Last year, I shared with all of you my blogging and coding goals for 2017. I thought that I would publish a new blog post to update all of you on my progress! I will also share with you other blogging achievements, obstacles I faced and will recap with 2017 in numbers!
Keep reading this blog post to know exactly how many page views I got in 2017, and what were the most popular posts of the year, and much more!
Recap of 2017
Here is a screenshot of my Google Analytics overview for 2017. You can see some peaks in the sessions when I published my posts: How I got 15K followers in a year on Instagram, and my interview with Estefannie Explains It All. The first one went viral on a Facebook group, and the second one was thanks to Estefannie promoting our interview on her social media accounts!
I believe that my bounce rate is a little higher than I’d want it to be, I think that can be explained by where my traffic comes from. Facebook groups, for example, I think people who visit from FB groups are more likely to scan the content and leave when they got the information they were looking for!
Most popular posts of 2017
I am proud of the blog posts I published this year, I think most of them were high-quality content, and that explains why I am now getting consistent views from Google around women in tech, Trello, and Instagram!
- How I Got 15K Followers on Instagram, 5818 page views
- Discover Tech Women On YouTube, 4181 page views
- Empowering Instagram Hashtags for Women in Tech, 3716 page views
- Interview with Estefannie Explains It All!, 2188 page views
- Integrate Trello With Google Calendar and iCal, 1897 page views
To get this list of my most favorite blog posts, I went to Google Analytics, then Behavior > Overview!
Review of my goals
Personal and coding goals
- Assist to 6 conferences or hackathons ⚠ I attended five events… that’s not too bad! : McHacks, Hackatown, ConUHacks 2, WordCamp Montreal, GitHub Field Day,
- Learn Ruby / Ruby on Rails ⚠ I did a bit of Ruby on Rails in one of my software engineering class, but I can’t say I know a lot of it.
- Finish Advent Of Code 2016 ❌ I didn’t take the time to continue this at all.
- Try ten different coffee shops in Montréal ❌ In April; I moved out of my apartment. I have a closed office in my apartment now, so I don’t feel the need to go to coffee shops as much.
- Get business cards done ✅
Blogging goals
- Post a technical article each week, on Monday ❌ I published 40 articles in 2017, compared to 33 in 2016, while the blog was created in March. We can, therefore, consider that I published fewer articles in 2017, it’s a shame! By cons, I think the articles I published are of better quality, which is very satisfying!
- Post a couple of times per month my weekly update ❌ I decided I would stop that series.
- Change the theme of the blog to be more professional looking ✅ I did during Christmas break last year and relaunched my blog with this theme on January 1, 2017! Still very proud of how it turned out.
- Get an SSL certificate for a secure connection ✅ Did it in February with Let’s Encrypt!
- Increase the security of my blog ✅
- Write 25 articles so that I will be able to participate in Blogmas 2017! ❌ HUGE FAIL on this. But I don’t think it was a realistic goal… I am too busy to do something like this, even though I’d be so happy to be able to do it. Maybe 12 blog posts (one every other day) would be better.
- Fix a bug with images on Safari ✅
- Create a new logo for the blog ✅ My friend Stephen did it for me! I love it so much.
Newsletter goals
I have a lot of trouble to send newsletters regularly… I wanted to get better at newsletters in 2017, but that didn’t happen!
- Send 12 newsletters (one each month) ❌ 3 newsletters in May, June, and September! I can’t believe I sent 3 newsletters during a whole year. I’m the worst. 🙁
- Get 500 followers on my newsletter ✅ 680 people are subscribed to my newsletter to this day!
Social Media goals
- 15 000 followers ✅ 25,5k followers
- 475 pictures ❌ 420 pictures…
- 1000 followers ✅ 1161 followers!
- 2500 tweets in total ✅ 2975 tweets!
Other blogging achievements in 2017
- Earned CAD 150 with affiliate links and Adsense revenue
- My blog is well ranked for keywords like “Tech women YouTube” or “Instagram 15k followers” and others.
- Reached 1K likes on my Facebook Page
- Launched my YouTube Channel, and to this day I have 1555 subscribers!
- Started promoting my blog regularly on Facebook groups, I use my Todoist template every day!
- Started to use Pinterest, but still don’t see a return on investment for this social media!
- I bought a Canon G7X camera to be able to take more high-quality pictures on my blog + YouTube channel!
- Managed to get 8 blog posts ready and scheduled for my semester so I wasn’t stressing out about creating new content
- Got 10k Pages Views in a month for the first time in June!
Obstacles I faced in 2017
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Should Girl Knows Tech be about women in tech, or blogging, or both? Are these two subjects compatible?
This one was a hard question for me that I had to think about a lot. In the end, I just told myself that I work on this blog for fun, because I enjoy it, and it should stay that way. Do I want to write about women? But I want to write about blogging too? Then just do it! I also talked to some of my readers about this, since it was haunting me, and a lot of them told me they love that I write about these subjects, because it inspires women in tech to start a blog and that’s amazing to me.
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Collaborations…….. Should I accept them, refuse them? How much should I charge?
I think everyone that has a blog or social media struggles with this. Should we collaborate with brands? On what terms?… One thing is for sure, I only collaborate when I like the product, but still, other questions remain.
My first contract ever was in March. I had a lanyard with my name and “Influencer” next to it. I was amazed! However, it took me 3 months to get paid afterward, and it was a small amount of money. I learned that when money is involved, contracts are really important to protect ourselves.
Especially on Instagram, a lot of small companies are reaching out to me for shout outs or promoting them. I don’t do it very often, but still, it’s very hard to juggle with all the emails and propositions out there… If I want to do it, then the next question is how much? You have to defend what you are worth, and I hate being judged for the interactions I get with my pictures. Companies evaluate my account on the number of likes and comments I get, and I HATE IT. I struggled with this for the last two months, and I just came to the conclusion that I WILL POST WHATEVER PICTURE I WANT, and I won’t stress out with the numbers omg, that’s not why I started my Instagram, and I won’t go there.
I’m not on Instagram to have a crazy amount of followers; I just want to post about my daily life and challenges, connect with other women in tech, so my decisions are made accordingly!
The lesson I learned is you are “worth” what you think you are and don’t undersell yourself for some stupid iPhone case. It’s so exhausting to always defend ourselves! Ugh!
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I said yes to too many interviews, and now I can’t complete them all.
I say yes to interviews because it helps me with backlinks, helps me to make my blog known to new people, and because I enjoy them, but these last few interviews I got were always the same questions and I said yes to too many of them all at the same time and couldn’t deliver. That’s a mistake I made on my end. I feel bad, but lesson learned!
2017 in numbers
- 83 634 page views
- 70.45% bounce rate
- 1555 YouTube subscribers
- 41 259 total views on my YouTube videos
- 2 checks, first income thanks to my blog!
- 1066 likes on my Facebook Page
- 1583 members in my Facebook group
- 25 646 followers on Instagram
- 422 pictures on Instagram
- 282 followers on Pinterest
- 1208 followers on Twitter
- 3014 tweets in total
- 40 blog posts published
- 783 comments
- 685 email subscribers
Conclusion
I achieved quite a lot of my goals for my blog in 2017! I am proud of the hard work I put in my blog. During the summer, I spent more than 15 hours per week working on upcoming blog posts and social media after my full-time internship.
The hard work and long hours I invested on my blog in 2017 are paying off! I can’t wait to see what 2018 will bring me!
8 comments
Congratulations on your accomplishments, I’ve been struggling with traffic over the past year. I believe it because I haven’t been the most consistent with blogging and I haven’t done enough planning in advance. This post is very inspiring. Thank you for sharing and great work!
Hi Tia!
I am going to publish a blog post soon about how I promote my blog posts on all my social media. You might be interested! 🙂
Marie
It’s nice to see posts for meeting or not the goals.
Hi Sirli, I agree! We have to be real! 😉
Marie
Congrats on those stats! That’s amazing! I’ve had my blog for a few years but just started really working on it professionally. I love your websit design.
Hi Christina!
Thank you!
Good luck with your blog, I have many blog posts that can help you take it off the groud! ;D
Marie
Congrats on all of your accomplishments for this year!! I’m definitely going to be setting some goals for my blog and newsletter list and hope to have even a fourth of the success you accomplished. We all gotta start somewhere…no?
Hi Monique,
Aww of course we all start somewhere! Good luck with your goals, you can reach them!
Marie