I enjoy looking back at month end to figure out what people are reading so better guide my content and my writing, since this is really YOUR blog.

November was the second busiest month in the history of Andy’s Travel Blog! The past two months have been absolutely crazy.  40% of the traffic in the 4-year history of this blog has come in the past two months!

I hope the spike in traffic is due to massive improvements in the quality of my posts, but I’ve also been posting much more frequently (a trend I hope to continue), which inevitably helps.

Top Posts from November

So I started doing some flight deal posts in November and the response was massive, in fact the top four posts in November were flight deal posts.  I guess it also helped that there were some pretty amazing deals in November, but still.  There are quite a few blogs that post flight deals and I had shied away from it, usually because it takes a bit of education to understand some of the limitations around the deals and I never want to confuse my readers.  That said, those posts brought in a massive number of readers last month, many of whom stuck around and visited some other pages, so I’ve thought that it might be time to make deal posts a regular part of the blog.  I’d love your feedback in the poll below:

Thanks for your responses, here are the top non-deal posts from November!

1. Bose QC35 Headphones Review
2. United Inconveniences Everyone with new Basic Economy fares
3. Be Thankful, Right Now is the Best Time to Travel in History
4. How to Use a Tilt Shift Lens
5. Casey Neistat Stopped Vlogging
6. 4 Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Traveler
7. Incredible Pictures of Iceland and a Free Video Series about how to find them!
8. How to Find My Favorite Photography Spot in Hong Kong
9. Yes, that guy who wrote the Singapore Airlines viral story plagiarized me
10. 5 Pictures: My Favorites from New York City

Most of these were as expected, over the years I’ve been able to estimate which articles will do well and which will not fairly accurately.  I have some older articles that catch quite a few hits from Google, my post on how to purchase tickets for Machu Picchu being the most popular.  While it never gets into the Top 10, it’s consistently in the Top 15, mainly due to great interaction in the comments from my good buddy Lyle Walker.

Where my traffic came from in November

Traffic Sources

• 55% from Flipboard, a personalized news aggregator
• 25% visited my site directly
• 10% came from search results in Google
• 4% from BoardingArea.com and Prior2Boarding.com
• 1% from Facebook

The other 5% came from a variety of other sources but none were enough to warrant mentioning.  Flipboard is primarily a mobile interface, which is why you may have noticed my articles being a bit shorter lately (mobile readers usually don’t stay on a page as long).  I want to increase my Google search results so I’ll be doing some SEO things in the background to improve those results.

Device Type

• 73% visited from a mobile device
• 15% visited from a tablet
• Only 12% visited from a desktop

As I’m looking for ways to improve the user experience on the blog it’s astonishing to me how little of my traffic comes from a desktop computer.  I’m trying to make the mobile version of the site a little easier to navigate and I guess the data tells me that should be first priority over the desktop site.

Location

The top 10 countries where my visitors read from have stayed relatively consistent over the years, only two surprises this month:

• United States – 70%
• Canada – 6%
• Australia – 3%
• United Kingdom – 2.87%
• Singapore – 1.13%
• India – <1%
• Hong Kong – <1%
• Germany – <1%
• Malaysia – <1%
• Philippines – <1%

I don’t ever recall seeing much traffic from the Philippines and traffic from India comes and goes.  Obviously my US readers are my bread and butter but it’s important to remember that I have a global audience as well.  Singapore did as well as it did because I posted a recap of the plagiarism incident from a few years ago when I saw that someone plagiarized him on imgur.

Expectations for December

December is typically a slow month for bloggers.  I was the exception to that last December, mainly because I was featured on BoardingArea.com and posted a bunch of amazing reviews from my First Class Trip Around the World.  I don’t have any amazing trips in my back pocket to write about this December, so I’m not expecting as big of a month as I had last year.  I’m looking to write a bit more about photography for beginners and have started working on The Official Andy’s Travel Blog Introductory Guide to Travel Photography (yeah yeah I know the title needs some work).  It’s going to be an ebook and I’m not sure when I’m going to release it, but I’ll be looking for some feedback along the way so please let me know if there’s any topics which you would like me to cover!

The Obligatory Thank You

Every month I’m grateful for every one of you who stops by.  I hope you continue to find valuable, informative, and entertaining content when you visit the blog, and, as always, please let me know what I can do to help!