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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Know Your Audience

Having recently quit my office job, I am devoting most of my time to applying for jobs and my most recent copyediting client.

And obsessively checking my stats on here. Not many of them, but they're there, and the statistics I get are fascinating: I wasn't even aware that there was a browser called Flock. Nor do I have any idea how someone from Israel would have found my blog. Most of the statistics are as expected, but it's the outliers that are fascinating. For instance, 3% of my pageviews are from China? That's an interesting statistic.

It's a bit reminiscent of the resume process; you have this collection of information, of stuff, and you put it out there and hope for hits. And, unless you get the job, or someone commenting, you will never have any idea as to why.

But the outliers, while the most fascinating, aren't the primary audience. My primary audience is people local to the Victoria writing community and people from the online forums where I discuss writing. Predictably, the sites my target audience uses are the top referring links to come here. That means I'm doing a decent job of being visible. I'd be extremely worried if I was getting most of my referrals from my Facebook page, considering that Facebook is more social and familial and I hardly discuss writing or the writing community there. It would mean I was making some kind of mistake on the other places I post links to this blog.

So, thanks for clicking over, wherever you came from.

1 comment:

  1. I've got to say, the stats system on blogger is absolutely fascinating! I got 10 hits from Japan in one day once, that was kinda weird.

    And I've noticed direct links to blog posts that apply directly to conversations seem to draw the most hits on other sites, though signature links also seem to work.

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