First off, thanks SO much to everyone who responded to my survey!!! I really appreciate it! I ended up with over 200 responses, but because I’m cheap and don’t want to pay outrageous prices for Survey Monkey, I only have access to the first 100. 🙁 But still, we got DATA. And what it says is very interesting, I think.
Let’s take a look-see.
Question 1: You are a…
Appears that the vast majority of my readers are scientists or science students, with a substantial group of non-scientists (19{9f43b4361d9a125bc126dd2a2d1949be02545ec69880430bc4fed2272fd72da3}).
Question 2: Highest Degree Obtained
So the majority of you have at least a Bachelor’s, if not higher, and a good chunk of you are PhD scientists (and OMG that means you may read a grant of mine some day. YIKES. *kisses up massively*).
Question 3: You read Sci’s blog BECAUSE…
This question didn’t come out quite like I intended…I mean, I really appreciate that everyone thinks I’m so AWESOME!!! I assure, I totally am, and I’m glad you all agree with me. 🙂 But really, I kind of wanted to get at what you were reading my blog FOR, what specific kinds of information you were after or wanted to see. It looks like a lot of you just love SCIENCE, and like the way I convey that science. And that is really pretty fabulous. But I’m trying to think of a better way to get at what people are coming to read my blog and expecting, and what you all would like to see more OF. The comments addressed this somewhat (thanks everyone for your input there!), and mostly boil down to a certain conversational, clear style, and my ability to dissect papers with my delicate little claws.
Finally Question 4: You Like to Read These posts of Sci’s
Well it looks like very few people missed my terrible poetry. 🙂
It appears that people really do come here for the science. This maketh me VERY happy. 🙂
So now we have all of this data. Collecting data is the easy part. It’s asking the RIGHT questions to collect the right data, and then coming to the best interpretation of it, that’s the hard part.
In this case, I’m not sure that I asked the right questions. The main question I wanted to answer was: Am I attracting the audience I want to attract?
Well, who do I want to attract? Me, I like readers in general, so that’s great. I would like to start with saying I LOVE my readers. You guys are amazing, send me lots of love, write insightful, smart comment, tell me when I’m wrong, and never complain about my overuse of the comma.
But what kind of audience do I want to ADD to my current readership and how do I get that audience? I think when I started this blog I was looking to get a mostly non-science audience, and I’ve succeeded in that somewhat (please, none of you go away! I love you all!). But getting a non-science audience for a science blog is harder than it seems. Many science bloggers move in pretty limited circles (for the internet), with science bloggers reading other science bloggers, and we end up attracting each other’s readers. While this is a good thing, it’s hard to get people who DON’T already read science blogs to break into the science blog world.
So I think my questions now are these:
1) How did you break into reading science blogs?
2) Do you recommend science blogs to other people? What characterizes the people who you recommend them to?
3) Do you have ideas or recommendations for how to get more readers who are not already interested in science blogs?
4) If you are a science blogger, how do you determine who reads you know? What do you look at to determine why people read you?
Fill me in the comments! I’ll be asking some of these questions at Science Online, and I’d love to get some more insight!
