Who loves ya, blogger? Here are my top referrers.

It can be so frustrating, this blogging habit. You pour your words onto the screen, diligently post, and sit there wondering who will read it. If readers loved me like my hound dog, I'd be writing on easy street.

My Creative Writer US blog seems to be at a plateau—maybe because there are so many writing blogs. I get thousands of unique visitors at Covering Florida each month. At Creative Writer US, I get 25 percent of the traffic I get at CF.

Covering Florida continues to grow in an amazing way, with increasing traffic in uniques and in page views each week. I post there daily, sometimes two or three times if there's breaking news, as I used to do here. But because I have to place my time where it counts, I dropped posting here to 3 times a week.

I do know who sends me readers—I have basic statistics on those. So here are my top 5 referrers for both blogs:

1. Google®—runaway tops, no contest (I still love Google, I admit it.)
2. Blog Catalog
3. BlogHer
4. Technorati
5. Various message boards, where people talk about what I write and post a link—these are diverse and no one stands above the other. Note: I don’t post on these boards.

I write the Creative Writer US blog because I love to write about my profession and it’s a means of sometimes writing about an author I wouldn’t get to write about otherwise. Book reviews and book publications are a very small market, one I can’t really afford to chase.

Here’s a “perplexion” (I know I made that word up)—both blogs have the same Google page rank, but CW US is ranked higher at Technorati. Go figure.

I’ve written about it before, but I’ll point it out again. The single most useful book I’ve found about blogging is J. S. McDougall’s ‘Start Your Own Blogging Business.’ What I learned from reading the book really helped boost my numbers at Covering Florida.

I will say blogging really lets me write what I want to instead of what I contract to write. That's a nice creative release in itself. And I know, from email and comments, that sometimes what I write helps others. That's always a good thing.

(©KayBDay/2007; all rights reserved)