Believe it or not, this very blog was visited even from iPhones. But wait a sec. Let me take one step back and start this topic from there.

Even though I’m not a pro blogger with well defined monthly earnings target and I’m not selling anything here, I am interested in why and how readers are reaching my articles.

From the statistics it seems that almost 25% of the traffic arriving to Photonovice.net are from search engines. I’m pretty sure that not all the visitors coming here from e.g. Google can find answers for their questions, but the roughly 2 minutes time spent in average on the site when coming from Google is a good sign. The bad sign though is the nearly 70% bounce rate (percent of people leaving the blog after checking only one page) of the same traffic source.

People reaching a blog through their RSS readers are interested in the author or topics discussed there and they are supposed to be more loyal than ones arriving randomly. So the number of subscribers of the RSS feed can be quite telling. For me - without any other tangible target - this slowly growing number is very meaningful. (To be honest, my subscribers are the ones, for whom I try to write at least one valuable and useful article every week.) And without analyzing it further - just because the numbers are available - I share with you that 54% of my subscribers are reading the RSS feeds through Google Feedfetcher.

Lot of people are reaching my blog through referring sites from time to time. StumbleUpon is the top one on the list, but even though it gives 26% of all the referred traffic, I tend not to take that seriously. There are two good reasons for that:

1. once StumbleUpon generated such a huge and unusual peak in my stats that was not repeated anymore
2. when I was using the StumbleUpon tool bar and clicked on Stumble button I noticed that I spent only fraction of seconds on sites that I was led to and I suspect others use that in a similar way

An other top referring site is my old blog that I was writing on at Wordpress.com. I migrated all my articles to under my own domain name but some search engines still like that old place and people find a few things there. I actually deleted the text of the most popular articles there and put a link to the new location instead. Hence the good position in the referrer list.

And the next big guy amongst the top referrers is PhotographyVoter.com. People coming from that way may not be that loyal as subscribers of my RSS feed, but they are definitely interested in photography and supposedly they are not coming here by mistake. By the way, they are very, very welcome here.

A few more facts from my stats:

Geography
The country that gives me the most readers is the US with 45%. The next on the list are UK with 8% and Canada with 7%.

Browsers
57% of my readers are using Firefox, 30% are on Internet Explorer and 9% on Safari.

Operating Systems
78% of Photonovice.net readers are using Windows, 18% are lucky Apple Macintosh users, some 4% are Linux using geeks :-). And as I wrote at the beginning I had no less than 23 visits from iPhones.

This is my entry to the last installment of the Blog Statistics Project which is about sources of visits to photography blogs.