Audience Analysis of PoeWar.com

Have you ever wondered who visits your web site? I wondered abut my visitors, so I conducted this audience analysis. It’s a bit long, but I think people might find it interesting, especially if they decide they want to do the same for their own web site.

An Audience Analysis of Poewar.com

I created my first web site for writers in 1993. In the beginning, it was a simple collection of links to other sites. As the years passed, I wrote and added several articles, and those became the main focus of the site. In 1999 I moved the site to its own domain name, poewar.com (Hewitt) and I began publishing more and more articles by myself and others. I also added other content such as job listings. The site grew in popularity but was, for the most part, a non-profit venture for me. I made enough money from links to books at Amazon.com to pay for the domain and put about thirty dollars a month in my pocket (Amazon). I dreamed of finding a way to work on the site full time, but I just couldn’t discover any method to make the site generate substantial revenue. I tried running online advertising, but I hated the thought of some flashy graphic making it harder to read my site, and nothing else seemed to generate any money.

I discovered Google AdSense in November of 2003, a few months after the program’s introduction (Google AdSense). Google AdSense runs text-based advertisements (they also run graphic ads but I don’t use them) that are tailored to the specific content of each web page they run on. For me, this was a giant leap forward in profitability. One of the main problems I had found with past advertisements was that many of them weren’t suited to the material I ran on my site. Visitors reading an article about fiction writing weren’t interested in buying a new video game system or taking a trip to Las Vegas. These visitors were, however, responsive to ads that had to do with fiction writing, which Google AdSense was able to deliver. My site revenue jumped from $40 in November to $390 in December. For the first time poewar.com was making enough money to justify spending serious time working on it. That became even clearer in January, when the site cleared over $650. I began looking for ways to make the site grow — as well as kicking myself for not working harder on it for the past ten years.

It was at about this time that I first started to look at the concept of blogging. The basic features of a blog are that it allows the author to post new information quickly and automates such processes as file structure, page formatting and overall site design. In the past, I had to do all of those updates myself, which meant that I often spent more time on the mechanics of the site than the process of creating new material. Blogging software allowed me to create new material much more quickly, especially in the case of the job board, which wasn’t so much a creative effort as a catalog of available jobs. For this part of the site, the chronological nature of blogging (the newest article or post is given the highest position and older articles are moved backwards on the page and site) made it ideal for posting jobs. It took me several months of research and experimentation, but in October of 2004 I moved my site to a blogging system called WordPress, which had the advantage of being free, well-designed and adaptable (Boren and Mullenweg). For the past year and a half I have been operating the site as a blog (actually as multiple blogs) and in many ways it has helped the site to grow and has made the site management process much easier for me.

As I said before, my site is focused on writing. The blog that occupies the front page of my site (www.poewar.com/) is focused on articles and information for writers. It includes most of the articles I wrote before turning the site into a blog as well as many articles and informational posts I have made since then. There is a freelance blog (www.poewar.com/freelance/) that is focused on freelance opportunities for writers. There also a job blog (www.poewar.com/jobs/) that lists all types of jobs for writers. In the past I have also developed individual blogs for other topics on the site, but I have mostly discontinued those efforts due to a lack of audience interest. It has been my experience that these 3 core sections bring in almost all of my audience.

After 13 years of running a web site for writers, I have begun to make certain assumptions about my audience. I have written articles about many writing-related topics which I currently divide into the following categories: poetry writing, fiction writing, essay writing, technical writing, copywriting, exercises, the writing business, freelancing, publishing, print-on-demand, ethics, reviews, news / sites, MFA programs and writer’s conferences. While I write for many reasons, the most significant reason is to help other writers. In order to do so, I believe it is important to know my audience. Up until now, I have made conclusions based on informal examination of my web site statistics as well as the occasional piece of audience feedback. Those assumptions are that I cater to a pair of fundamental audiences, writing students and entry-level writers interested in a career in writing. I believe I also cater both to those interested in creative writing and those interested in professional writing. Now, as I attempt to move further into the world of web publishing as a business rather than a hobby, I want to know more about my audience because I want to better serve them, and because I want to broaden my readership and in the process increase my site’s profits.

The first aspect I need to look at is the overall web site traffic I receive. Knowing how much traffic my site generates in total allows me to put other numbers, such as the popularity of individual pages, into perspective. To do this, I take advantage of a web-focused statistical tracking program (“Statistics of poewar.com“). Overall web site traffic can be measured using 3 different metrics: Unique Visitors, Number of Visits and Number of Pages. The Unique Visitors metric is an excellent guide to how popular your site is. It tells how many visitors from unique IP addresses (different computers and systems) access your web site. While it is possible for a visitor to access your site from more than a single IP address, for the most part a single IP address equals a single visitor. For the month of March, 2006 (the month I am conducting the audience analysis for) poewar.com had 47,662 unique visitors. Looking back over the period from January 2005 to March 2006, poewar.com averaged 43,821 visitors a month, so the figure of 47,662 visitors is slightly above average. It is also above last March’s figure of 45,767.

The Number of Visits metric shows how many times people are accessing the web site. In March 2006, poewar.com received 91,734 visits. Looking back over the period from January 2005 to March 2006, poewar.com averaged 77,229 visits a month, so the figure of 91,734 is significantly above average. It is also above last March’s figure of 72,704. These metrics provide a means of measuring how much repeat business your site gets. In order to do that, you divide the Number of Visits by the Unique Visitors. The figure of 91,734 is slightly less than double the number of unique visitors for the month (47,662), so poewar.com averaged about 2 visits per each visitor. Realistically, there were probably some visitors who were at the site frequently (such as myself) and many visitors who only visited the site once, but the average number of visits was 2. This indicates a tendency by the audience to return to the site, but does not indicate that the average visitor considers the site to be of daily or weekly interest.

The Number of Pages metric measures the total number of web pages accessed on the site. For the month of March 2006, 264,178 pages were accessed. Looking back over the period from January 2005 to March 2006, poewar.com averaged 257,833 pages a month, so the figure of 264,178 is slightly above average. It is also above March 2005’s figure of 233,160.

The Number of Pages metric gives you a good indication of how many pages the average visitor accesses. By dividing the Number of Pages by the Unique Visitors, you can compute the average number of pages visitors looked at over the course of the month. In this case the average visitor accessed 5.5 pages per month. Additionally, by dividing the Number of Pages by the Number of Visits, you can compute the average number of pages visitors looked at per visit to the site. In this case the average visitor accessed 2.9 pages per visit.

Because poewar.com has many pages (a little under 5000 in March 2006) a high number of pages per visit makes sense and can be seen as a good sign. There are limits to this however. If the average visitor is looking at 7 or 10 pages per visit, it may indicate that they are having trouble finding what they are looking for. In this case, a figure of 2.9 pages per visit indicates that people do explore the site rather than only read the first page they come to.

After examining the 3 metrics, we can make some preliminary assessments of poewar.com. The March 2006 data for poewar.com indicates that the audience as a whole is growing rather than contracting, but the growth is only nominal. The data also indicates that the audience is composed of a readership that is willing to explore the site but does not access the site more than a few times a month. There are some gray areas in these conclusions, however, because they assume that a single audience is being addressed by these large and general figures. It is possible that there are differing audiences for the site. The first audience could be composed visitors who come to the site from outside links or searches, view a single page and move on. The second audience could be composed of more frequent visitors who access the site on a regular basis and read more than a single page. Unfortunately, all that such general figures can give us are indications, not specifics. Fortunately, there are many other metrics that can give us more detailed clues about the audience.

The Individual Page Popularity metric is a key statistic for identifying your audience. This metric tells you what pages and by extension topics your readers are most interested in. It is an excellent way to gauge what is working and what isn’t. Do not think, however, that this topic that cannot be skewed because it often can. A page might be popular because your readers love it, but other factors, such as a link from a popular site, may be more responsible for the result than overall reader desire. For this reason, the Individual Page Popularity metric should only be considered as part of the equation, but certainly a vital part.

Because there are almost 5000 pages on my site, it would be impractical to compare the popularity of each page. Because blogs record information chronologically, there are many pages that are accessed for a particular date rather than an article title. There are also pages that bring up information for a certain category. The category information is very important, so we will look at that separately later. In order to keep the information manageable, I have chosen to focus on the actual articles that make up my central blog. In looking at this metric, I am leaving out 2 very large sections of my site, the freelance opportunities section and the writing and editing jobs section. These sections account for several thousand of my pages, but because they are focused more on general content (job after job after job) than individual posts, page popularity isn’t a major issue for these sections. I will take a look at those sections as a whole after I go through the individual articles.

Even looking at this single section it would very difficult to dissect every page. Instead, I want to look at general trends. For that, I am limiting myself to the top 150 article posts. That still creates quite a range. The most popular post, Fifteen Craft Exercises for Writers, generated a total of 5,803 page views. The least accessed of the top 150 posts (there is a three-way tie) generated only 20 page views.

Looking at the top 150 posts as a group, I can divide them into the following main categories:

• General Writing (24 Posts)
• Technical Writing (24 Posts)
• Poetry (18 Posts)
• Freelance Writing (17 Posts)
• MFA Program Profiles (13 Posts)
• The Writing Business (10 Posts)
• General Publishing (10 Posts)
• Writing Exercises (6 posts)
• Fiction Writing (6 Posts)
• Print-on-Demand Publishing (6 Posts)
• Writing Conferences (5 posts)
• Book Reviews (4 Posts)
• Ethics and Writing (3 posts)
• Copywriting (2 posts)
• Essay Writing (2 Posts)

Although the top 150 posts do not include all of my articles, they are a fairly accurate profile of what I write for poewar.com. The general writing category is a catchall for such subjects as the definition of terms, cross-genre craft advice, and articles about the writing life. Technical writing, poetry, fiction and freelancing are the subjects I write about the most and the other categories are ones I occasionally write about. In recent months I have written more about publishing and print-on-demand. Ethics, copywriting and essay writings are topics I have touched upon. My MFA program profiles have generally served as filler when I couldn’t think of anything else to write about.

Now that we have looked at the 150 articles as a whole, it is time to look at the top thirty articles to see what is most popular. The top 30 articles combine for 39,876 page views. The remaining 120 articles in the top 150 combine for only 10,458 page views, so the top 30 articles represent the bulk of my individual article traffic.

� Poetry (10 Posts)

� Freelance Writing (4 Posts)

� Fiction Writing (3 Posts)

� The Writing Business (3 Posts)

� Technical Writing (2 Posts)

� General Publishing (2 Posts)

� Writing Exercises (2 posts)

� Writing Conferences (1 post)

� Essay Writing (1 Post)

� General Writing (1 Post)

� Book Reviews (1 Post)

This look at the top thirty says some interesting things about my site’s audience. Because I have written so many articles about poetry, it is no surprise to see poetry articles dominating the top 30. What is surprising is the relative lack of technical writing articles in the top thirty. Out of 24 technical writing articles in the top 150, only 2 managed to make the top 30. I believe many of these are interesting and quality articles, so it is disappointing to see them so poorly represented. Because the MFA Program Profiles are of limited appeal, I am not surprised that none of them made the list. It is more surprising that my articles about print-on-demand haven’t made the top 30, but they are relatively recent articles, and less likely to have generate as many links from other sites. The indications of this list are that my articles about poetry, fiction and freelance writing have relatively high appeal, while my articles about technical writing, blogging and print-on-demand publishing are struggling to find an audience. It should also be noted that while only 2 articles about writing exercises made the top 30, those 2 articles are numbers 1 and 5 on the list, indicating that there is a solid audience for writing exercises. There is obviously much more analysis that can be made in regards to page popularity, but there are also many other valuable metrics that need to be looked at.

As I stated, it is important to take at least a general look at the popularity of the freelance opportunities section and the writing and editing jobs section. As a measuring stick for popularity, remember that the most popular article post, Fifteen Craft Exercises for Writers, generated a total of 5,803 page views and that the top 30 articles combined generated 39,876 page views. The main jobs page alone (www.poewar.com/jobs/) generated 42,437 page views. It is the most viewed page on the entire web site, beating out even the main page (www.poewar.com/) which generated 17,217 page views. The main freelance opportunities page generated 6327 page views. These sections represent a major portion of poewar.com’s traffic.

One of the features of blogging is that you can select categories for your postings. The categories used on my site are the same as the subjects I listed above. Visitors to the site can select these categories to see the most recent blog entries about those subjects. This is a very important metric because categories are rarely linked to by external sites or search engines. That means most people who choose a category link do so after they have already reached the web site. This makes the metric an excellent measure of what visitors to the site want to learn more about. For March 2006, 8,452 visitors visited on these category pages. The following is a breakdown of what they chose:

� Poetry Writing 1814 21.46%

� Fiction Writing 1301 15.39%

� Exercises 936 11.07%

� Essay Writing 866 10.25%

� Technical Writing 595 7.04%

� Freelancing 493 5.83%

� Writing Business 429 5.08%

� MFA Programs 403 4.77%

� Copywriting 321 3.80%

� Writer’s Conferences 290 3.43%

� Publishing 283 3.35%

� General Writing 276 3.27%

� Print-on-demand 159 2.39%

� Ethics 124 1.47%

� Reviews 119 1.41%

For the most part, this list corroborates what we have already learned from looking at the list of top articles, but there are some important deviations. Poetry and fiction writing fall into line as expected, but 2 other categories, writing exercises and essay writing, show a surprisingly high number of inquiries in comparison with the number of articles being accessed in the top 30 and even in the top 150. This metric indicates these are 2 areas in which the audience is probably being underserved. The audience wants writing exercises and information about essay writing, but they aren’t finding the articles that they are looking for. This data also reinforces the earlier indication that technical writing articles are generating only a moderate amount of interest and that the subject is not a central focus of the site’s audience.

The next metric goes further into what people are looking for when they come to my site. Search Keywords identifies the words people use most often when they conduct searches that lead to my web site. In order of popularity, here are the top 50 keywords being used in searches for my site: writing, jobs, how, write, poetry, writer, freelance, cinquain, letter, query, writers, technical, job, essay, editor, employment, tips, exercises, money, careers, magazine, poems, editing, publishing, creative, new, personal, copy, book, novel, mfa, games, poem, mystery, play, people, articles, letters, fiction, opportunities, cinquains, assistant, press, york, essays, research, story, editorial, Chicago, short. I have removed most common words such as a, an, the and to. This search metric goes strictly by word, not phrase, so it is logical to assume that the abundance of the word new is partly due to people searching for New York. The word how might be considered as part of the common words list, but I left it on because I think it indicates a desire by my audience to learn how to do things.

Looking at the keywords gives a pretty good summary of the audience that my site reaches. The site is first and foremost about the subject of writing, so it is not surprising to see writing, write, writer and writers appear in the first 11 entries. The jobs section is the most popular section on the site, so it is also not surprising that jobs is the second most popular search term for the site. In the top fifty search terms, there are many more common job terms such as: job, employment, careers, opportunities, and assistant. I also believe that most of the searches for New York and Chicago come from job seekers. Job titles such as writer and editor are also common in job searches as well as other articles.

From the search data it is clear that poetry is a big draw for the site with people searching for terms such as: poetry, cinquain, poems, poem, and cinquains. Freelancing and fiction terms are also abundant. From the search terms alone is easy to put together a profile of poewar.com’s audience as interested in writing related subjects, with a particular emphasis on poetry, employment, freelancing, fiction, technical writing and publishing. They want to know how to accomplish tasks such as finding a job, writing a query letter or writing a poem. Many of them come from major cities such as New York and Chicago.

Beyond search keywords are search keyphrases. Keyphrases are more precise. They tell you exactly what was typed in during a search query. The top twenty keyphrases that brought people to poewar.com are:

� Cinquain

� How to write poetry

� Writing jobs

� Writing exercises

� Query letter

� Writing poetry

� Writing careers

� Writing

� How to write poems

� Query letters

� How to write a query letter

� Creative writing exercises

� Cinquains

� Poewar

� Careers in writing

� Poetry writing

� Writing poems

� Poetry tips

� Freelance

� Freelance writing

Looking at these keyphrases, it is clear just how dominant poetry is within the top searches for my site. Nine out of the top 20 search keyphrases are related to poetry. Careers and employment are also well represented, as are freelancing, query letters and writing exercises. No technical writing topic made the top twenty searches, which further indicates a problem with that topic. Looking at the top 75 searches, only the keyphrase technical writing jobs refers to technical writing at all.

This leads me to ask a question. Are people simply not interested in technical writing, or are people who search for technical writing not finding my site? Using a combination of tools, it is possible for me to find out. The first step is to find a way to compare phrases. Poetry Writing and Technical Writing are phrases that are similar in structure and both topics have many articles on my site, as we saw in the list of the top 150 articles I discussed earlier. Poetry Writing, however, is the sixteenth most popular search keyphrase leading people to my site while Technical Writing does not appear in the top 75. Using a Keyword Selector Tool found at Yahoo Publishing’s advertising site, Overture, I can compare the relative popularity of the 2 terms (“Keyword Selector Tool”). Technical writing is listed as receiving 14,237 searches in the month of March while poetry writing was listed as receiving 3,933 (note that the number of Yahoo searches is for their site only and is far less than the number of total searches done on the web, but the differences in search sizes should hold true for most major search engines). According to this, then, there is more interest in the term Technical Writing than in the term Poetry Writing, so the problem does not lie in a lack of potential interest in my articles.

The next step is to look as where my site appears when one searches for the term. For that, I will use google.com because it is the most popular search engine in the world and brings poewar.com the bulk of its traffic from search engines. When I search for the term Poetry Writing on google.com, my site appears in the third position in their list of web sites. That means that someone searching for the term can quickly spot poewar.com. When I search for the term Technical Writing on google.com, poewar.com appears in the 40^th position in their list of sites. Few people look that far down a list of sites before they start clicking, so it is no surprise that I am not receiving much traffic from that search term. By looking at the number of searches and the relative search position, it becomes clear that there is an audience for the subject of technical writing, but poewar.com is not reaching a substantial portion of that audience. For some reason, google.com does not assign as much importance to my articles about technical writing as it does to my articles about poetry. This shows just how important search engine placement is in the success of a site. For all but 11 of the top 75 search keyphrases leading to poewar.com, the web site is ranked in the top ten search engine positions for that keyphrase.

By now, we have a pretty clear idea of what people who come to the site are looking for and what they are reading. That only tells part of the story, however. In order to get a clearer idea of the audience, we must find out some details about who the people who come to the site are. A quick look at the site statistics tells me the following for the month of March 2006:

� 74.8% of my visitors used windows computers and 6.7% of my visitors used Macintosh computers while unknown and others made up the rest of the visitors.

� The web browsers people used to reach my site included: Internet Explorer 60.1%, Firefox 14.9%, Mozilla 5.4% and Safari 3.8%.

� Visitors to my web site tended to arrive at their highest numbers during the midmorning to afternoon hours (Mountain Standard Time) and at their fewest numbers at night and in the early morning.

� The number of visitors was at its highest on Mondays and Tuesdays and at its lowest on Saturdays and Sundays.

� 73.3 % of my users accessed my site directly, 13.5% accessed my site via a link, 12.7% accessed my site through a search engine and 0.3% used an unknown method.

Unfortunately, the statistical tracking program that I normally use for my site was unable to track the country of origin for my audience so I cannot give information about that for March 2005. In recent days, however, I was able to find another package to track that. According to sitemeter.com, from April 23^rd to April 27^th, my audience was made up of United States 86%, Canada 6% and United Kingdom 3%, with no other country generating over 1% of the site traffic (Site Meter – Counter).

From these stats, I believe we can come to a few additional conclusions about my audience. Some of these conclusions may seem obvious, but now they are backed up by evidence. My readers are primarily from my own country of origin, the United States. Those who are not from the United States are mainly from English speaking countries. They are not as likely to visit the site on the weekend or at night as they are during the afternoons in the middle of the week, which indicates to me that my site is used as more of a tool than as recreation. It also reflects that 95% of my readership (as shown by the user percentages for the United States and Canada) resides in similar time zones to mine. My audience is knowledgeable enough about computers to use a web browser and most of them use a Windows-based system running Internet Explorer.

Perhaps a more useful way to get an idea of poewar.com�s audience is to look at the web pages that link to poewar.com. Almost all of the pages that link to poewar.com have some emphasis on writing. Of the Top 100 (by traffic sent to the site) web pages that link to poewar.com fifteen belong to accredited schools (based on their .edu addresses) and many others have an educational focus as well. These other educational sites include webenglishteacher.com (Beard), knowledgehound.com (Knowledge Hound) and internet4classrooms.com (Brooks and Byles). The site webenglishteacher.com, in fact, has 4 pages among the top 100 pages that link to poewar.com, including the top page. That site accounts for approximately 15% of poewar.com�s traffic from links. The visitors coming from links through .edu sites and other educational sites would appear to be people interested in education. The people who set up the links obviously were trying to assist that sort of audience. These links indicate that people come to my site seeking educational articles and that the people leading them to my site feel it can offer that to them. The .edu sites that link to mine include elementary schools, colleges and universities, so my site appears to be of interest to people at a variety of educational levels. The top 100 links to my site send visitors to the following topics / areas:

� 15 links to the front page (www.poewar.com/)

� 14 links to writing exercises

� 10 links to the writing employment section

� 10 links to fiction-related articles (not exercises)

� 9 links to poetry-related articles

� 8 links to the freelance opportunities section

� 8 links to the glossary of writing careers

� 7 links to freelancing articles

� 5 links to technical writing articles

� 5 links to general writing articles

� 4 links to the site map

� 3 links to essay related articles

� 1 link to a book review

� 1 link to a writer�s conference announcement

These links show what the authors of other web sites believe are the most valuable topics on my web site. Between the writing exercises and the general fiction writing articles, it is clear that fiction and the craft of writing are topics that other web site authors believe are of interest to their audience. Poetry writing is also of interest to other web site authors as are articles about freelancing and writing careers. Not surprisingly, the freelance opportunities section and the writing employment section also attracted interest. The 5 links to technical writing articles show that there is some interest in that topic. Considering the scarcity of essay writing articles on my site, that topic once again proves to be of high interest to other web site authors.

One more way to gauge the audience for poewar.com is to look at its peers. There are several sources I can use for this list. Most major search engines, including Google (“Related:http://www.poewar.com/”), Yahoo (“Communications – Writing”) and Alexa (“Related Links for:”) have features that can identify related web sites. I was also lucky enough to recently be selected as a member of the 101 Top Web Sites for 2006 by Writer�s Digest (Hampton). That list is also separated into a smaller section of 29 writer�s web sites. Because there is a wealth of sources, I chose 5 sites that appear on at least 2 out of 4 of those individual lists. These sites are:

� Absolutewrite.com � This site, like mine, covers many areas of writing (Glatzer). The site claims to cover, �writing, screenwriting, playwriting, writing novels, nonfiction, comic book writing, greeting cards, poetry, songwriting.� By looking around the site, I can see that they offer many more writing articles than I do, which explains why the site has a large audience. The site is an effort by many writers, as opposed to my singular effort. The site does differ substantially from poewar.com though because it offers classes and editorial services. It also heavily promotes a newsletter. Unlike my site, absolutewrite.com does not use blogging software and instead seems to rely on discussion forums when creating a community. Absolutewrite.com does offer freelance listings, but does not appear to offer listings for permanent jobs.

� Writergazette.com � The opening statement on this site reads, �Bringing you free writer-related articles, paying call for submission and freelance job postings, contests, resources, tips, and more to help induce, improve, and promote your writing career – every week� (Barrett). Like absolutewrite.com, this site spends much of its space promoting an email newsletter. In fact, due to the promotion of the newsletter, many articles do not appear until the user scrolls down to them. The site is difficult to navigate, but does feature a substantial list of articles. Like absolutewrite.com, this site seems to feature many different writers.

� Writersweekly.com � The name of the site is very appropriate; this site features the web version of a weekly email newsletter that is primarily about freelance writing (Writers Weekly). This site comes in a more blog-like format, although it doesn�t use any blogging software I am familiar with. The site also serves as a sales tool for a series of e-books about the writing business.

� Writershome.com � This site is also dedicated to opportunities for freelance writing (Writers Home). The site serves as a freelance job board for writers. It is a good looking site, but I found very little content on it. It does offer freelance writers the opportunity to post their resumes. I have thought about doing that with my web site but while it might drive some traffic, I would hate to get a novice writer�s hopes up that someone is out there reading their resume when the chances seem so slim that it would happen.

� Burryman.com � This site focuses on links to other writing sites. Its lists of link are extensive, probably numbering in the thousands (Burry Man). The site is similar to poewar.com in the mid-nineties, when it also was a large collection of links. In addition to being a site considered similar to my own, burryman.com has links to poewar.com and brings it a moderate amount of visitors. Burryman.com also features a newsletter.

While this is hardly an exhaustive list of my peers, it does point out that there are sites similar to poewar.com that try different things. Each of these web sites featured a newsletter. This is a concept I�ve considered in the past, but haven�t pursued. The main reason I haven�t pursued it is because it would lock me into a weekly or monthly cycle of creating the newsletter and its content. I have never kept a strict schedule for adding creative work to my sites (though I post jobs almost every day). The advantage of a newsletter is that it continually reminds people about your web site, which increases the likelihood of repeat traffic. There are many downsides, however, such as the increased amount of non-writing work (putting the newsletter together and maintaining the mailing list) and the possibility of your newsletter or mailing list leading to spam or being mistaken for spam.

It appears that my main competition frequently uses multiple authors. I have solicited articles from other writers on occasion, but for the most part my site has been a solo effort and will probably remain a solo effort. It also appears that my main competition uses their sites to sell other goods and services and pressures people to become members or at least sign up for a mailing list. I do intent to market any books I publish through my web sites, but I will never pursue a hard sales push. I find those things annoying when I visit other web sites and I try not to annoy my own audience too much.

What these peer sites say about my audience is that the audience is used to a substantial amount of sales pressure from other sites that they do not receive at poewar.com. While my site does run text-based advertising and links to books at Amazon.com, it does not aggressively market any product and tries to keep its advertising tasteful and non-intrusive (Amazon). I believe that this is an aspect of my site that the audience probably appreciates.

After evaluating the data I have assembled and processed, I believe I can draw some conclusions about the audience my site is reaching, and needs to reach. The community that my site reaches is primarily composed of Americans and other English-literate cultures. The audience is computer literate and knows how to navigate the web. For the most part, the audience views poewar.com as either educational or as a tool toward accomplishing a task such as finding work or deciding upon a career. The bulk of my audience consists of people who already know about the site and access it directly. About a third of my audience comes to the site through links and search engine queries, which means they are probably first time visitors who may or may not become repeat visitors. Neither type of visitor tends to return to the site more than a few times a month.

Beyond those shared factors, my audience is divided into a few distinct groups. The largest group comes to my site looking for freelance or permanent work. These people are the most likely to be repeat visitors because the information they access changes on a near daily basis. If they have been to other sites dedicated to freelance writing or writing employment, they may have been subjected to far more intense sales pitches and attempts to get them to pay for memberships or services. Chances are, this group consists of people who either want to start a career as a writer or editor, or are somewhere in the early or middle portion of their career and looking for a new job.

The next largest group comes to my site looking for creative or craft articles that are primarily related to poetry, fiction or writing exercises. A major portion of this audience is presumably students that are led to the site via various links from academically-themed web sites. These students also appear to have significant interest in articles about essay writing, an area that is only lightly covered by existing articles. Another portion of the audience seeking these creative and craft pages is composed of novice adult writers who come to the site through various links from other writing-themed web sites.

Both classes of groups, students and novice writers, also appear to be interested in articles about writing careers. There are a significant number of articles about these subjects on my site, and they seem to be reaching most of them, with the exception of my articles about technical writing. This is a section that is currently underperforming, although there does seem to be a potential audience for the subject.

A small but very important audience community is composed of webmasters from academic or writing-themed web sites. This audience consists of educators or writers who are interested in the various topics I write about, but are primarily motivated by a desire to serve their own audience. This is an important audience because they have the capability of bringing more people to poewar.com. This is a community I already reach out to through link exchanges and some conversations. For the most part, however, I have not pursued this audience as aggressively as I should.

With a clearer picture of my audience, I can now start looking at the actions I can take to better serve my existing audience and to reach out to new communities. This paper is not about planning changes to my site, but there are some items that do stick out, such as the need to find an audience for my existing technical writing articles and the need to pursue more articles about essay writing and writing exercises. Also, with a fuller picture of the audience of other web site authors, I now know who to focus upon if I want to start reaching out to that audience, perhaps by using a personal and focused email campaign.

The benefit of understanding my audience is that I can now take that audience into account whenever I write new articles or alter the design of my web site. I know who I am serving, and with effort and intelligent planning, I believe that I can improve service to those communities.

Works Cited

Amazon. 29 Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This is the site of the well-known popular media reseller that I often link to from poewar.com.

Barrett, Krista. The Writer Gazette. Apr. 2006. Topzone Systems Inc. 29 Apr. 2006 . “Bringing you free writer-related articles, paying call for submission and freelance job postings, contests, resources, tips, and more to help induce, improve, and promote your writing career – every week.”

Beard, Carla. Web English Teacher. 25 Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This site is aimed at English educators and provies a catalog of articles on the web that English teachers would find useful in the classroom.

Boren, Ryan, and Matt Mullenweg. WordPress. 29 Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This web site is the home of the blogging program that is also called Wordpress. This is the software I use to run the majority of my site.

Brooks, Susan, and Bill Byles. Internet4Classrooms. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This web site is dedicated to K-12 teaching methods and tools.

The Burry Man Writers Center. 2006. 30 Apr. 2006 . This site focuses on links to other writing sites. Its lists of link are extensive, probably numbering in the thousands. The site is similar to poewar.com in the mid-nineties, when it also was a large collection of links. In addition to being a site considered similar to my own, burryman.com has links to poewar.com and brings it a moderate amount of visitors.

�Communications – Writing in the Yahoo! Directory.� Yahoo. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This is the section in which Yahoo lists poewar.com along with other similar web sites.

Glatzer, Jenna. Absolute Write. Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . The site claims to cover, “writing, screenwriting, playwriting, writing novels, nonfiction, comic book writing, greeting cards, poetry, songwriting.”

Google AdSense. Google. 29 Apr. 2006 . This web site allows web authors to find sponsorship for their own web sites through a system called contextual advertising, which matches the subject of the advertisements with the subjects of the web site.

Hampton, Robin M. �101 Top Web Sites for 2006.� Writer�s Digest. Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . Writer�s Digest is a major magazine, web site and book publisher in the field of writing. Their 101 Top Web Sites list is a yearly staple.

Hewitt, John Charles. PoeWar . 28 Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This is the site I am providing analysis for. The site itself has existed since 1999 ang the blog on the site has existed since 2003.

�Keyword Selector Tool.� Overture. Mar.-Apr. 2006. Yahoo. 29 Apr. 2006 . This is a valuable web research tool that allows people to enter in a search term and find out how many searches were performed for that term during the previous calendar month.

Knowledge Hound. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . This site is focused on how to do things, and does not focus exclusively on English or writing.

�related:http://www.poewar.com/?.� Google. 29 Apr. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . A list of web sites that Google believes are similar to www.poewar.com.

�Related Links for: poewar.com/?.� Alexa. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . Alexa provides both a search engine and web site analysis and ranking. it is an excellent location for mining information about other web sites.

Site Meter – Counter and Statistics Tracker. 27 Apr. 2006. Site Meter. 27 Apr. 2006 .

�Statistics of poewar.com (2006-03).� PoeWar. 29 Apr. 2006. Awstats. 29 Apr. 2006 . This is the base statistical page used for analysis of the site poewar.com. The tracking program is a product of Awstats. This page is a duplicate of a page that connot be reached by the public.

Writers Home. 2006. 29 Apr. 2006 . this is a forum for freelance writers and potential clients to get together. It looks well designed, but poorly populated.

Writers Weekly. 29 Apr. 2006. Booklocker.com, Inc. 29 Apr. 2006 . This site features the web version of a weekly email newsletter that is primarily about freelance writing. The site also serves as a sales tool for a series of e-books about the writing business.

Related links

• Fifteen Writing Exercises (0.500)
• How to Create Fictional Characters Using Adversity (0.500)
• 12 Exercises for Improving Dialog (0.500)
• How to Create Fictional Characters (0.500)
• Writing Productivity -- Using an Idea Log (0.500)

Contact John Hewitt

Writing Content and Web Consulting

Email: hewitt@poewar.com
Phone: (520) 261-6104
LinkedIn: poewar
Twitter: @poewar
Facebook: pwar2