It’s been awhile, friends. I hope you’re doing well! I haven’t been reading which means I have been leaning into other hobbies and not creating content this year… but I’ve missed you! This post has been in drafts for literally months and I’ve finally summoned the courage to post.
It’s no secret that Blogging Statistics are a deeply kept secret, cloaked in mystery. We are left comparing our own success with what we think other blogs are doing, and I think a lot of new book bloggers give up as a result. It’s been a few years but I’ve decided to bring back the Stats Transparency Post.
2022 Stats Transparency was made available to Reader Voracious patrons early with a more in-depth analysis! Patrons support me and receive early post access, the ability to make requests, and more perks for as little as $2 a month!
This post is full of tables and graphs as I share the insight I’ve gleaned from my statistics (and year-over-year trends). This post isn’t meant to be a “How to Grow Your Blog” guide, but my goal is to promote open discussion about statistics. Let’s get to the data! 📊
Why Stats Transparency?
I think it is important to normalize talking about statistics within our blogging niche, as well as remove the stigma surrounding sharing statistics, and agree with what Vicky says in her 2018 post that initially inspired me:
But ultimately, I believe that the book community is a community in need of a lot more transparency. For authors and publishers, I know this is a lot more difficult, but for bloggers–we control our platforms. Not anyone else. In the end, my blog is my blog and I can give insight to other bloggers by sharing this information (even if it feels so awkward).
Briana @ Pages Unbound does a biennial survey to demystify “average” book blog stats and consistently 50% of respondents report 50 views or less a day on average. Check out 2022’s results and stay tuned for the next survey in 2024.
Reader Voracious’ growth isn’t typical: I know how very fortunate I am to have the platform that I do and how anomalous it is within the community. The reason that I decided to not share my statistics on the blog for the past 3 years is I didn’t want to make anyone feel bad and don’t want it to look like I’m bragging. I’m incredibly nervous to share but I think there are some lessons that can be learned if you want to try to grow your blog.
Reader Voracious Statistics for 2022
Reader Voracious turned five years old back in March (omg!) and had it’s best year yet in 2022!
Posts
Visitors
Views
We’re six months into 2023 and I still cannot believe that Reader Voracious almost had 100,000 views in 2022. This is in large part to my Book Blogging Spreadsheet Template (December and January spikes) and a number of my posts doing very well via search: 26 of my top 75 posts viewed in 2022 were published last year, the rest are older content and reviews!
📊 Need help tracking your statistics? Download the FREE Ultimate Book Blogger / Reader Spreadsheet Template!
Reader Voracious Statistics Year Over Year
One of the valuable insights comes from the statistics year over year. You are able to see trends easier with more data points, and ultimately that is why I decided to share my statistics publicly. Reader Voracious went self-hosted in June of 2019 and the below screenshot reflects the view breakdown since then.
Reader Voracious had 21,507 views in 2018 and 24,859 views in 2019 prior to being self-hosted. Over the last five years, I’ve decreased my posting frequency (245 posts in my first year!) and continued to see increased views each year.
Where my statistics get especially interesting is with followers: Reader Voracious experienced explosive growth in its first two years in large part thanks to blog hopping and to a smaller extent on Twitter. I blog hopped daily to dozens of blogs prior to 2020 but haven’t had the bandwidth, which has a direct impact on meeting new bloggers and engagement.
🎉 Related Post: Evergreen Content and Book Bloggers. Learn why book reviews consistently perform better months and years after publication.
Blogging Changes Since 2018
If you read my 2018 Stats Transparency post, you’ve probably noticed a few changes to not only my format but also the types of information that I track now. Engagement across post types or posting days isn’t a metric I track anymore because the majority of traffic comes from search engines, skewing engagement rates: I mostly get comments when I blog hop and as I mentioned, I no longer have the bandwidth to hop being those who leave comments.
- I no longer have the capacity to blog hop frequently, which was a large driver of comments on my blog.
- As such, most of Reader Voracious’ traffic is via Search Engines since becoming self-hosted. Visitors from search results rarely engage with posts like the very active and supportive community of book bloggers, and quite frankly the whiplash from the high post view counts and low engagements were demoralizing.
- 73.16% of last year’s traffic came from Search Engines and 66% of the Top 75 posts were published prior to 2022.
Ultimately my goal has always been to gather data that helps inform my content creation decisions because no one likes to feel like they are talking into the void. A year of intense data gathering helped me analyze trends for my audience and implement a content strategy with those trends in mind and now I can spend my spoons working on creation!
📊 Need help with SEO? Check out my Free Guides in the SEO Basics series!
One thing that I want to specially highlight is how amazing SEO is for book bloggers. Book reviews, lists, and discussions continue to receive traction months and years after initial publication. Social Media posts like Instagram and BookTok aren’t indexed by search engines, so blog posts continue to receive traffic if optimized well.
💡 Related Post: Why Book Blogs Are Relevant & Valuable Marketing Tools
Additional Reading
Before wrapping up, I’d like to highlight other book bloggers who share their blogging statistics with their own Stats Transparency posts. If you’ve got one of your own please let me know so I can check it out and add it here!
- Soph @ Bookwyrming Thoughts: 2022 Book Blogging Stats Transparency
- Jenna @ Failing Letters: Let’s Talk About Stats: Views, Comments, Likes & Referrers [Discussion]
- Annemieke @ A Dance With Books: Statistics – Let’s Talk About Those Pesky Numbers
- Kristi @ Confessions of a YA Reader posted her monthly stats for years
- Sumedha @ The Wordy Habitat: My 2022 Blog Statistics || Analysis, Comparison, and Insights
Final Thoughts & Lessons
Reader Voracious has experienced a lot of growth since its inception in 2018 and I’m so proud of and thankful for this community of readers. SEO continues to ensure that blog views grow year over year — even as the number of posts decrease each year — but blog followers have been largely stagnant since I stopped actively blog hopping.
Blog hopping is still one of the best ways to grow, gain a community, and interact with other bookish creators, especially considering social media platform changes that make it near impossible to promote your content. *cough * Musk’s Twitter *cough*
My goal is to get back into the swing of things with blog hopping and a posting rhythm because I miss the conversations! Thank you for being here and please drop in the comments to say hello, share your recent post, and ask any questions you might have.
💖 If you like the work that I do here at Reader Voracious, consider fueling my pumpkin spice latte and black tie addiction by buying me a ko-fi or joining my Patreon! ☕
Let’s Chat!
Thank you for being here and please drop in the comments to say hello, share your recent post, and ask any questions you might have.
This post is brought to you by the Reader Voracious patrons. Please take a moment to check out their content!
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Kal this is such an excellent post and it’s so good to read from you again 🥰 I loved seeing this deep dive into statistics, always so interesting to learn more about it. I’m in a bit of the same situation as you, in that I haven’t blog-hopped regularly and frequently in the past few months… or year, even. My engagement has dropped because of that, but, like you, my views have increased thanks to SEO. I miss the conversations with people, but I also know my life isn’t the same and I can’t – and also don’t have the energy or time to spend entire evenings blog hopping, as I used to.
Anyway! I’m ranting here, all of this to say: thank you for sharing this with all transparency, and it’s SO nice to read from you again. Can’t wait to read all of your blog posts. Sending you lots of love <3 <3
🥰🥰 Thank you for the lovely comment, Marie! Good to know that I’m not the only one in a similar boat – especially since I feel a LOT of guilt about not blog hopping these days, but I just can’t. My middle ground is of course replying and hopping via my blog comments (very late but whatever haha) so I still get the conversations with people.
I hope to be more consistent moving forward on the blog, maybe at least once a month for the time being? How shocked 2018 me would be with her posting 5x a week and daily blog hopping. Love you lots and hope you are well!!!
Love this post! I completely agree that seeing stats with high view count and low comments is demoralising but something is better than nothing? I have noticed that whenever traffic from search engines is low, I get more engagement even though I did nothing to get that engagement like blog hop. It may be a coincidence or maybe I notice it only then? Who knows. (btw I did post my 2022 stats as well!)
Ahhh, belated nice to see you, Sumedha! I agree that high views & low comments is definitely better than nothing (and I am so blessed). Interesting that you see engagement with search traffic, I don’t at all! And I’ll check out your post now & link it xoxo
Loved seeing you on my feed again 🥰 I always appreciate some insight into stats, though I usually prefer not to look too much into my own 😅 I do like stats though and it’s interesting to look at the data!
I hate what Twitter has become, now it won’t even automatically share my posts on Twitter, so I have to do it manually and pray I don’t forget 😢
It’s good to be back and lovely to see you, Caro! I know what you mean… I don’t pay too much mind to my stats these days, it took quite awhile to pull and analyze this data for the post.
Ugh, TWITTER. I miss what it used to be. Freaking trash… and it’s not even really worth sharing there since links are suppressed by the algorithm.
This is such a good post, I really should do one going over my own stats. It’s also nice to show how even though everyone claims blogging is dead, we still get a decent amount of views each month. Lovely to see a post from you again Kal! Hope all is well
Thank you and I’d love to see you post something similar! You’re absolutely right: blogging isn’t dead at all, if anything it is evolving. My search results show the lasting value of blogs because they get traffic long after the original post date.
Ah welcome back kalkal and those stats are amazing. I forget to check my stats but every so often I’ll take a peek because I’m curious just to see how things are performing etc. Particularly since I don’t currently promote my posts on social media like I used to nor do I blog hop as often I did prior to my hiatus in 2021.
Thank you Cloclo, it’s good to be back! I can’t help but peek at mine whenever I go to my dashboard since they are right there, but I def had to do so much data analysis for this because I don’t really keep track in a meaningful way anymore haha
And not like your post promotion will go anywhere these days, it’s better to not bother lol. I MISS TWITTER OF 2018!
Welcome back, Kal! Glad to hear that you were able to focus on other hobbies these past months. It’s always nice to switch things up! I love the idea behind this post and others should take note and understand what the statistics mean and why they blog in the first place. Great post! 😀
Thank you Lashaan, it’s good to be back! It’s been so much fun playing video games and going on hikes, but I definitely missed the book community.
Welcome back! ♥ And look at those stats, those are fantastic! I try not to look at my stats too often, tbh. 😅 They went downhill a bit during the pandemic and have never quite gotten back to normal, which I know is definitely influenced by my lack of blog hopping and by the fact that I don’t do Top Ten Tuesday much anymore (which was always a HUGE driving force in my engagement historically).
Thank you Destiny, it’s great to be back AND to see you! I feel you on the pandemic dip, that’s when I noticed the dropoff of engagement that’s largely been fed by my infrequent posting schedule and non-hopping. I think a lot of us bloggers got tired then and at least for me, I never got back into the hopping habit. My views are high but I don’t really care about that… and it’s truly from like 3 or 4 posts that do stupidly well via search.
This is such an informative post here. I will be transparent I barely pay attention to my numbers. Because for me it’s about the community and building connections and relationships with others and not really my blog statistics. But this is something I should think about doing and being transparent on. I honestly don’t feel uncomfortable, it’s just not something I think about if I am being honest. I might check my stats maybe once every 6 months haha.
I truly appreciate you sharing this post and being so transparent on it. Hope you have a wonderful week! 🙂
I don’t really pay much attention to my stats either, my obsession really ended after the first year when I was looking to use data to drive my content planning. But I would be lying if I didn’t see them on my dashboard every time I log in to write a post or reply to comments. I care much more about the connection and community too, and my analytical brain can’t help but draw conclusions!
Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and share your thoughts! Happy July!
This is interesting information and good food for thought. I have a small group of fellow bloggers that I interact with regularly. Any others who have taken the time to read my blog and show interest will gain my support for follow back. I found that I was investing too much time in commenting on others blogs without getting a reciprocal comment back so I’ve cut back on my blog hopping. It’s a hobby to me and not a source of income.
I have a very similar process with blogs that I follow! I used to go through my reader and leave comments on anything that was of interest, but that lasted maybe a year or so. Nowadays, I comment back and occasionally hop outside of that when posts on social media pique my interest. For me personally, I feel like I don’t make enough time for the comment-hopping so I want to be a bit more active in that regard. The community and conversations are my favorite part, and since Twitter isn’t giving me that anymore I should put more effort in the community here… within reason. Thanks so much for reading!
Hm… yesterday I suddenly had a huge jump in visits… I wonder if your tagging me in this post as a patron had anything to do with it?
Yay for an increase in views, awesome if it happened to come from here. Thanks as always for your support! xoxo
I agree that blog hopping is still the best way to gain more on all areas. I cannot quite be bothered with SEO (haha sorry).
I did my own stats post earlier this year: https://adancewithbooks.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/a-dance-with-books-statistics-lets-talk-about-those-pesky-numbers/
No need to apologize for not bothering with SEO, it is a lot of work if you dive deep into it! I really don’t do anything other than keyword it using a plugin myself.
Thanks for also doing a post on your stats – I added it to the post! And yes, blog hopping truly is what drives engagement and I am making an effort to get back into it a bit again. Thanks for stopping by!
Holy crap! Your stats are amazing! Nice to see you back. I was honestly just thinking about you the other day wondering if I’ve missed posts.
Aww… thank you — search engine traffic is something else lol. It’s good to see you, Kristi! (And my heart swells that you missed me!)
I used to be a book bloggers before venturing into the exciting world of editing (Thanks for creating the spreadsheet, it was a lifesaver, Kal!).
It always surprised me how my old book reviews continued to get views years after posting them.
I still blog, but The BG Blog is now aimed at writers as apposed to readers. You’ll be pleased to know that I still check my stats monthly, thanks to the habits I formed when completing your spreadsheet. Lol!
Thank you for your lovely comment, and it’s great to hear the spreadsheet template has served you well! Book Reviews truly are underrated by literally everyone because they don’t get a lot of engagement or views when originally posted, but a book review has value so long as that book is in print (and probably after).