Every year since the creation of my blog, I share my goals for the coming year and then return to them. I always find it interesting to provide some feedback on what has been accomplished. I also love reading these kinds of article on the blogs that I am reading, so I thought I would share the same thing!

In this article, I will give you the statistics regarding the number of visits that my blog had received, and I will look back on the goals that I fixed for 2018 and we will see if I reached them or not!

Statistics for 2018

Here is a screenshot of my Google Analytics dashboard for the year 2018. One of the peaks in terms of visits (573 unique visitors) occurred on July 22nd. On July 21, I published my article on how I learned HTML and CSS on Neopets. As I have a mechanism in place to automatically share my new articles on Reddit, this one was popular on the social network and I discovered that it was later shared in several subreddits like /r/Neopets, which earned me lots of visits!

Another spate of visits occurred on November 6th, shortly after I published my article on how and why I study for 8+ hours a day. I shared it on Instagram, and it was popular. It must be said that these are answers to one of the questions that I am asked most often: how I manage to study for so many hours!

Read my blogging review of 2017 to see how much the blog evolved! 

Most popular posts in 2018

1. Comment j’ai eu 15K abonnés sur Instagram, 28 319 page views
2. How I got 15K followers on Instagram, 13 982 page views
3. Empowering Instagram Hashtags for Women in Tech, 10 799 page views
4. Ultimate List of YouTube Channels For Study Tips, 8434 page views
5. How to change the thumbnail when sharing your blog on Facebook, 6 726 page views

I was surprised to find that the most popular article on my blog is an article written in French!

Review of my goals for 2018

1. Reach 15,000 monthly page views

I’m very happy that I achieved this goal! In December, there was a little drop in the page views, but it may be because everyone is busier during this time of the year. I also did a little less promotion of my articles on social media since I was busy studying for my exams and attending NeurIPS!

The same thing happened in 2016 and 2017, so I’m not worried at all!

2. Publish 30 blog posts

I am far from achieving this goal: I published 18 articles in 2018. One of the reason is that I had particularly difficult courses at my university, and my student club took a lot of my time as well. I hope to do better for 2019!

I’ve also focused more time on my YouTube channel over the last year, which significantly affects my previous amount of time spent on the blog.

3. Learn more about SEO & Google Analytics

This goal has not been reached! During the year, my interests changed. I am still interested in deepening my knowledge of SEO and Google Analytics, but I prefer to invest my time elsewhere. To learn more about artificial intelligence, for example.

4. Create an ebook

Unfortunately, I have not been able to write an ebook in 2018. On the other hand, this goal is for me to reach in 2019. It’s something that is important to me and that I aim to achieve!

5. Social media

I had also set some goals for my social networks in 2018. As we can see, I had not reached them during the year!

• Be more active on my Facebook Page ✅
• Make 12 live videos on my Facebook page ❌ I didn’t make any live videos!
• Have 2,500 likes on my Facebook page ❌ (1711/2500)
• Get 50K followers on Instagram ❌ (32.2K/50K)
• Have a total of 700 images on my Instagram account ❌ (532/700)
• Get 3K followers on Twitter ❌ (2605/3000)
• Have 1K subscribers on Pinterest ❌  (748/1000)

But it does not matter at all. These figures were used as objectives do not mean much. It was just for the pleasure of trying to estimate how much I could evolve and grow Girl Knows Tech on social networks.

Various successes of my blog in 2018

I talk more about my accomplishments for 2018 in my full article dedicated to this topic. However, here are some blogging highlights of 2018:

• I got 1700 likes on my Facebook page
• I reached 30K followers on Instagram
• I invested time in my Pinterest account to try and understand this mystery that seems to drive traffic to blogs. I am using Tailwind to schedule my pins.
• I have 4000 subscribers on my YouTube channel
• I have more and more collaboration offers for my Instagram account! As a student, it feels good to have some money coming in to cover the costs of running my blog.

Obstacles I faced in 2018

• In which direction do I want to go with my blog?

I was asking myself the same question in early 2018. The angle of the question has changed slightly, from “Are blogging and women in technology compatible?” to “what kind of articles do I want to publish? ”

I must say that I was a little lost in regards to this in 2018. Am I writing articles on what inspires me at the moment, or do I force myself to write about some topics that inspire me less because that is what I should be writing about? My blog became a success that I never expected to become. I think that’s what creates doubts in my mind today.

I think that I feel some pressure or fear of disappointing by publishing articles that would not be good enough… I need to get this feat out of my mind so I can move forward.

• I receive too many emails

Another obstacle I face is that I receive many, many emails. This requires a lot of time from me. I also have a little FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) if I do not answer some emails. I am afraid to miss an opportunity that could have been good for me.

Unfortunately, many of these emails are “cold emails”, sent to a large number of people. I still feel the need to answer them. Anyway, if I do not do it, these people often raise me up and then, I lose more time reading their follow-up emails…

In short, I have too many emails, and it’s not my full-time job to answer these emails… I’m getting a little overwhelmed!

2018 in numbers

• 157 657 page views
• 81.08% bounce rate
• 4324 subscribers on YouTube
• 92,853 total views on my YouTube videos
• 1695 likes on my Facebook page
• 2265 members on my Facebook group
• 32 200 followers on Instagram
• 529 pictures on Instagram
• 732 followers on Pinterest
• 2551 subscribers on Twitter
• 4846 tweets in total
• 18 blog posts published
• 1062 comments 
• 1584 subscribers to my newsletter  

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article that gives you more information on the real numbers behind my blog! I can not wait to see what is waiting for my blog in the next year!