Analytics' stock-in-trade, of course, is not just to show you how many, but all sorts of other things about the visitors. The idea is to use this information to tweak your content and your promotional efforts. We're starting to learn that, and I for one have already made some decisions based on it.
Things I know about our readers:
- They are only a few at the moment, but only a month into blogging it's still very early.
- I have readers in Canada and the USA, no surprise, but also in Peru, Belarus, the Czech Republic and Australia.
- The geographical profiles of Shirley's and my visits are very similar, meaning a lot of the same people read both our blogs. This means that the crosslinks and cross-promotions are working -- which way, I'm not sure, but suspect it's both. It also means that each of us can more or less cut in half the resources needed for promotion, because anything either of us does will drive traffic to both of us.
- Promoting on Daily Kos works for us. My sigline, when I comment on Kos, is "Fantasy Fiction for Dems" and it links to chevenga.com. I did a snarky photoshop in a front-page comment section the other day, resulting in 15 recommendations for the pic -- but also a little spike in visits to my site for that day, mostly from Democratic-leaning states in the USA.
- After I SEO'd www.chevenga.com a couple of weeks ago, we're just starting to get search engine traffic. Getting search engine traffic for an online novel isn't easy because there isn't an agreed-upon term for the concept ("blook" also refers to dead-tree books based on blogs)... but then I already knew that.
I use StatPress on "Gaiatribe: Ideas for a Thinking Planet" and "Hypatia's Hoard of Reviews," plus WordPress stats on "Gaiatribe" as well. I like to see where my hits are coming from; sometimes I can identify what's working and do more of it.
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