If you are one of Humboldt County's prestigious bloggers, like the Carson Park Ranger, each time you finish writing a post and are about to Publish, you might think to yourself “is anyone actually reading this? Does anyone really care about what I have to say?”

My husband Jim and I have had our travel website/blog, LiveWorkDream, for over 18 months. We are faithful about checking our visitor statistics, but we never felt like we had a good handle on what our readers liked or didn't like about the site. We cover topics ranging from fulltime RVing to simple living, and we've often wondered what we should devote more time to, and what we should scrap altogether.

We wanted to put aside any doubts we had about our work, so in November, we created an online reader survey poll, with a Wordpress plug-in called C Forms II (Wordpress is the open source, free software we use to publish our blog). As an incentive for people to respond, we threw in five prizes - copies of Fodors' Essential USA road trip travel guide that we received from the publisher.

As the surveys started coming in, we were intrigued with what we discovered. Among many of the findings, we learned new things like:

Discovery #1: More people read our blog on a weekly basis than daily.

The Conclusion: Our readers are busy and choose to catch up with our posts all at once, perhaps skipping through them until they find a topic that interests them. We probably shouldn't post more than three times a week so people don't feel overwhelmed when they do visit.

Discovery #2: Instead of subscribing to our blog in an RSS Reader, and perusing posts directly in it (a Reader is like an electronic newspaper of your own, which gathers up all of the latest work by the blogs and websites that you've told it to monitor), most of our audience physically comes back to our site each time they want to read it.

The Conclusion: Wow, we get bookmarked and people actually remember to visit at least once a week. This is a huge compliment.

Also, while we didn't ask their ages, this leads us to believe that the majority of our readers are in the 40 and over crowd, many of whom don't have the desire or time to get into the latest web technologies. Instead, they choose to continue monitoring websites like ours, by bookmarking within their browser instead of an RSS Reader.

Discovery #3: Most readers find our monthly expense reports to be useful.

The Conclusion: Our readers are curious about what it costs to live the way we do, and are perhaps comparing our spending against theirs. For the foreseeable future, I guess I'm stuck playing bean counter at the end of each month.

Discovery #4: Based on their feedback about Twittering and Digging, social networking isn't something our readers are doing. Most don't Twitter, and they definitely don't spend a lot of time using the social bookmarking toolbars on our blog either (In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and share with specified people or groups inside certain online “networks.”)

The Conclusion: Again, we think that this is a reflection of our readers' age bracket. It was good to learn this about them, because as more social networking plug-ins become available for us to add to our site, we know that this probably isn't something we should spend a lot of time implementing.

Discovery #5: The top 3 things people want to read about on our site are: “Fulltiming,” “Simple Living” and “RV Technology”

The Conclusion: Our core readers are interested in what it's like to live a simple life in an RV on a fulltime basis. We are happy knowing that we've been writing for the audience we wanted to attract.

Discovery #6: Almost none of our friends and family filled out the survey. The most enthusiastic respondents who enjoy our site, are total strangers.

The Conclusion: Our friends and family know how boring we really are and don't buy into that road tripping, freewheelin' hippie image we have on the web.

Overall, it seems that our readers are there for the blog itself, not for the rest of the website, which includes a storefront and a road trip songs page, among other things. They just want to read about life on the road. While some things can be omitted or cleaned up (like not talking about politics, according to a few respondents), our readers have affirmed that our approach is working well.

If you have a blog or any kind of website, we highly recommend publishing a survey. If you don't know how to do this, get to know members of Humboldt's very own Redwood Technology Consortium. Although many RTC members are, like our readers, over 40, they are some of the most tech savvy, enthusiastic tech evangelists I've ever met!

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Rene Agredano and her husband/business partner Jim Nelson publish LiveWorkDream, an RV road trip sabbatical website that covers their adventures as they search for their ideal place in which to live and work. They have been members of the Redwood Technology Consortium since 1998.

Copyright 2009, Eureka Times Standard Newspaper. The print version of this article first appeared in the 1/15/09 edition of the Times Standard.