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!

1. How I Got 15K Followers on Instagram, 5818 page views
2. Discover Tech Women On YouTube, 4181 page views
3. Empowering Instagram Hashtags for Women in Tech, 3716 page views
4. Interview with Estefannie Explains It All!, 2188 page views
5. 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

Instagram

• 15 000 followers ✅ 25,5k followers
• 475 pictures ❌ 420 pictures…

Twitter

• 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

• 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.

• 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!

• 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!