Girl Knows Tech is 1 year old

The blog has officially one year! A lot of things happened during this time. I thought I would write a short article to summarize everything that occurred during this first year of existence!

Highlights

New design in January

The change of the design, launched on January 1st, caused a lot of changes on the blog! I never realized that the theme has so much impact on statistics and the popularity of a blog. As soon as I changed my theme and navigation, I immediately saw a lot of changes – my visitors stay much longer to go from one page to another!

From March 1 to December 15, the date around which I put girlknowstech.com in maintenance mode, the average duration of sessions was 1:05 minutes and the bounce rate was 73.50%. Since January, the average duration of the sessions is 1:56 minutes and the bounce rate is now 56%! For me, these figures demonstrate the success of this positive change for the blog. I am very happy to have carried out this change which has not been of any rest!

Also, note the large number of visitors who came on January 1st! I think it was a successful launch!!!

Monetization

For one week now, I put some affiliate links in my articles! But I only recommend the products I was using before I knew they were offering an “affiliate program”! You can contact me if you have any questions about this. Everything I promote in my articles is from my personal experience, as usual, and if you click on my links to register for the site, for example, I will receive more or less $ 0.50.

My only objective is to cover the operating costs, which are $ 120 per year.

What I learned this year

Planning is the key to success

I have a very busy schedule between school, my student club, and this blog. I only spend very little time on the sofa doing nothing! Keeping a blog afloat, and publishing content regularly requires a lot of time and investments. We often forget what awaits us when we go headlong into a great adventure.

As you can see in the screenshot of Google Analytics above, the blog had fewer visits between May and August 2016. This is because I was much less prolific to write and to publish articles during this period, I lacked planning and direction. My editorial calendar with Trello was my savior for that!

Various technologies

My blog is hosted on DigitalOcean, and my domain name will be very soon at Namecheap. These are two companies that I had never used before! By the way, if you create an account with Digital Ocean through my link, you’ll get $10 in credit just for signing up!

I also have a development environment that runs on Vagrant with Scotch-box. I had never used Vagrant before! I just love it! 🙂

Edit: I am now using SiteGround as my hosting company. I made the switch because I didn’t have time to manage my server myself and everything in between. I am very happy with my decision, I am SO impressed with SiteGround’s customer support, it’s amazing! I get help within minutes! 🙂 

Social Media

Instagram

I would never have believed, ever, that I would have so many subscribers on Instagram. As I’m writing this, I have 12,500 subscribers. Nor would I have thought that such a large community of programming was there. I am very happy to be part of it and to have met extraordinary people: Estefannie, Gillian, holy, and many others!

Others

I’m still active on Twitter and Facebook! I’m also starting to use Pinterest – I’m currently trying the free version of Tailwind to see how their services can help grow my account.

Most Popular Articles

1. My Blogging and Coding Goals for 2017
2. How to Install WordPress on your OVH Server 
3. 2016 Accomplishments 
4. Tech Women on YouTube
5. Hidden Figures

Thanks to everyone of you for following my blog for a year now! It means a lot.