2016 has been and gone and, for many people, it has not been the greatest of years to date (from their opinions). Regardless of this, it is a good idea, like New Year resolutions, to look back at the year and see what we have learnt and how we can improve ourselves for 2017. With this in mind, here are the two main things I learnt in 2016 from blogging which could become paramount to success for blogging in 2017.
 
 

#1 Gaining a Loyal Audience is Becoming More Difficult

If you have read the numerous articles online about how to become a better blogger, you will have noticed the constant point that successful bloggers connect with their audience, almost like a friend-to-friend level. I guess why this is important is similar to why it is important for YouTubers to connect with their audience – many people don’t watch videos for the content on YouTube now but watch for the people inside the video and their personalities – the same, to some extent, applies to blogging too.
However, the problem I found is that connecting with an audience is definately becoming harder. The man reason I feel this is the case is because of technology improving – everything is becoming easier for web users to get information about at a click of a button, or even a quick question to appliances such as Amazon Echo or Google Home. People do not care more about personalities online but more about getting information quickly and convieniant.
 
 

#2 Pageviews are not that Important

Some people will disagree with me on this. However, what I have found is becoming increasingly more important are the visits instead of pageviews. This is because, at the end of the day, pageviews come from visits. Therefore, surely the most important statistic out of the two is the originator: the visit?
As well as this, take this example:

• Website 1 gets lots of visits (100,000/month) and has a pages per visit of 1.18, meaning the pageviews per month is 118,000.
• Website 2 gets less visits at 30,000/month. However, their pages per visit is much higher, at 4.87. This results in the pageviews per month at 146,100.

Which website, from this, is more successful? Yes, website 2 has more pageviews, but how much easily for website 2 is it to gain extra traffic? It appears they have a great theme and content to keep web users on their website. However, the main way website 2 would gain extra traffic would be through organic search engine traffic, which is a long process to say the least.
Compare this to website 1, it already has the traffic from search engines (presuming the fact the majority of traffic to websites come from search engines). Therefore, the hard work, to some extent, has already been done – improving the pages per visit is a much easier task than gaining more organic traffic, especially from the fact it is easy to test. For this reason, I would deem website 1 as more successful since the foundations for the traffic are already concreted in. This brings out the point that visits, from my perspective, are more important than pageviews and should be prioritised more by bloggers.