ሪሴስታንስግ

I sometimes wonder who reads my blog. I can read the stats about how many page views I get and what country they're from and that tells me some things, but it would be interesting to know more. On the other hand, it's good not knowing, because it frees me from any compulsion I might have to write what I think my audience wants to read. I have no idea who my audience is. I know that I always get the vast majority of page views from the United States. For my old blog, Germany came in second for page views, and I think Australia was third.

My new blog hasn't been going that long, so I think new trends might emerge over time, but so far it's been interesting to see that I'm getting quite a lot of page views from central and eastern European countries - like, Czechia, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine. And Germany is still fairly high on the list. Besides that, I seem to get some page views from all over the world. 

But yes, I wonder how people access my blog. Like, I have some posts that do really well - get a lot of page views - and some that don't. Some posts (not many) continue to get page-views over time - like, a year or two after I post it, it's still getting around 20 page views a month or something like that. I wonder how that works. Like, where is it that people are accessing it from? 

Sometimes I spend a lot of time and....it's not work or effort, but let's say, investment...I invest a lot in a post, and it doesn't get many views. Other times I'll write something really quickly and it's kind of unstructured and stream-of-consciousness, and that post will get a lot of views. 

I think, in general, because this blog is new, I don't get the amount of page views that I had started to get after my old blog had been going for a few years. It's a bit dis-heartening sometimes. With my old blog, I was used to, as soon as I posted and shared on facebook, twitter and pinterest, I would get around 12 to 20 views straight away and then, I would keep looking back at the stats page and refreshing and the amount of page views would keep climbing or go down but then up again and sometimes, over the course of the next couple of days, there would be periodic spikes. The same thing still happens with my new blog, just on a smaller scale. 

I'm pretty sure that most of my page views come from twitter, because I don't have that many friends on facebook, or followers on pinterest, but I have a lot more followers on twitter. But yes, as to which of them are reading my blog and why, and how many return readers I have, I have no idea. Sometimes I have wished that my blog was more interactive - that people would make comments or that my posts would stimulate some kind of discussion. I do get some 'likes', which I always appreciate, and some people I know in 'real' life have given me some feedback - usually positive but, at times, I have used my blog to have a bit of an indirect dig at some people - a veiled attack - and sometimes the other person has let me know that they did in fact feel attacked. And sometimes I have received positive feedback on social media.  

It's probably a good thing that I don't know my audience and what brings them to my blog and what they want. It means that I write what I want. It's a weird thing, in a way - writing, but you don't know who it's for. I've always found that different types of writing take time to get used to. Over time, a kind of formula evolves, but it's a complex one, otherwise what you write would be formulaic, but this formula is a kind of structure within which you can create something fresh and new.