What the Blogger stats page tells you about your blog

This blog has a reader in Moldova.

I learned this unusual and perhaps useful fact from the new Blogger stats page. This feature helps you learn more about how your blog is used by the general public. Blogging is important for writers, and I think Blogger is the best platform. It's owned by Google, so posts with the blogspot domain get preference on Google searches, and we all know how important those are for connecting with readers!

The stats page tells you a bit more about your readers and what they read. You can select data from the past day, week, month, or all time, and see which posts get how many hits. You can also see how many readers you have in each country, what browsers they use, what URLs referred them to your blog, and even Google search terms that led readers to your site.

My most popular posts are interviews, so perhaps I should do more. Interviews not only generate new hits, because the interviewees mention your site to their readers, but you get to learn something rather than simply blog about what you already know. Posts that mention famous writers, such as the ones I did on Poul Anderson and William S. Burroughs, also generate lots of interest. My post on starting a sentence with a conjunction ranks high and is often read because someone put those search terms into Google.

Google searches for my name, the term "midlist" or its variants, and keywords related to my posts bring in a lot of traffic. Another major source are other blogs who link here. Thanks especially to writers Sioux Roslawski and Donna Volkenannt; you're numbers one and two!

The geographic breakdown is interesting as well. The majority of my readers are in the U.S., with the U.K. a distant second. Spain has a good showing because I know so many people here, and Europe in general is the source of many hits. South Koreans are also interested in my blog, and I get a scattering of hits from all sorts of places such as Guam, China, India, and, of course, Moldova.

So welcome to my blog, Midlist Moldovan! I hope you find it of interest to you.

[Moldovan flag courtesy Wikimedia Commons]