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Today, I'm going to do something that I don't think I've ever seen anybody else do before.

Frankly, it's a little bit nerve-wracking, but I'm going to do it anyway, because I think you need to see how creating content can actually grow your audience.

Yes, the actual numbers.

…I'm about to show you seven years of my website’s analytics! 😳🫣🤯

Before I dive into that if you missed the last few posts, I’ve been sharing details about how I create video content & blog posts, and why I share DIY focused content.

Now go bookmark, watch or read those posts FIRST so you understand what I’ve been doing over the years of analytical data I’m about to show you. 😉

(Ok, who am I kidding?! I know you’re not gonna do that & will watch those NEXT instead, after seeing the results of my efforts in this one. 😂*)*

The Strategy Behind Content Creation

Most of my business now is teaching other people, but I started as a web designer doing the work and just answering questions for people because I wanted to help.

The content I posted/created was centered around the questions my clients/friends/family/network were actually asking. I would make a running list, and every time someone asked a question that could be a post, like…

I don't understand how to create space between this thing or that thing.
I don't know how to resize an image block.
I don't know how to contact Squarespace support.

Every time I heard a question that I could answer, I added it to my list! That way I could refer to my ever-growing list of ideas for new content, and that way when I sat down to actually create one, I wasn't racking my brain, trying to figure out “what the hell do people want to hear about now?”

Because when you do it on the fly like that, there's no longterm strategy. The tips are random, and don’t work as well together as a whole, to achieve an underlying goal, which may be to grow your email list or find new clients, etc.

So you gotta try to plan it out a little bit so that you have sort of a series of helpful information that support each other and you're building a useful foundation –both for you AND your audience.

But anyway, I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

I know why you're really here!

Diving Into the Analytics

Let's take a look at my analytics data from inside my Squarespace website, so you can see how creating all of this content has actually grown my audience, grown my traffic, and as a result, grown my business.

2016

In 2015, I had my website on Weebly. I don't remember exactly when I launched it, but eventually I found Squarespace sometime in mid/late 2016, and I started the process of migrating my content, my blog posts, from Weebly over to Squarespace. Then I launched that Squarespace website in October.

This graph only shows the last 90 days of traffic. Whatever existing traffic I had collected through Weebly’s site was being redirected from the domain that I had moved over to Squarespace. So, nothing super awesome to look at yet, but this is pretty normal for a brand new website when no one knows what they're doing, how to market it, or how to get any eyeballs on it, etc.

Launched the new site in October, started blogging about 1-2x per month at some point in 2016. I was also posting everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and on the website via the blog posts.

You can see in those 90 days, I got 9 visits from Facebook, 8 from Twitter, 7 from LinkedIn, 7 from others, and 147 directly to my website.

2017

Then in 2017, things are looking up! I am still publishing about once every other week, so about 25 posts per year. The posts themselves were very professional. It was how I was used to writing in college, and so while they had good info, they were probably pretty boring to read, –not gonna lie.

I was still posting everywhere (ie: the ‘be everywhere’ marketing strategy!), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest. Most of my effort was on Pinterest, and of course, the blogs, so Google and Pinterest were sending me the most amount of traffic, as you can see from this graph.

So I would say the blogging efforts were beginning to pay off this year! I was still working my 9-5, on average that was 40-50 hours per week, plus another hour commuting back & forth each day. I had a lot of overtime hours on and off throughout 2017-2019 in my full time job.

My average monthly visits are starting to trend up in 2017, annual visits to my website have increased almost 20x, compared to the last 90 days in 2016.

My bounce rate is high, –something I was paying attention to but honestly had no idea how to fix. 😂 My page view count is high and that felt nice! But if you look at the graph’s numbers, this is still only about 200 visits per month. So, not a ton of traffic yet, but things are getting better. Obviously, the effort that I'm putting into blogging is actually starting to work though!

2018

In 2018, things were getting better and easier. I was getting much faster at writing posts. I was more comfortable with creating the content & coming up with ideas, or at least to find people to ask for inspiration.

My bounce rate went up a little bit more this year, so not super great. Page views and visits also went up though.

Things were generally trending up! You can see that instead of averaging 200 people per month, I'm now averaging 500 to 1,000+ people per month.

Still blogging twice a month, once every other week. Still posting everywhere… Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and the blog on the website. Google is my highest source of visitors next to direct traffic and Pinterest slides into third here.

Those three things together (social media, blogging, Pinterest) are creating the searchable content that is driving people to my website and slowly gaining traffic. Could it be happening FASTER? Yes, if I posted MORE frequently.

Blogging is 100% THE thing that’s working best for me at this point, so I should have quit posting on social media platforms in 2018. I did not have the data to prove that it was worth paying for Buffer/Later App/Planoly, or whatever I was using at the time to schedule those social media posts. I also did not have the time outside of my full time job to mess with creating Facebook posts –and Twitter posts –and LinkedIn posts –and Instagram posts –and Pinterest pins… –and ALL THE THINGS.

I should have stopped. Lesson learned (but not until in 2022). 🫣

Annual visits to my website have increased almost 6x compared to 2017!! I had a lot of freelance work this year and I worked on some big, fun projects. I had mostly clients that were referred to me from humans that I actually knew IRL, but some were actual strangers on the interwebs that found me through my website.

So that made me feel good!

2019

In 2019, I burned myself out.

2018 was looking great and I did all the things. Then in 2019, I was like, “Oh my God, ––I can't anymore.” I had to take some time off of freelance stuff, so I cut way back on client work, cut way back on social media platforms I was active on, and cut out Twitter and LinkedIn completely. I pulled way back on the volume of posting on Pinterest too.

I started blogging once per week at some point this year to kind of replace the effort I’d been putting into social media & refocus that toward what was working (the blog), because I realized at this point, social media was NOT getting me the results that I wanted. And that actually began to pay off over time!

Traffic dipped this year, because I took kind of a lot of time off. 😬 I did not work with very many clients in 2019 because I was straight up exhausted and my husband was sick of me working 24/7.

Overall, I was okay with the fact that traffic dipped this year, because it didn't actually tank., which made me happy.

Google, Direct and Pinterest traffic was still my top three sources of website traffic. Facebook and Other was… frankly, I'm surprised that it was as high as it was because I had cut back on a lot of stuff that year!

Bounce rate went down. Page views went up.

So overall, not terrible for having overworked myself to death. 😂

*screenshot of 2020 website analytics graphs*

2020: Life Stuff, Covid, & Growth

In 2020, lots of things happened. So let's first talk about Life Insights. In February, I took my little sister on a road trip, about 1,000 miles (one way!) to Baltimore, Maryland, where she auditioned for The Voice. That was a super fun trip! So glad I got to do that with her.

But that was before we knew anything about COVID. By the time we came back home, a little later in March, we had been hearing whispers. Between March and April we started to “feel” the results of Covid finally affecting us where we lived, seeing the 6ft rules, masks, toilet paper shortages, whole isles of cleaning supplies completely empty, and the fear began to set in for the general population as we wondered what would happen next, hour by hour. We were wiping down our mail and our groceries with disinfectant, putting filters in our masks and insisting on space at the office. (Apparently this worked, because we didn’t get Covid until 2022!)

Then in April, work at my 9-5 began to slow down drastically and we got cut back to part time hours. Suddenly I had an extra 20 hours in my week to work on my business! 🤯

In May that trend continued. I was still working part time for my 9-5, and part time for my freelance stuff, ––which I was absolutely loving. I dreaded going back to full time in the office.

Then in June, things were still very slow at the 9-5, so the owner asked me if I wanted to take a furlough. (Because I had told him in late 2019, actually, that I had wanted to phase myself out; that I was getting burnt out with that kind of creative work. I wanted to do something different.) And I took it!

So essentially in June, I quit. I had no intention of going back unless I had to, financially. And luckily, that was never the case.

Then in early July, everything turned upside down. My father-in-law died unexpectedly in a tragic accident and that shook up our whole lives. My husband and his brother had to manage & sort through their Dad’s estate, and all of the things that were tied to their dad.

Even the house we lived in at the time actually belonged to their dad. So we decided to move out of that house & into his, so it could be prepped to sell and put it on the market.

We moved out of our house in August/September, and moved into his house for about 6 months while we looked for our own house. Then we used the money from the sale of our house to buy a new house somewhere totally new & fresh, and then we moved across the country, about 1,300 miles away to a place we’d literally never been before we signed the papers. We packed up a 28 foot trailer with all of our stuff and we followed it with our 80 pound hound dog and a 6 or 7 pound orange tabby cat.

Side note: I give that trip 3 stars out of 5. 😂 We survived & so did our furbabies!

I worked full time for myself from June through December this year. Website traffic is going great at this point! I've gotten pretty good at batching and scheduling things out so the frequency is a lot more predictable, despite everything going on in our personal lives this year.

So this was a tumultuous & strange year for a lot of reasons!

BUT –despite all of that– my annual visits to my website increased almost 3x, going up to almost 200%. I was still blogging weekly, and I'd still cut back down on my social media stuff.

The Launch of 'Launch the Damn Thing' in 2020

By August, I had actually started building a template shop (because I had some free time to kill). I intended to call it Launch The Damn Thing®. I wanted to have a separate company for it... which didn't last long.

I decided very quickly that I hated having 2 email lists, 2 Facebook pages, 2 Instagram pages, 2 LinkedIns, 2 websites, … ––way too much for one person to manage when they really could have been one company.

But then I realized I had to drop one of them, which felt scary & terrifying. “Which one do I want to drop?” 😳

Well, the honest truth was that I enjoyed being myself –and felt like I could be myself– more as Launch The Damn Thing® and the face of that business, than I could for Studio 1862. So I decided to kill Studio 1862.

You can see here on the graph, when I launched, Launch the Damn Thing®, and that began to gain traffic, LTDT began to take traffic away from Studio 1862.

I launched LTDT’s website in October-ish, and then when I connected Studio 1862’s domain to the LTDT website, that started pulling my old traffic over to Launch the Damn Thing®.

Eventually traffic to my old domain petered out completely, which was totally fine by me. I felt LIBERATED by that rebrand.

Anyway, this ended up being a good year for audience growth!

For Studio 1862’s website, between January and October/November, a whopping 33,000 people came from Google, 5,500 came directly to LTDT’s site, and just under 1,000 came from Pinterest. Not too shabby! The bounce rate went up again, so… not great. Something I was still paying attention to & trying to figure out.

And then the last part of that year, from when I launched LTDT’s new website, that brought in another 9,000 visits hitting a total of around 50,000 visits! And about 72,000 pageviews for the year. Not too shabby for DIY SEO efforts. 😏😄

2021

And then, in 2021, this is the first full year that Launch the Damn Thing existed, while Studio 1862 did NOT. So, traffic was still being redirected ––technically, it's still redirected because I still have that domain, I just don't use it for anything. And no, you can't have it! 😂

In April 2021, we moved across the country. I had planned a lot of my content to schedule while we were busy traveling and unpacking, so I didn't really see much of a dip there.

From February to August, I had a retainer client sending me weekly work which was perfect for me at the time. It was what I needed to get me off the ground, so to speak, but I could not continue with it past August. It just wasn't financially sustainable to keep that work and continue trying to get web design work, which paid a lot better.

You can see for November, my whole monthly visits for that month was about 11,000 people! So we're finally talking very decent traffic now with 98,000 visits for the whole year and 136,000 page views. Bounce rates are slowly starting to go down a little bit, –maybe.

What I think of when I hear “holy shit” 😂

At some point this year, I started blogging 2x weekly. I had the time earlier in that year to test it out, but that schedule didn't last long. It wasn’t for me and I went back to 1x weekly posts. I’ve been doing once weekly posts ever since!

Direct traffic had increased 2x compared to 2020. Google traffic increased about 2x, too. Social media continued to be about the same, because I really wasn't putting my efforts there. Annual visits went up about 2x, also.

I think the new brand –and my confidence in it– resonated better. It was more relatable because I was being more authentically myself.

Then, …in the fall 2021, I had my first $10k month! I made exactly $10,373.34 in 31 days. That had never happened any time in my entire life until that moment. And actually, I hadn't even realized that it had happened until a month or two later when I was categorizing transactions in QuickBooks. Then my jaw hit the floor when I saw the month-by-month Profit & Loss report, thinking “HOLY SHIT!!”

I could not believe my eyeballs...

But then I was like, “okay, so this works! I can repeat this. I can figure out what happened and I can do it again”. That achievement gave me the confidence to truly KNOW what was possible, for me.

2022

…And then in 2022, things went weird. 🫠🤣 Because of course they would!

These numbers look really great. But I have to tell you, most of it is not real.

In mid 2022, in about June, I installed Termaggedon for my Cookie Consent Tool & Privacy Policy, but I did NOT give it the proper permissions to collect cookies for Squarespace. Since that’s the analytics we're looking at here, that was pretty important. 🫠 Turns out, if it can't collect cookies to analyze traffic on the website, the numbers go bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S! 🍌

So they are real, in some way, but I can't tell you specifically.

At this point too, I was also migrating from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 and in no way was that information even remotely reliable either. It didn't look anything like my insights from Google Search Console. So I was getting three different sets of numbers.

What I'm guessing is that these numbers are all closer to page view counts, than unique visitors or website visits. So maybe 488,000 page views. If memory serves, I was also getting around 10,000 clicks per month from Google searches at this time, and impressions were in the hundreds of thousands, based on my insights in Google Search Console. I’d show ya that too, but it won’t let me go back more than about 16 months.

Anyway, so it looks great, but it’s not 100% real.

So, what changed? Well, years of blogging certainly helped! Every post you write continues to do ‘the work’ for you, and they stack on each other over time, like bricks in a wall building up strength (or in my case, domain authority, backlinks, recognition, and more).

But I also wrote a couple guest blog posts in 2022, and I had several interviews on different podcasts and YouTube channels that were not mine, which exposed me to other people’s audiences, expanding my reach even further.

In February 2022, Paige Brunton also brought me on to help her with Square Secrets™️ & Square Secrets Business™️ monthly student Q&A calls as her co-coach, and I’ve been doing that ever since! So that also introduced me to all of her students as an educator. They are so much fun, and I love having my ear to the ground & hearing all the current questions that those students have when they enroll in her programs. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of really awesome people through those too!

So Google traffic increased roughly 2.5x. Direct traffic increased about 17x. 😂 Again, I don't know how much of that stat is “real” or multiplied because of the cookies issue.

Then other search engines begin sending me traffic too, like DuckDuckGo and Bing. I have literally never tried to do anything with those; never set them up, never optimized or submitted sitemaps to those search engines, etc. So I don't know how that happened, other than naturally, because they’re search engines too.

Social media was no longer even registering on the graph, which I was totally fine with. My bounce rate skyrocketed to a near 100%. Again, I don't even know how real that number is, but since my previous years are high too, it’s a safe bet that it’s in the same neighborhood as past years.

By the way, if you want to know what happened with Termaggedon and how I fixed it, which I did the next year in early 2023, check out these posts next:

Anyway, in 2022 I continued to post blogs 1x weekly, as I still do now.

I also started my YouTube channel in June of 2022 and you can also see where I started getting more traffic after that, which is CRAZY PANTS! Because I started that channel with just 37 subscribers, and that year new videos were NOT coming out every week; their posting schedule was fairly irregular during those last 6 months. So that’s really interesting!

Apparently, introducing another method of searchable content, on a platform that is designed to find ANY valuable content that fits the viewer (vs finding NEW content that fits the viewer) introduced me to a lot of new people who love my teaching style. That's why I've kept doing video content, because it grows my audience & my reach without needing ads, and it turns out I actually enjoy it too. Who would have guessed? An introvert on YouTube; would never have put that together…

2016 - 2020: five years of growth

So, if we combine all of that and look at the total 30,000 foot overview from 2016 to when Studio 1862 ‘died’ a peaceful death in 2020, I got a total of 76,000 visits, and about 114,000 page views. The bounce rate was an average of 82% which is not great. But for DIY effort, no SEO expertise and no sales conversion expertise, it wasn’t terrible.

Then Google, Direct traffic, and Pinterest, –all three related to searchable content– were the bulk of my traffic sources, by far!

Facebook and other social media was negligible at best. If we look at that on the other graph, you can see that visually represented here.

Anyway, so that's the total from 2016 to 2020 for Studio 1862.

*screenshot of 2016-2020 website analytics graphs*

2020 - 2022: three years of growth

Then when I switched over to Launch the Damn Thing®, including the weird year with the Termaggedon issue, we had 595,000 visits over two or three years and 448,000 page views. By the way, that should be a sign; those two things should not be in that order. Visits should not be higher than page views.

And then the bounce rate went way up. So, again, that’s always something I’m keeping my eye on, and troubleshooting to see if I can get it to go down.

In 2023, my average bounce rate across all 12 months was 53%. In 2024, as of posting, it’s just 3.5% (for Jan-April), so it’s improved A LOT. 😃

Google still brought me the most amount of traffic in 2022. In the bar graph, Direct and Google traffic sources were neck and neck with each other. Social media traffic continued to be negligible at best, which is apt since I QUIT posting to social media regularly this year (2022). 😂

*screenshot of 2020-2022 website analytics graphs*

My reflections & some advice

Hopefully now you can see the progress I’ve made, from ZERO traffic to attracting thousands each month.

Every time I switched up something, I saw an increase in traffic. If I started blogging every other month, then to posting 1x monthly, then to posting 2x monthly, then to posting 2x weekly for a while, then back down to once weekly posts, ––but always posting–– the momentum continued to build that whole time.

“Real footage” of me thinking about boosting a Facebook or Instagram post. 😂 (J/K)

I was consistent, disciplined, persistent, and it has paid off big time!

Because in all those years, I’ve never had to run a single ad anywhere, –if you don’t count boosting a random post or two on Facebook or Instagram 6+ years ago wondering what that feature could do to grow my profiles. 😂🤦🏼‍♀️

All my effort paid off though, because for all the years I was practicing what I’m good at NOW: creating content people enjoy consuming and that answers questions people are actually searching for answers to. Eventually, over time, this is what helped my amazing clients find me on the interwebs, without ads, without a truly heavy social media presence or impressive follower counts, without networking, without cold pitching, ––blogging (content marketing) was my ONLY real strategy.

It grew my audience, expanded my reach, grew my business, helped clients find me, and now it’s allowed me start teaching what I’ve learned to other aspiring designers in their first baby steps.

“What if you're not interested in teaching other designers?”

On last week's post, I got a comment (on the YouTube video) with a really good question:

That's okay! It's totally fine. I wouldn’t worry about that, because you're not going to start a new blog, podcast, or YouTube channel with an audience of designers ready to learn from you right out of the gate! Naturally, over time, you may attract those people, but in the beginning you’ll only attract people that are just a couple steps behind you with those more beginner-level questions, searching for beginner-level answers.

You're not going to attract the experts or people who are more experts than you are, most likely. Most likely, for you as a newbie yourself, you’ll create content around what YOU know, and that will attract the people who don’t know what you know, however limited that range is when you first get started. That’s basically your potential clients. 😉

So, I wouldn't worry too much about who you're actually teaching at the beginning, because the point is, you're teaching –period; end of story. The reason why they come to you doesn't matter as much in the beginning, and you can hone that more strategically, later.

Generally, if you create content that is answering questions they are actually looking for, you can develop this kind of progression too; just hopefully a lot faster than I did! 😂

SEO Tips & Tools for Accelerating Your Growth

If you want to increase this speed, then I recommend you go to the SEOSpace* website, then look in the top navigation, under the Resources menu, and click on Free Live Webinars. Henry does a new free (recorded) workshop several times a year, on topics like:

Go check out his free workshops. Don't worry; they're pitch free! He’s not there to sell you anything, just to help more people understand SEO.

If you then want to use SEOSpace’s tool to work on your own Squarespace website’s SEO, then use my SEOSpace affiliate link to sign up* for any plan, and it’ll blow your mind! It's literally like having an SEO expert in your back pocket, but for like $15 bucks a month.

I mean… ya can’t beat that, honestly! It's the most affordable possible SEO option out there, that’s THIS robust and it only works for Squarespace users. It was designed & developed specifically for Squarespace websites, only. You can't go wrong with it.

And no, this post is not sponsored. I just really fucking love that tool! Big fan. 😂 And Henry’s awesome too; he really does WANT you to get better at SEO for yourself.

I hope that was helpful for you to be able to *see real numbers ––*real-ish, minus the Termaggedon Cookies shit–– to see the real progression, and how this ‘content marketing thing’ can actually work.

Hopefully this gives you some optimism and ideas for what YOU can achieve in your own business!

How blogging grew my audience & business (see my actual website analytics!)

The Strategy Behind Content Creation

Diving Into the Analytics

2016

2017

2018