Thanks to my Referrers

I regularly look at Google Analytics to see how visitors have reached my blog. As well as referrals from big sites like Google, Blogger, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter I get referrals from smaller organisations and individual genealogists.

I am so grateful to those individuals who link to this blog from their blogs and websites so the purpose of this post is to say thanks to the people behind these sites that have sent readers my way in the last three months.



Creative Gene 
Elyse's Genealogy Blog
The Family Curator

Footnote Maven
Geneabloggers 
The Genealogue
Genealogy Wise
Gould Genealogy
Hunter Valley Genealogy 
Jennifer's Genealogy Blog
Mosman Library
My Family History Research
R17M
Shauna Hicks
Small Leaved Shamrock
TMG Sydney
Twigs of Yore
Unlock the Past
The Wandering Genealogist

Flatline on the Blog

Although my blog doesn't have a high readership I continue to blog because I enjoy writing, want to preserve some stories for future generations and believe that some of the things I write about may be of interest to others.

I therefore got a shock this morning when I checked in with Google Analytics to see who had been visiting lately.  The visits usually go in peaks and troughs with no particular pattern. On the image below visits go from a low of 16 to a high of 70 in a day. A report on recent visitors tells me that my blog has had no visitors since June 15th.










I find this hard to fathom as someone commented on one of my posts during this time so I must have had at least one visit. Others may read my posts in an RSS reader and not actually visit the blog but to have no visitors for 10 days seems a bit strange. I am now wondering about the effectiveness and reliability of Google Analytics.

Site Traffic

I wonder if anyone will actually read my blog and if they will find some of the snippets useful or at least interesting. Instead of installing a simple Hit Counter I decided to add Google Analytics code to the blog to keep track of how many visits I get, where they come from geographically and from where they were referred.

I have just taken a look at my first Analytics report (for the past three days) and have discovered my 8 visitors have been referred from Google, Google.com.au, Blogger.com and one from a genealogical society. I have nominated my blog to a couple of directories and put it out on Twitter so it will be interesting to see if the readership grows over the coming weeks.