Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

For your first question (how to roughly estimate that number), you might want to have a look at your analytics, Audience -> Behavior ->New vs Returning -> Returning to know the exact number of returning visitors each day, that would be a better estimate than dividing the return visits by # of posts.

You mean seeing the flow of only returning visitors? That gives on average 110+ return visitors a day for last 30 days.

Still, this is equally distant estimate as mine. We can never know if it's 110 readers visiting daily, or they are 220 in number visiting alternate days ..or its 330 visiting every three days..and so on. I am taking it for the lack of more accurate measure.

May be recency and days since last visit, those data can be combined in to some formula one day, that can give a more reliable number.

Thanks Suba!

I am not sure where you are seeing the average, it shows day to day numbers for me as graph (like all the other analytics graphs for the past one month). So that gives me exactly how many people visited (repeat visitors) on on say Jan 31st. If you want to filter it further you can filter based on "/" which shows how many repeat visitors came to home page (most certainly regular readers) or by any posts (mostly subscribers/followers coming directly from mail/twitter/whatever). HTH.

Another thought is to evaluate the time-on-site statistics. For example, Awstats will tell you how long a visitor stayed on site. I tend to ignore an traffic under two minutes, which is the bulk of the traffic. If someone is to be a reader, they need to have time to read. For example, you could look at end of month statistics over time and count the number of people who spent more than five minutes on site. Those are readers. Then remember that the actual number is probably smaller, because some are return visitors.

This is a better approach that RSS counts and list subscriber counts, because you have no idea how engaged RSS and list subscribers are. Some people sign up for RSS feeds and lists and never pay attention thereafter.

I am perfect example at that. 100s of blogs on my rss, I never open rss, I rather visit the blogs I like frequently.

For your first question (how to roughly estimate that number), you might want to have a look at your analytics, Audience -> Behavior ->New vs Returning -> Returning to know the exact number of returning visitors each day, that would be a better estimate than dividing the return visits by # of posts.

You mean seeing the flow of only returning visitors? That gives on average 110+ return visitors a day for last 30 days.

Still, this is equally distant estimate as mine. We can never know if it's 110 readers visiting daily, or they are 220 in number visiting alternate days ..or its 330 visiting every three days..and so on. I am taking it for the lack of more accurate measure.

May be recency and days since last visit, those data can be combined in to some formula one day, that can give a more reliable number.

Thanks Suba!

This is a better approach that RSS counts and list subscriber counts, because you have no idea how engaged RSS and list subscribers are. Some people sign up for RSS feeds and lists and never pay attention thereafter.

I figured if my subscription base is growing, people read me and like what they read. Otherwise what's the point of subscribing, right? I never try to guess what my readers like because it is a really difficult thing to do. You cannot please everyone and write what you think they would like to hear. They came to read YOU. So, I'd keep writing what inspires and matters to YOU. 

My method is subtracting unique visitors from total visitors in a month. Suppose I have 10000 unique and 13,000 total visitors. Then my repeat visitors will be 3000.

Now I divide 3000 by the numeber of posts written in the month which is 16. The total is now around 200.

Roughly I estimated 30 are from yakezie. So 170 are my non yakezie readers who generally read my posts.

There are major flaws in this approach, I know. But looking for better alternative if they exist. 

And the reader taste, I have no clue. I am a big failrue, readers don't call me, twit me or mail me with their opinion.

People claim that they know what their readers taste is...so I asked the question how do they know this. 

It's about questioning the system.

My point is that there's no precise way to figure it out, so people are giving you methods that they use to try to estimate it.  No one's claiming that their suggestion will get the true measure of who their readers are. 

I suppose you could do a survey, but then most people probably wouldn't respond unless there was an incentive, in which case you would likely get people who enter every online contest and that would skew your results.

The only way I have to guage this is to write articles that seem to drive more traffic, and then I check loyalty stats on analytics.  But you make a good point, I encourge readers to leave more feedback by they rarely do.

Do you know if they at all exist? For sure? Do they come and read your most of the posts? DO you know what they prefer and what they not?

I remember checking Alexa a while back which tried to explain my audience demographic.

 

Based on internet averages, funancials.biz is visited more frequently by users who are in the age range 25-34, have no children, are college educated and browse this site from home.

 

I'm assuming mostly chicks visit my site. 

This is your visitor's profile Hunter, not readers'...

We always hear each other mentioning about 'My readers', 'My readers love this and my reader love that...

Well, do you know who are your readers, and how many are they. If you know a rough number, what's your way of getting to that number?

 

The blogs I visit from this group has 10 -20% comments from non Yakezies..for some, 0% non yakezies. So how do you know what your readers like and what they don't.

I am confused and don't know a straight answer. Feel free to give your opinion.

The only way I have to guage this is to write articles that seem to drive more traffic, and then I check loyalty stats on analytics.  But you make a good point, I encourge readers to leave more feedback by they rarely do.

Larry @ The Skilled Investor said:

[NOTE: I cut out my long message from above and just included OnCentAtatimes question.]

Larry you are much more seasoned blogger than me. You know a lot more. But do you mean, the one off search engine visitors are your readers? If they are readers what information you have on them? 

See where I am coming from is..The Simple dollar readers are generally too frugal types, where as GRS readers are more diverse in nature. Ramit Sethi's readers are not in to all out saving, they prefer earning more to save than reducing cost.

Day after day their readers come and read their blog posts. Do you happen to have that clear readership choice known to you?

 

If I count one off search engine visitors as readers then I don't need to think about them while writing, no matter what you write, search engine visitors would come by.

Several years ago, I orchestrated an email group of about 20 bloggers -- most of whomwere in personal finance. (One of the nice things about stumbling across Yakezie recently is that similar activity is far better organized with this website and the group is much larger.)

With this little group of bloggers we tried various things that were cooperative in nature regarding social sites, and the conclusion I reached through all that activity was that you could spend endless hours trying to push up your social traffic, but there was no financial case for doing so. On the contrary, search engine traffic seemed to be focused and motivated to proactively seek out certain information that was implied by their search engine queries. It also seemed that searchers had a much greater tendency to click ads.

I reached these conclusions not because I could parse the search engine versus social traffic on a site with both kinds of traffic, but because I had some niche keyword structured personal finance sites that rarely got social traffic. (e.g. Alexa ranks in the millions.) Nevertheless, those keyword sites with limited social traffic yielded Adsense revenues significantly out of proportion to the ratio of traffic compared to much higher traffic sites with mixed search engine and social traffic. (To be real, the per site Adsense revenues might buy a cheap lunch, but once running I rarely had to tend the niche sites again.)

You said that "The Simple dollar readers are generally too frugal types, where as GRS readers are more diverse in nature. Ramit Sethi's readers are not in to all out saving, they prefer earning more to save than reducing cost." and maybe that characterizes their readers because that is the subject that they stick to when they write. However, your original question was something like how do you "know" who your readers are. I only know through inference from the analytics that I mentioned.

I write what I write (usually focused on investments), because that is what I want to write or because I have already written something for a client and it does not take much time to generalize it and re-purpose it for the web. I am not trying to build a regular readership as a primary web activity. If visitors come back, that is fine, but it is not the focus. (That said, I do try to build a mailing list with a free ebook giveaway and a newsletter. However, the longer term purpose there is for product sales.)

I do not agree with the idea that "I don't need to think about them (search engine visitors) while writing, no matter what you write, search engine visitors would come by." Search engines are brainless and have absolutely no semantic understanding of any content. They just parse, compare, correlate, and index text strings using algorithms with incredible complexity. Search algorithm complexity is driven by the endless gaming activities of webmasters to claw their way to the top of the SERPs. Getting to the top of the SERPs means more traffic and more money. If you ignore keywords, you ignore probably the most financially lucrative segment of your visitors.

If a blogger just writes whatever comes to mind without paying attention to the search terms that people use to find information, then they are far less likely to be found via search engines. Thus, a blogger then only has "regular" readers who probably never click an ad and never support the blogger financially. Unless the blogger has a product to promote and can get their regular readers to buy it, there is no business model for blogging. Virtually all visitors think content is free, because it is. Makes it hard to pay the rent.

Therefore, for everything I am going to post to the web, I do a quick and dirty 5 to 10 minute keyword analysis on the Adwords keywords tool. Many times I find that there are equivalent 2, 3, and 4 word keyword strings with ten times the search traffic when compared to the words that I would use instinctively when I write. I am conscious of the keywords that I include in the post title, because these are the anchor text links back to the post that will influence SERP rankings.

Therefore, I use the terms that more people tend to type as search queries, because if I do not use those words, then my post is far less likely to show up in the SERPs were anyone will find it. Being keyword conscious does not guarantee high rankings, but ignoring keyword data means staying in the weeds with less search traffic and less money.

Hope this second try at an answer was more clear.

Based on internet averages, funancials.biz is visited more frequently by users who are in the age range 25-34, have no children, are college educated and browse this site from home.

I'm assuming mostly chicks visit my site. 

When I do something people don't like, I usually hear about it. For example, I stopped doing monthly spending roundups in August. After the 7th or 8th person emailed to ask why I stopped, I agreed to bring them back in January (even though I REALLY don't like doing them). For that many people to say something, especially when their emails start with "I always read but don't usually comment," I figure it's pretty important to them for whatever reason.

I get most of what I know about my readers from my StatCounter stats and/or Google Analytics. 60% of my traffic is return traffic, so I can look at my average unique visits over a month and estimate how many people read on a regular basis. StatCounter also lets me see how many times each IP address has visited, what they read, their entry/exit pages, etc.