Sunday, March 15, 2009

Who Reads the Tuesday Column?

I don’t chase after visits to my Tuesday Column site—I know that some online writers monitor their traffic daily and write more of whatever gets them the greatest number of visits. As for me I write whatever I’m thinking about regardless of readership and frankly I have all the readers I need to satisfy me.

However, writing on the web gets one fewer responses than preaching at a church (well most churches at least ;-). When preaching I can see the crowd and know for sure they at least listened to some of what I preached. On the web most folk read but never comment—I have learned to live with that. (Those who DO comment get read by about 350-400 people each week so the commenters have a following too.)

Yet, sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading. That’s when I check the data. Today I had an extra half hour so I looked at the data. Here is what I saw concerning the last two weeks.

-825 of you visited this week’s column on homosexuality--thanks for coming by!
-657 visited the column last week on Grandparenting--thanks (even though it applied to few)

The vast majority of the rest of the readers these last two weeks came directly from a Google search that brought them to one of the past columns. The most popular past columns by the family (besides the weekly Tuesday Column) are invariably the same:

-My own most visited past column was my speed-reading article
-David’s past column on Leadership Movies
-John’s past article on How to Write an Exegesis Paper
-Sharon’s booklet on Leadership Theory for Pastors

In total 13,692 unique visits occurred the past two weeks, which is about the average for the year (900-1000 per day). In the last two weeks readers visited from 92 countries--so it is nice to "see" you guys from other countries too.

Well, I don’t suppose these figures mean anything to anyone but me—but I thought I'd resport them to myself here anyway. ;-)