A Welcome Mat for Your Global Visitors

On February 4^th, I decided to add a new feature, ClustrMaps, which tracks visitors to three of my blogs and helps me know what countries my readers are from.  Within just three weeks, I could see that I had visitors from every continent to one of my popular blogs, The Sovereign!  (Click here to see the list of countries.  This blog has had 12,500 visitors since December of 2006.)

I also look at WordPress statistics to see what people are reading.  I am using the list of countries from ClustrMaps and the statistics from WordPress to plan more evangelistic links and some future foreign language translations for the most visited posts.  For instance, two popular pages on our Family News blog, “God Knows Who You Should Marry” has had over 500 readers and “When Your First Child Leaves Home for College,” over 300.  In these true stories, I point my visiting readers to God.  This summer, I am hoping to get at least a Spanish and a German translation of these articles, and more, if my family and friends are willing to translate them for me.

I don’t necessarily know what the most popular posts will be at the time I write them, so, for example, after I knew our photo of a Space Shuttle launch on our family site was very popular, I added a link in the post to a testimony of two Christian rocket scientists.  (This post has had 3,600 visitors.)  On another popular post with a photo of a butterfly, I included a link to why butterflies could not have evolved.  The site itself, Mike and Sus Family News, has had over 14,000 visitors.  All my blogs have evangelistic and pre-evangelistic links sprinkled throughout, so, hopefully, even the most random visitor could find a Gospel presentation.

See the upper left corner of this page for the standard two links I have on all my blogs.  First of all, I chose a video presentation of the Gospel because videos are very popular and secondly, I have a link so visitors will know where to go to read the Bible in their own language.  Since I have a lot of links to Bible verses in my blogs, I am praying that visitors will notice the link and find their way to a Bible translation in their language.  Bible Gateway has over fifty languages available.

What are you doing to “greet” the visitors to your blog?