Head Tale

As so many sites/apps do at this time of year, one of my blog plug-ins also provided a “Year in Review” report for my blog traffic.

Now, I should back up and repeat my standard line that I tend to think of this blog as my “acreage in the country” – far away from the busy high rises that are Facebook and Twitter, the crowded mall that is Amazon, the business centre that is LinkedIn, the urine-soaked subway that is Reddit. 😉

My blog is my own little space where I can putter away with my thoughts, explore different ideas and the only people who pop by are those who purposely choose to get a bit off the highway to swing by.

There are times where I’ve wondered what would’ve happened if fourteen (!) years ago, I’d worked towards making this blog dedicated to a single topic – something library-related or one of my other interests – digital video/streaming, Saskatchewan politics, NHL hockey – or whatever.

Or whether I focused on a single topic or kept my current random “thought of the day” approach, what would happen if I made a more concerted effort to build my traffic like all the other travel bloggers and mommy bloggers out there with their very beautiful, very search-engine friendly, very loaded-with-ads-and-affiliate-program-offer web sites?

I mean, fairly soon after I started this blog, I did syndicate it out to Facebook but I pulled back on that fairly quickly as my uneasiness with Facebook and their approach to user data and privacy grew.  I went for a long stretch where I didn’t promote my blog at all.  And now I’ve reached a point where I basically syndicate it out to the raging firehose that is Twitter but I rarely use hashtags in my post titles which could also help grow my audience.

At any rate, given that I’m just a humble blogger on the backroads of the Information Superhighway, it’s still interesting to get some insight into who’s coming to my site.

I’m not going to share the actual numbers – not because I’m proud (or embarrassed!) but because they’re sort of meaningless – especially on a blog that’s not commercialized. So whether I get 1000 visitors, 10,000 visitors or 100,000 visitors a year doesn’t really matter.  And honestly, I’d rather than 1000 people visit who enjoy my posts and learn something or maybe think about things differently than 100,000 people coming by to learn how to make a “rye and coke press”.  (Okay, that’s pretty cool too that this continues to be one of my highest visited posts of all-time!)

I guess the other question is why I continue to blog at all on a platform I started while in library school to learn a bit about what was then still a fairly new technology, keep family and friends at home up-to-date on my Ontario adventures, and yes, have a platform for publicly exploring ideas and sharing opinions?

I think that’s part of it – though I don’t focus on getting a lot of traffic, when something does demand a platform like library cuts or a provincial election or whatever, I do see big spikes in my traffic (and weirdly, just being a long-time blogger gives you a certain “authority” with media, politicians and others that might not actually be deserved!) 😉  I also like the discipline of having something I do every single day.  Blogging also helps me practice my writing (though in some ways, my informality and lack of editing probably hurts my writing too!), I like creating an archive of my life’s moments that will (hopefully) be there for anyone interested after I’m gone.

Anyhow, here’s some screencaps from the report about my blog’s past year…

First surprise comes right off the top.  I would’ve guessed that 90% of my traffic comes from Canada but turns out 44% comes from the US, 33% comes from Canada and the rest comes from around the world including some people from the planet “ZZ” whatever that is! (not sure but maybe a visitor from somewhere that their country can’t be identified for some reason?)

Demographically, there’s a fairly equal split between men and women and my audience tend to skew towards younger people.  I always imagine my “typical reader” is someone like me – a middle-aged librarian with an interest in technology but yeah, probably a reflection of young people spending more time online means I get more younger people visiting my blog.  (Also because younger people still don’t know how to make rye & coke presses like us grizzled veterans!) 🙂

No surprise that my home page is also the most visited page then the rest of the Top 5 is basically a “greatest hits” collection of posts that have been continually popular ever since I posted them – listicles, resort reviews and the perennial favourite on how to make a rye and coke press.  

Finally, the device breakdown shows the ever-increasing reach and use of mobile devices.