A few months ago I was reviewing various demographic stats for my blog. I was prompted because I had seen an unusual number of page views from URL's which I didn't recognize. When I flipped over to my "Audience" stats I saw that I had gone somewhat "mini-viral" in Bulgaria. On that single morning 300 Bulgarians navigated to my blog! I was astounded! I looked at the blog subject and could find nothing that would have so intrigued Bulgarians that they would tune into my blog in significant numbers.
Now, for a guy who is not hip to how one goes about attracting a blog audience this was pretty heady stuff. I found similar anomalies on other days as well. One week I will find I'm "big" (and I say that tongue in cheek) in the Netherlands, another week I'll find that the French are reading in significant numbers.
Overall, my largest volume of readers come from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico and Russia. But I also have a few that regularly read from Nigeria, Bulgaria, China, Turkey, Malaysia, the Philippines and many other smaller nations.
Each time I see these stats I get a thrill that people are interested enough to navigate to Lost in America and read what I have to say. Oh sure, I know my 65,000 page views don't compare to the Huffington Post, or even a single article on Yahoo, but I'm thrilled none the less.
A few months ago I reconnected with my cousin, Ralph. He noted my blog link on Facebook and emailed me and told me he had been enjoying my blog. Soon after his daughter Tammy corresponded as well. Between those two peering over my past blog efforts I saw a pleasant spike in readership and was pleased to see some of my old blog entries regurgitated and appreciated. Because I have been fairly prolific, especially compared to those bloggers who post less frequently, I have a substantial sample of blog entries which cover a wide variety of subjects.
So, I am very pleased and appreciative that I have readers who are interested enough to visit daily, or occasionally, and take the time to consider what I have to say. And when 300 Bulgarians tune in on a single day I am pleased beyond measure. And I'd give a pretty penny or two to find out how 300 of them went "viral" on me.
Smile.
2 comments:
Hi! I found your post because I was looking for technical material on the Bulgaria hits. I'm getting these as well but I know that they are not normal hits. If I remember correctly, these are called spam referrals. These are bot-generated hits so in most likelihood does not refer to people who actually read a post. It's never a good idea to click back on URLs from where these hits ostensibly originated because you can open yourself up to malicious stuff. I don't think as yet there is a way for bloggers to do anything about these hits but I think Blogger itself is periodically monitoring the situation.
Hey there, this is really helpful. I'm getting an unusual amount of hits from Russia which was initially intriguing , now I'm simply suspicious.
Cheers - Perry
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