May 2022 Blog Analytics Recap | Portly Passengers

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May was the first full month of changing focuses and I started to devote every possible moment I had to our blog. If I said it was a smooth transition, I would be lying. There are a lot of personal habits that have to change when it comes to focusing my time. But as I slowly transition into better habits for our blog, I know the payoff will be a huge reward.

The goals for May 2022:

Launch our lead generation
Start a new lead generation
Publish 3 blog posts (1 more than April)
Complete a competitor analysis

Results for May 2022

Launching Our Lead Generation

When it comes to launching a lead generation opportunity the biggest question many new bloggers, myself included, have asked is “what kind of lead generation can I provide?”.

With so many opportunities available online it really starts to feel overwhelming on how you can start to incorporate your own thoughts into the offerings.

For me, I started with 2 things:

Adding popups to our most popular pages
Taking the content of our most popular page and turning it into a PDF

Popups are the quickest way to start growing your email database because there is not much work that goes into the process. This was an obvious answer of the many years of missed opportunities on our blog.

The second option of building a PDF was a little more difficult.

Because our top pages of content are slowly deranking within Google, I knew that I needed to provide something new and fresh on similar content. However, I knew I didn’t want to waste any additional time on this content.

So I took the content I currently had and changed it into a PDF.

The goal for this was mainly to get used to the process of my email platforms dashboard, but over time as our blog posts slowly derank our landing page will start to rank higher giving us evergreen opportunities to grow our email database.

By doing these two things I was able to grow our email leads by over 300% in May compared to April.

This was a huge accomplishment for someone who has avoided email marketing on our blog for 4 years!

Results from starting our lead generation strategy

Next steps:

First, I have to actually start building a newsletter. I decided that the end of the month is the best option for us at the current moment. This will make it easier to continue content development for the rest of the month.

While I know many bloggers use RSS feeds, I opted out of this due to the fact that we are all very much digitally fatigued.

When it comes to our email leads I know that each month with wax and wane based on users to our website and the content we are developing. With that, I’ve come up with a content strategy to help promote our next lead generation opportunity.

Start A New Lead Generation

Lead generation is a continual process. Content gets old, new things become available or maybe you learned something new about your audience. Either way, having a process for lead generation allows us to continue to grow our blog database.

The hardest part was realizing I wanted/needed to take the blog in a whole new direction. Airline travel is dominated by some pretty big players, and while our blog was one of the first to actually dive into the issue of flying while plus-size, many influencers are now addressing the topic as well.

So because we aren’t planning on flying anywhere soon, the shift became clear. This meant starting a lead generation project around what we are currently doing the most of, Road Trips!

With all this information in my back pocket, I was able to start planning out a content strategy around the lead generation project as well as our travel schedule. This allows for less stress and the ability to repurpose our content on other platforms when needed.

Publish 3 Blog Posts

In the past, we have just posted whenever we feel like it. Some weeks would have 2 posts or maybe 4 while others would be the beginning of a week-long hiatus from posting content.

This isn’t very intuitive if you are trying to make a blog into a business. However, this was also a habit I needed to break, which habits are horrible to break!

So we are starting small. In April we aimed to post 3 but only finished with 2, so I decided to aim for 3 again and we accomplished it!

Woot, woot!

This allowed me to start seeing more clarity on what I wanted to talk about vs what our audience is looking for. Because travel is really starting to take off due to restrictions being lifted, I knew that people would soon start looking for inspiration. This is where my content focus really started to shift.

We will just have to wait and see the long-term benefits or harm this did for our blog.

Competitor Analysis

Not everything I do for the blog is going to be public facing. As a blogger, there are many & I mean many behind the scene projects that need to happen for us to advance ourselves.

Competitive analysis does just that.

By looking at our competitors I was able to see opportunities for our own growth as influencers. The best part is that the competitor analysis also gave both myself and Peter the inspiration we needed to keep going.

Here is what we learned:

We need to work on our social media
We need to improve our travel content
Collaborations should be a priority
Our audience wants to feel related too

How we are using competitive analysis for the future greatly impacts our content strategy.

We hope to start incorporating video into our brand shortly but do not have a set date or plan for this yet. However, we are continuing to work on growing our social media platforms the most.

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