Tracking a Year's Worth of Blogging

On November 8, 2015, I started tracking how many reads three of my blogs were getting. I had MapLoco which tracked where readers were from, and that was fun, but I also wanted to know how many people were reading. I love to write and will write regardless of readership (I have other private blogs that exemplify that), but I was curious at the same time as to just how big my readership was on my three main blogs.

The results were surprising.

 This is a screen shot of the beginning of the tracking. (I discontinued tracking Flying High with Mrs. I  because it was for my students' families, and I switched them over to Facebook - a much easier format for my students' parents to use.)

And here's today's. (Since I accidentally deleted two numbers on 11/6/16 for Horsiemama, I am actually tracking from the second week, but it is still a full year.)

Teachinmama went from 30,236 to 33,280 reads in the year's time. That's 3,044 reads this year or 59 reads per week.

The stats for Horsiemama are similar. The numbers begin at 7,330 and end at 10,745. That means I had 3,415 reads total or 66 per week.

What's more interesting to me personally is that, although the readership is close in numbers, the people reading the blogs are very different. Teachinmama is my "grandaddy" blog - I started it in 2008 as my personal blog and it is read solely by family members. It is private and can only be read by invitation.

Horsiemama targets a different audience. I started it in 2012 when I got Abby and began filling the pages of Teachinmama with Abby tales. (Abby Tails would have been a fun name for her blog!) I wrote about her so much that I decided to give her her own blog, but I did not take hers private as I have many horsey friends, both real and model, who I thought might enjoy it. And, most of my family members are non-horse lovers, and are happy just reading Teachinmama. Only occasionally does someone cross over and read both.

Looking at MapLoco, I see that Teachinmama has been read on 1 continent, North America, while Horsiemama has readers in 5 continents. (Only missing is Africa and Antarctica!) The dots are clustered around places where family members live in the USA on the map for Teachinmama, whereas they are all over the country for Horseimama plus a large cluster in Europe and smaller clusters in Asia and Australia.

It was a fun experience for me to track this past year and then look at the results. I think I will continue filling in stats each week and, next year at this time, compare the two years and see if things have changed.

Stay tuned!