How many people visit my blog each day?

I get 28 people visiting this blog every day – on average – and they come from 30 countries.

To any pros out there…I know this is not a figure to brag about.

The map above, clipped from my Google Analytics account, shows in green the countries from which people have visited. The darker the green the more visitors. The white is those which have not yet had the pleasure…

The first post was at the start of February 2009, and my intention was to make it a sort of diary of what I do in my career as a social media producer.

And since the beginning I’ve had the Google Analytics code in place so that I can tell how many people visit, what they find most popular, what browser they use, which country and which cities they come from and so on.

Anyway, I wasn’t chasing visitors. I was recording my activities. Clients were mentioning they had looked at the blog and I noticed, in the statistics, spikes in visit numbers when I contact and pitch to a new client. People are obviously looking me up on the net to see what I’m up to, they find the blog and their visit is logged.

(Don’t worry, Google Analytics is powerful, but there’s no way for me to find out who you are…if you visit the blog.)

This blog is very informal. It’s only a business device in so far as it shows the kinds of work I do. There are sites out there which are totally driven by what people find interesting and want to read.

It follows that most folk don’t want to read what I do, so if I get a regular visitor then I think, ‘There’s someone whose interest is valuable’. Regular visitors could be one or more of the following:

• A client – and that’s important to my profile
• A prospective client – that’s just as important
• A fellow social media/media professional – I like that my peers would be following my activities
• Social media enthusiasts – people who use social media in their personal life, or who want to see what my line of work involves
• Friends and family – I’m pretty sure none of my family and friends visit my site more than a couple of times a year
• Stalkers

So, I get an average of 28 readers a day. They come mostly from UK, mostly from Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. That average slips to 10 visits a day and has peaked at 38 a day. New visitors always look at my galleries. Regular visitors tend to visit two posts and then leave the site. I get an average of 80 page visits per day.

By blogging standards my site is probably average in terms of visitors to blog sites. But there are many blogs which attract 10,000s, even 100,000s, of visits each day- from all over the world. Those sites have a very focused remit. They are business driven. They reach out to a specific market.

I’ve been thinking of a blog to run as a business, as an experiment in how to be 100% focused on the content and appeal to a well-defined community. I think I have an idea and I’m exploring it now.

As for those 30 countries: The United Nations has 195 nation state members, so I’ve a long way to go. (No-one from Libya has ever visited.)

PS. Site owners rarely reveal how many visitors their sites get. It’s quite uncomfortable because low numbers can be interpreted as crap content! But don’t think about visits stats in that way. Think that someone is writing and someone else is reading. That’s the simple equation. And when you add in the fact that there are millions of blogs out there and even more websites, any reader – especially a regular reader – is a valuable commodity. (The again – the content may be crap!)