Who Will Read Your Blog? You'd Be Surprised!
I recently added two site counters and some code for Google Analytics to this blog. Before I added these, I wondered whether anybody ever read this blog. I assumed it was pretty obscure, and it is. I don't get a lot of traffic, but now, thanks to the site counters and Google Analytics, I know that people do read it and I even know how they find it. I no longer write something and then helplessly wonder whether anybody will ever read it. The fascinating thing to me are the searches that lead people to this blog.
For example, someone searched the words "Veronica Belmont precocious." I've never called Veronica Belmont precocious. However, I have mentioned Veronica Belmont and I called Nancy Drew "precocious." So, if you search these words in Google, my blog comes up as the fourth item. Whoulda thunk it? Someone else searched for the exact phrase "tips for living in Florida" and up came this blog as item number two of two. I'm actually surprised that searching for the exact phrase "tips for living in Florida" only produces two items. One of the first referring pages that showed up on the counter was someone from the United Kingdom searching for brief reviews of Spiderman 3. So somebody from England read my review of Spiderman 3. Pretty cool!
The random ways that people find my blog are amazing. Of course, some of the randomness is the result of the totally unfocused idiosyncratic nature of this blog. I write this blog primarily for my own amusement and to learn about blogging. Now I have a greater understanding of what professional bloggers mean when they talk about the key search terms that lead people to their blogs. I didn't understand exactly how they knew this until I installed the site counters and discovered what is tracked and that you can see the search phrases people used and the search page they viewed. This is pretty powerful information if you're trying to attract people to your site or buying ads via Adwords. In fact, I'm going to ask the webmaster of my office web page to add Google Analytics to my professional website.
By the way, as I was typing this, someone came to my blog because they searched for "Floridian spider" on the Dell search page. "Floridian spider"? Whoulda thunk!?
You are exactly right, it is amazing how people find our blogs. I recently received an update on my site traffic and was suprised how many people had been recently visiting my site. It also makes me think twice about my postings, because I would actually like to be interesting or entertaining to someone who stumbles on to my page. Keep up the great work. Maybe someday we wont have to work because of all the traffic we get!
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