---
title: "Survey Results of My Blog’s Readership and My Accompanying Analysis"
date: 2007-06-16
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> For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://idratherbewriting.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of all pages are available by appending .md to any page URL.

# Survey Results of My Blog’s Readership and My Accompanying Analysis

Last week I [posted a survey](https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/06/04/who-are-you-a-one-question-survey-to-identify-my-readers/) on my site asking who my readers were. Here are the results of that survey.

[![survey](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/survey1.gif)](http://www.surveygizmo.com/reports/771/3905/6F21Z448NIR0QOKPZAY9P6D1X0DF3J/)

You can view the report [here as well](http://www.surveygizmo.com/reports/771/3905/6F21Z448NIR0QOKPZAY9P6D1X0DF3J/).

### Geographic Breakdown

Here's a geographic breakdown of where my readers are located.

![geographic representation of readers](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/readers1.png)

### Survey Analysis

Most of my of my readers are in technical communication. They're more interested in blogging than podcasting, and only a handful have met me personally.

This means I'm largely writing for strangers. A lot of my posts are descriptions of good podcasts I've listened to. But if readers aren't interested in podcasts, these recommendations may have little appeal.

### What Is Blogging's ROI?

I have been a little concerned about the ROI of blogging lately. I'm thinking that —

- Blogging requires a lot of time without producing any direct monetary rewards.
- Only a tiny percent of my readers actually know me personally. (What kind of relationships am I building?)
- Neither blogging, podcasting, or wikis seem to be skills in demand in the field of technical communication. (If you find a job description for a technical communicator that even mentions the word blog, wiki, or podcast, let me know. I don't think they exist. Or if they do, they're one in a thousand.)

### How Readers Consume Blogs

After the survey dropped off the front page, I had only a few more respondents. This confirmed my suspicion that even though you may have written 250 posts, only the last 10 exist to your reader. This leads to the [treadmill effect Arrington described](https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/06/16/techcrunch-founder-interview-on-iinnovate-arrington-talks-about-how-blogging-is-a-treadmill/) -- the idea that blogging is like running on a treadmill. You just keep putting time and energy into something that goes around and around without taking you anywhere.

Ideally, blogs should present readers with a neatly organized view of posts related to their interests. The index doesn't really work (for example, see [my index](https://idratherbewriting.com/index)). Neither do users peruse categories much (at least I don't). Perhaps providing related posts, top ten categories, and other aggregations that appeal to users is more useful.

**Update:**I decided to build in more embedded navigation into each post. Now at the end of each post, I show you 10 Related Posts and also the Top 10 Posts on my Site. Since 70% of my site visitors are supposedly first-timers (according to Google Analytics), it might make sense to provide per-post navigation like this.

### Any Feedback ?

Do you have any thoughts for my about my analysis? I'd really like to hear them.