(I’ve had this blog post in my drafts folder for almost a year, it’s about time I actually write it.)

Everywhere I turn I’m being told that I need more. I’m told I should have more friends and like more pages on Facebook. I should have more connections on LinkedIn. I should have a bigger house, a larger yard and more stuff. However, when I was learning about UX design and I asked myself “Who do I want to look at my website?” I realized that I didn’t care about the quantity of visitors, I care about quality of visitors.

I want to be a software developer in Colorado, so I care if people in the Colorado tech community look at my site. While it’s entertaining to me to see that a few people in Brazil found my site useful in the past month, it doesn’t work towards my goal. I could have 10,000 visitors to my site, but if none of them can help me towards my goal it doesn’t make much sense to attract them.

So how do I attract the visitors I want?

If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you are either a person who can make hiring decisions regarding software developers or you’re a curious programmer. These are the 2 personas I created when I started this site. I attract visitors I want by:

• Writing about them, their companies and their achievements.
• Reaching out to the people I want to visit my site through social media.
• Writing about things that interest the people I want to visit my site ( I need to do this more).

How do I measure that my efforts are working?

This is the hard part. Counting visitors is easy. Judging the quality of visitors is hard. There’s an entire industry created to do just this! They do surveys and focus groups and find all sorts of ways to find out more about visitors. I don’t have the interest or resources to do this though. I simply use Google Analytics to tell me how many people from Colorado are visiting my site. About 1/2 of my visitors (just over 100 per month) are from Colorado and I’m pretty happy with this.

How do you measure the quality of your visitors?