Monday, September 1, 2014

Unexpected Visitors

Today is Labor Day, a holiday for almost everyone in the US, except for those who work in fast food places, corner stores, grocery stores, gas stations, tourist destinations--I could go on, but you get the point. Most of my writer friends have been working too, or at least visiting FB to talk about writing. Because this is only partly a holiday for the US, I am half taking the day off. Today I have a question, and I hope someone has an answer.

I reviewed the stats for this blog for the week ending today. To my surprise, I had the highest number of page views from Turkey, at 93, which was higher than the US, at 70. I had only 6 page views in Ukraine, even though my name is Ukrainian. I had a smattering of page views in various other countries--in Europe, eastern Europe, Africa, Scandinavia, and India.

The Internet has made all of us internationals whether we know it or not. We get Facebook Friend requests from all over the world, some even in coherent English. We certainly get plenty of ads and sales offers from other countries, more than the nearly ubiquitous offers to make us rich from generous souls in Ghana and other African countries. Occasionally we get an intelligent and interesting comment from someone in Europe who reads mysteries. But Turkey?

I can't imagine what I might have said that would be of interest to anyone in Turkey, let alone 93 people or so interesting as to prompt one person to visit 93 times. Perhaps this is a sign of an impending scam, and I have tripped over a warning. Perhaps there is an ex-pat community that surfs the net on Mondays. Or perhaps those poor souls in Turkey were looking for something else and were directed to my site by mistake. Whatever the reason, I may have to think more about what I send out into the world, knowing it could end up in Russia, no friend of Ukrainians right now, Turkey, where women have a more precarious status than in the West, or Scandinavia, which often finds the US intolerable and intolerant.

This Internet business is making life complicated. So, readers with blogs, where do your visitors come from? Do you keep track? Do you know anyone in Turkey?

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Susan,

    That's very interesting. Turkey? Hmm. Okay, I was certain it would be India. I've just started my personal blog and don't do it as often as I'd like because it's time consuming and I need to work on my fiction. However, I'll take a look at our Author Expressions blog and see what I can discover.

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  2. Hi, Jacquie, I thought I'd have lots of readers from India, but apparently not. Anyway, I understand your reluctance to put too much time into blogging. I try to write every Monday, which seems easier for me than writing blogs at the end of the week, which is when people are supposedly more interested in reading them. Monday works for me.

    I hope you'll post what you learn about Author Expressions. Should be interesting.

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