemed quite high compared to other posts.

Questions and ideas that came up in September

• Rather than pushing for higher volume of content, Leo and I decided focusing on 3 x high quality posts per week is the most sustainable plan for now.

Looking ahead to October

• Our goals for the end of October are still a fair way off (25,000 subscribers and 1 million uniques/month). We need to keep these in mind as we plan and execute on content this month.
• Starting to plan out the first Buffer ebook with Social Media tips and insights

Note from Leo: Let us know any more stats that we could share with you guys in the comments below!