Business report gathering around table to review

Written by Jason Montoya. Posted in Blogging.

Reviewing The Top Performing Blog Posts Via Organic Traffic

With my escalating blogging goal (to reach 400 posts by year's end) nearby, I've surveyed the archives to discover which articles are performing well with the search engines.

My first high-performing blog post took about ten months to gain traction, so I suspect the landscape will change greatly over the next year as the over 200 articles I've written in the previous fourteen months will find their place on the search engines. To maximize my existing library, I'll also need to go back to many of the articles not performing and complete focused updates to get them on track.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a close eye on the break-out pages gaining momentum and listed below.

Top 5 Performing Blog Posts Via The Search Engines

Over the past thirty days, what are the top 5 performing blog posts (outside the home page)? Here are the pages that are driving the traffic surge on my website, starting with an unexpected super performer.

Super Performers - 68% Of Search Traffic

These two articles drive almost 70% of all traffic right now!

48% of Search Traffic | The End Hot Sauce Challenge: Surprisingly, my top search-trafficked blog is me sharing my journey to eating one of the hottest sauces around (The End). This article, which includes a video of me and four other guys (including the friend who bought me the hot sauce) eating The End hot sauce, quickly moved up the search engines. While the traffic increase is exciting and gives me an opportunity to experiment with SEO ideas, the downside is how little the content has to do with my focus on personal, and small business growth.
20% of Search Traffic | Three Ways To Respond To An Offer Of Help: This short but powerful little article continues to drive a large volume of search traffic. Perfectly aligned with this blog's objectives, I'm glad to see how many visitors this inspiring story is able to encourage.

Top Performers - 14% of Search Traffic

6% of Search Traffic | Three Problems With The Last Jedi Backlash & How We Become Better Thinkers: Out of the three articles in The Last Jedi Betterment blog series, this one has risen to the top of the search engines. It's exciting because of how much work was involved in creating it, and how it aligns with the goals of my blogging. I'm hoping its rise will help elevate the other two articles.
6% of Search Traffic | How To Become A Movie Extra In Atlanta Georgia: Another win was this post I created sharing how to become an extra here in the city of Atlanta. I've also had the opportunity to share the link with friends interested in the experience. While it's not closely aligned with my blogging goal, it does provide a way to make some extra income for up-and-coming freelancers.
2% of Search Traffic | The Funny Story of How I Started Eating Spicy Food: Interesting that two of my top-performing articles revolve around spicy food! Apparently, people like searching for funny stories involving spicy peppers.

5 Up And Coming Blog Articles

The following blogs are getting clicks from the search engine, and look to be potential ongoing drivers of search traffic. Three are older articles with two being published within the last twelve months.

How I Organize & Backup My Computer Files And Folders: When it comes to growth, being organized is key, and our folders and files on the computer are no exception. This article explores the method and tools I use to keep files organized, archived, and accessible.
What If Life Is Meaningless And Your Legacy Is Worthless? It's awesome to see one of my favorite articles gaining traction. I also believe this blog post is super important in the message and encouragement it delivers.
The Worm Story: An artifact from my childhood and the Island Story, this little narrative shares how a system shock leads to good things.
The 'Splinter Effect': Wounds, Pain & Healing: This article has always gotten clicks from search engines since it was published in 2014. I suspect people may be clicking on it for the literal intent to remove a splinter, so I'm concerned the figurative content may not be relevant.
How Faith In God Changed Ms. Okezie's Business and Transformed Her Life: A guest post by a friend who shares her story of trusting God through challenging times, has consistently found an audience with search engine users.

And These Articles Were Close Behind

Organic Traffic Over Time

There was an uptick in January 2017. After the weekday blogging challenge concluded at the end of 2017, the organic traffic dramatically picked up speed as I continued publishing new content throughout this year. With my blogging initiative near the 400 total library goal and an impending break to my publishing schedule, I'm curious to know how much this will spike upward before it plateaus.

My Projected Search Traffic Through 2019

Projected Future Organic Traffic

It's always risky to predict the future, but I'm gonna go ahead and try! Based on the average organic traffic growth, I’ve mapped out how I expect traffic to grow over the next few years. And by the end of next year, I predict I'll be generating around eight thousand visitors from the search engines per month. If that happened, it would be exciting and a home run. But, this projection seems high and improbable. Plus I've yet to decide my publishing schedule for 2019, so I'm not sure how that may affect this.

Regardless of how accurate or not this is, I'll have something to compare the actual data with as 2019 unfolds.

Wrapping Up

The leading indicators are in, and the movement is upward and forward. While the volume will need to dramatically increase for this blog to generate any amount of meaningful income, it does seem that the seeds are sprouting and the potential for this to happen is in the cards.

The unknown of how this unfolds is exciting because right now, my income is not reliant on blogging. So, for the foreseeable future, freelancing will remain my primary focus.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)