Monthly Blog Update: June Brings the Heat!

Another month has passed us by and we are officially halfway through the year! Thank goodness because it was a HOT month out here in Phoenix! June was a bit of a roller coaster and July promises to be packed with writing, so let’s take a look at how the blog is doing.

May: 

Views: 376

Visitors: 181

Likes: 125

Comments: 66

Countries represented: 17

June:

Views: 386 (2.6% improvement)

Visitors: 197 (8.8% improvement)

Likes: 107 (14.4% decrease)

Comments: 39 (40% decrease)

Countries represented: 20 (17% improvement)

Reflections

June is definitely a learning month. Even with two extra posts, I barely pulled off an increase in views and visitors. Participation/interaction with the content or me (via likes or comments) has also waned a bit.

First things first, May had a lead coming off the A to Z Challenge and about halfway through the month I published Why I Write for Teens, which garnered the overwhelming majority of views for May. By contrast, in June, I had more posts reach 30+ views than in any previous month.

On top of May’s lead and popular post, in June I had Phoenix Comicon and a week or two of shit hitting the fan, and trying to pull a series together. June saw more book reviews and attempts to put good content out there. The fact that the two posts that got an amazing response (that weren’t award posts) involved self-care and personal vulnerabilities tells me that (as every experienced blogger who reads this already knows) I need to pay better attention to my community and make sure my content is relevant to you and also present a piece of myself in kind.

June’s posts are consistently more viewed so I know my audience is growing, now I just need to nail down what you really want to read!

Moving Forward

Since I publish my reading lists and review a diverse YA book each month, I was thinking about how to invite people into that fun with me. I really like something Dahlia Adler (BTW, if you like YA, finding new diverse titles, and fun blog posts, check out Dahlia’s site!) does with her monthly book club: offering a chance to win a giveaway if you read the book(s) and leave a review on a major bookseller site (like Amazon or Barnes and Noble). The whole point of the diverse YA reading is to support authors that are otherwise often marginalized, and buying their books + leaving reviews can be an excellent way to do that!

Suggestions welcome! If you have an idea for what might motivate you to read along, let me know!

In addition, while reviewing some of June’s posts, I noticed that I can get a little academic in some of my writing. A whole lot of blogging is having a distinct voice and June was a hint that I should pay more attention to that. So I’ll be working on that more in July and August.

July’s posts are already planned out and I’m prepping for Pitch Wars, so hopefully I’ve planned ahead well enough. August will see some new developments!

How did everyone else’s June go? Were you productive (because I consider that a win, even if I didn’t hit my goal numbers)? What was the coolest thing that you did or that happened to you?