Blogging

We Love You Too, Beaverton!

July 25, 2012 by Corey 5 Comments

Exploring who visits your blog and why is a fascinating way to burn time on the internet. It is productive, too, because as you delve deeper into the statistics you can figure out why people are coming to your blog and try to tailor your content to what your readers want. There are a host of ways to learn more about your readers but I use Sitemeter, Google Analytics, and Facebook, though the last only really tells us about who likes our Facebook page, even if the demographic information there is more detailed because Facebook knows your gender, your age, and more about you in general.

I thought I would write a series of posts about who is coming to read 10,000 Birds, how they get here, and why I believe they are coming to the blog. This is the first post in the series and it addresses one simple issue. Beaverton, Oregon, loves 10,000 Birds!

Why do I think 10,000 Birds is big in Beaverton? Simple. One neat thing about Google Analytics is that I can see a list of what cities provide the most traffic to the blog. For the last thirty days, most of them are cities with very large populations that you would expect would send a lot of visitors our way. New York, London, Chicago, and Los Angeles are our top four, for example, and Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle, and Toronto round out our top ten. Number eleven is Washington DC. Beaverton, a city of only 89,803 people according to 2010 census data, is number twelve. Over a half of a percent of Beaverton’s population has visited 10,000 Birds in the last thirty days. The absurdity of that number of visitors from so small a city is emphasized by New Delhi, with its population of nearly seventeen million, being thirteenth among cities whose populations have visited 10,000 Birds in the last thirty days.

We have never mentioned Beaverton on 10,000 Birds until now and I know of no reason why we should be so relatively popular there. I did find Beaverton Bird Blog, which links to 10,000 Birds, but it has not been active for over eight months.

Whatever the reason, I must say that I am flattered that what seems to be such a fine small city likes 10,000 Birds so much and I hope that someday I will get there and be able to bird Beaverton. Anyone want to show me around? And do any Beavertonians or Oregonians want to hazard a guess as to why 10,000 Birds is big in Beaverton?

Stay tuned for more posts in this vein, that is, if you want them…

Written by Corey
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.