Stats On My Mind
It’s never a good thing to get obsessed with the stats on your blog—counting the numbers of visitors and page views and spiders gets you nothing but heartburn when you’re hoping lots of people are reading your blog.  I try not to look at mine more than a couple (or three or four) times a day. Do I wish more people came here? Yes. Does studying the stats change anything? No. Still, I can’t help going there; it’s sort of a minor addiction. I’ve heard of folks who are so caught up in it they need an intervention so I don’t feel quite as guilty as I might.
One useful thing about the stats, in the sense of being enlightening as well as frequently amusing, is the referral list. This is where you can see the search terms people have used to arrive at the blog. Some of them are perfectly understandable, like an author’s name or book title . You can guess that the author has googled his name to see if there have been any mentions anywhere or perhaps he has an automatic search like Google Alerts.  Another possibility is that a reader is looking for information regarding an author or a review for a particular title.
Then there are the others. Some are funny, some are puzzling, still more are downright strange. Some of my favorite recent headscratchers:
samples of business introduction letters
under books
“girls boarding school”corsets
three types of animal bonding “Animal bonding” -Human -elves
women books club blogs
blasphemous idols
squirrel mystery
trash book club
public authors
So, I’ll keep looking at my stats—they might give me heartburn but they’re also good for a “what the heck?”.
June 27, 2010
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
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2 Responses
Leila,
I learned about your site about a month and a half ago from reading one of your postings on Dorothy L. I’ve enjoyed reading through your site and you are now one of my bookmarks. I was lucky enough to win a book from you.
Anyway, I just wanted you to know I enjoy your site!
Sandi, thank you so much for saying that! I love doing this—after swearing I’d never get involved in blogging
Knowing that you enjoy reading it means a lot to me and, by the way, I plan on using the teeny review you sent me very soon.
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