Where are your readers coming from?
If you’re concerned about the audience of your blog — even if it’s a personal one — you are probably using some software which gives you the number of your visitors. But besides the number of pages viewed, these systems also can tell you where your readers are located. Read more…
What these packages are doing is very simple: they’re recording all the transactions between the server that hosts your blog and your readers — with your approval. And the HTTP protocol can reveal lots of information about who is reading your blog, such as her/his IP address, the time she/he spent looking at your precious contents, or where she/he lives ( with some margins for errors).
Some of these packages are pretty sophisticated, such as Google Analytics which is free but still in beta phase. As you can see on this map generated by this service for one of my other blogs, readers are located — almost — everywhere in the world.
You also can use what you could call a Web 2.0 service, MapStats from Blog Flux, which mixes HTTP statistics with Google Maps. Here is what Blog Flux says about their service.
Blog Flux MapStats is the coolest way of tracking your website visitors. Not only does it provide the normal statistics and graphs, we have incorporated the system into Google Maps! Instantly see where your latest visitors are coming from, and find out what they are looking for.
If you want to know more, take a look at this online demo.
Most of these services are free and just need a minimal intervention from you. You’ll just have to add some lines of code in one template of your blog — and that’s all.
And please remember that I don’t know who are my readers now (in other words, the above explanations can be useful or useless depending on who you are). So let me know if this post has been useful or not.
