Slovenia?

Leaving California and Other States of Mind Audience Distribution

OMG!  I decided to check the stats on my blog readers, which I haven’t done in over a year.   I only have a handful of registered followers on the site and about a hundred that have an e-mail subscription.  I get dozens of clicks from Facebook and Twitter everyday, but I was not prepared to see the numbers I just saw:

Over 5,000 page views.  This is over 2 years and 175 posts, but still I couldn’t believe it.  Where are these readers coming from?

I clicked on the little map showing me the distribution (see above).  Mostly U.S. (no surprise), followed by Canada and then the UK (okay, fine).  But then:

South Korea  62

Belize  45

China  39

Netherlands  38

Russia  37

Germany  30

Philippines 18 There were also a handful of visits from Japan, Slovenia, Spain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and India. How they found my blog is a mystery.  Either there are some serious bilingual methamphetamine addicts overseas or my friends have cousins in places I didn’t know about. “Dear Vladimir, You must check out this blog!  You will laugh out loud when she jokes around about her cat!” I will never know if I have accidental tourists or if I am spreading the joy as far away as the north pole on my sheer hope that readers find me, but I thought I should do a little more research and see at least which post was my audience’s favorite. “Something’s Fishy” (http://leavingcaliforniaandotherstatesofmind.blogspot.com/2009/11/somethings-fishy.html) got 160 unique views.  Maybe because it had the word “Harvard” in it?    It’s funny that it was that post, too, because I received one of the nicest e-mails about it from a random fan.  He is an attorney in a suburb of NYC who was also a Cornell grad and was searching Twitter for the Harvard v. Cornell score last year.  He came across my tweet, and blog, and felt compelled to write to me and let me know that my tales of life in Ithaca made him laugh and think about his happy days here and that it was fun to fantasize about living in a college town, raising a family.   Social media experts will tell you it is important to manage your "klout" score and engage your readers.  I haven’t pushed for feedback, or tried to track what is going on.  I just wanted to share a little bit of the fun and now I see it’s grown organically.  You know, that is really why I do it.  Enjoy!