A Year in Review 2015: Top 5 posts and referrers- Lulu & Celeste

yearinreview

I decided it would be fun to put together a little “year in review” for 2015 and look at the top 5 posts and referrers for the past year.

I have a tiny blog. I started getting a little more serious about blogging in April or so, instead of simply using it as a means to showcase the pattern testing I had been doing. I reached out to different Canadian pattern designers and hosted a blog tour of their patterns in June. I was super blown away when many of them said yes (the others just didn’t respond, that’s ok though). It was so much fun and I’m trying to decide if I should host another this year. After the tour I also started working on more tutorials that I plan to be posting in the next few weeks.

Here are the stats for 2015:

Total number of page views: 41,662

Total number of users: 10,828 (that’s pretty incredible to me, nearly 11,000 different people looked at my blog this year.)

I wrote 120 blog posts in 2015! Here I was thinking I hadn’t posted much, when really, I had on average a new post every three days.

My favourite posts of 2015:

Besides the posts that made it into the Top 10 most viewed category, these are ~~three~~ four of my favourite posts that I wrote last year:

Kitty Cat Hair Clip tutorial that I wrote for Rebel & Malice’s 12 Days of 1 Hour Projects tour. I like it because it’s so cute! I’ll be “bringing the post home” sometime in the Spring.
The interview post with Stephanie of Swoodson Says. She was the first interviewee in my new series of interviews. A guinea pig of sorts.
My entry for the Sew the Show: Six Degrees of Separation blog tour. I really love how my top turned out, and I love that I was able to reinterpret an animated movie character’s outfit into an everyday top for Little Miss V.
I really love the Jackolope tee I made for Miss V, I made a boy shirt so girly and got over my fear of Free Motion Applique all in one shot!

Top 5 Referrers:

The referrers are outside websites that linked to one of my posts. Technically, the sites that referred the most were Facebook and my old Blogger blog (posts from my old Blogger blog automatically switch to the WordPress post if you happen to come across an old link on someone else’s blog or through Pinterest). But for this I’ve eliminated them from the ranking (especially since I can’t see exactly where the Facebook referrals are coming from, it just says Facebook).

Hugs Are Fun. Most of the referrals are linking from her busy bag post to mine.
Patchwork Posse. I did a few guest posts on their blog over the summer and all of the posts I did resulted in some referral traffic to my site with most of the hits coming from my Quick Tips for Sewing with Felt guest post. I will be reposting an updated tip post on my own blog in a few days.
Pinterest. The post of mine that is pinned and repinned the most and brings the most clicks to my site from there is this one for the doll’s skirt tutorial.
Swoodson Says. A lot of posts of hers have resulted in visits from her blog to mine (we’ve done lots of blog tours together) but the one that brought the most hits was the Virtual Busy Bag swap she hosted.
Sprouting JubeJube. Again, she’s participated in lots of blog tours that I’ve also participated in so there were lots of hits coming from her blog. However, the one that brought the most traffic over to my blog was her tour post featuring her Victory Patterns make.

Also in the top 10 were The Giveaway Roundup and Sew Mama Sew because of the giveaways I took part in; and Craft Gossip and Craftsy because of free tutorials on my blog.