My Blog Statistics

15 months ago I began my blog to allow friends and family to keep track of where I was and what I was up to.  I had retired from the company I worked at for 28 years and was ready to move to Taiwan and marry.  I did that and I am happily married, however life continues to evolve, as it does for everyone.  I became bored not working and re-entered the workforce after 7 months of retirement.  I continue blogging approximately every week and have posted 65 blog entries to date. 

Sometimes I try to add some humor to my work, though many people would be surprised to hear that.  I occasionally receive comments that suggest my humor has failed.  While living in Taipei, I described the noisy, polluting motor scooter swarms and wrote why they were part of the culture, but largely unnecessary after a great public transportation was installed.  I included some Hello Kitty references, lame motor scooter gang discussion and even modeled a nice pink helmet.  This was an anti-scooter piece, yet I received a comment that my blog was right on target; they were necessary in Taipei.  Since then I have worked on my writing skills to better communicate my thoughts.

My blog reading audience initially was the intended friends and family and it has grown to include many people largely unknown to me.  The intended targets have read it less frequently over time.  I am often told when I see friends, that they have not read the blog in a while.  My life isn’t that exciting, so I believe writing about what I did each week or where I traveled, may not be too interesting.

I can see what countries the readers are from and which blog posts they read, though I cannot tell who the individual readers are.  I have few formal followers, though there is larger group of consistent readers, based on the blog stats.   The country with the most blog reads is the U.S. with 75%, followed by Taiwan with 10%; which I expected.  Third place is Canada.  My sister-in-law lives in Toronto, so I hoped for some Canadian traffic.  She asked that I include more pictures of her sister.  Since I began adding more pictures of my wife, my Canadian traffic has gone down.  The interesting readership follows in descending order: Russia, Germany, Singapore, U.K., Poland, Spain, China and many more.  China is interesting because you cannot access the Google blog website through normal internet channels and most likely have to use a special VPN connection.

The blogs that generate the most readership seem to be the human and social interest stories, and less about my personal life.  Sleeping Asian Hidden Danger is by far the most popular with a 2 to 1 margin over second place Umbrellas for Rainy Taiwan.  I often see a 50 hit spike on Sleeping Asians within one hour and I assume someone is passing the link around. My political commentary of Tommy Thompson is a Piece of Crap was popular for 2 weeks during the election season and is third place. Motor Scooters and Love Motels are fourth and fifth.

Based on the declining interest in my life, and the apparent interest of blogs unrelated to my life, I think I will change the focus of my writing.  I still enjoy writing and will continue.