I wanted to make a website for the yearbook club and post some of these photos in galleries. It’s a great way to promote the yearbook and the kids like seeing themselves online. There were some legal issues that I’m working out with the administration, but there were also some technical issues.

Although I obviously can create and host my own website, I don’t have access to web space with php hosting for the yearbook club. I didn’t want to mix school stuff with my own stuff, so I didn’t want to host it here. The simplest solution for me (which I also use for class blogs) was a free blog hosted on WordPress.com.

That is, until I realized that I couldn’t easily embed slideshows from other websites (i.e. Picasa). Doh! The embed and iframe tags that are usually used to include slide shows gets wiped out by WordPress’ security.

I figured out a work around, though. http://www.slideshare.net/ allows you to create and host unlimited slideshows for free. They also offer an option to embed the slideshow into a WordPress blog, and its compatible with a free WordPress.com blog. This solved my technical problems and I don’t have to worry about storage space.

Shortly, I’m going to write up an article about this for Associated Content. I’ll link to it when it’s published. In the meantime, here’s a sample gallery. The pictures are just of my backyard. I’m still working on the legal issues, so I haven’t actually hosted any slideshows of students yet.

I came up with the idea while reading through the IRS documentation about the Hope Credit, Lifetime Learning Credit, and Tuition and Fees Deduction.

I just started graduate school, and next year I’ll be taking advantage of one of these tax benefits. While reading the IRS page, I thought it’d be nice if there was a simplified version that explained the important details without getting hung up on all the legalese.

I don’t know if I accomplished that, but I learned a lot about the tax credits while working on it!

In addition to summarizing the IRS documentation, I created a simple calculator to estimate how much each tax credit/deduction would net you on your tax return. It works nice, and I like the styling of it. If I get around to it, though, I want to make it work via AJAX (currently it posts to a php file and then redirects back to the page).

I also plan on posting a series of quick “Question of the Days” about the tax credits and deductions.

I don’t plan on spending a lot of time on the site – maybe an hour or two each week adding QotDs, and a few hours promoting/linking throughout the web – and I’m curious to see how well it’ll do in SERPs and, more importantly, PR. Cause, you know, PR can equal cash.

If you’re lucky enough to still be in college, you may have gobs of time to waste. Those of us that have moved on to the real world don’t have that luxury. Blogging and publishing on the ‘net needs to fit into an already busy schedule.

With that in mind, it’s definitely worthwhile to take stock of your blogging habits and make sure you’re working efficiently. If you don’t budget your time effectively, you’ll either burn out quickly or fail to meet your goals.

I found some tips for budgeting your blogging time in a recent post on Problogger. It’s got some great tips, but there’s one I’d like to point out in particular: don’t waste your time on social networking sites.

But Don’t Social Networking Sites Bring Traffic?

Yes and no.

Digg and StumbleUpon can definitely bring in big numbers, but that’s not going to happen just because you submit your article. If you submit the article, it won’t be very long before it drops off the page of recent entries – and it’ll be lost in oblivion forever.

In order for your article to get rated well, move up the rankings a bit, and draw some real traffic, you’re going to need other people to submit your post and/or review it. That probably means that people are coming to your post by another means (search engine traffic, RSS subscribers, links) and then Digging or Stumbling your article.

In other words, write a good article and wait for other people to Digg it. If you spend a lot of time Digging and Stumbling your own articles you’ll probably end up at best wasting your time and at worst being labeled a spammer.

What About Making Networks on Social Networking Sites?

You might be thinking, “What if I make a deep network on a social networking site? Won’t that help drive a lot of traffic when I submit an article?”

If you can rise to be one of the top users of the site, then sure. But be prepared to spend a lot of time Digging, Stumbling, Redit-ing, or whatever. Chances are you don’t have that much time (if you still want to blog, wake up for your real job, and keep your family), so focus on the things that are realistically attainable.

There’s a nice quote in the ProBlogger post that sums this up:

A better use of your time is to write a Digg-worthy post, or a post that will spread like wildfire on StumbleUpon or Delicious — not because you’re friends with lots of the users, but because it’s insanely useful, interesting, controversial, or what have you.

Use Social Networking Sites Passively

My advice would be to use social networking sites passively.

Write great articles and then include a bookmarking bar under the title and at the end. If people think it’s Digg-worthy, they’ll Digg. If they don’t, it won’t matter if you Digg it.

Digg seems to me to be a tool for content consumers, and as a blogger you fill the role of a content producer. There’s just no efficient, feasible way for you to manipulate a social networking site into sending you traffic – you need to rely on the consumers to promote it for you.

Some things are well known. We all know keyword density is important so that Google’s crawler knows what your site is about. Titles are important. Text needs to be discoverable.

This is another reason that I like writing things at Associated Content – and one reason it is in some ways better than a blog.

How Do You Know What Works?

Trial and error.

Sure, you can read about keyword density and search engine optimization all day. You’ll never know if it works until you try it. And you’ll never know it was your optimization that worked until compare a handful of articles on the same topic with different styles.

Think of it as an experiment of sorts. By writing about a single topic with three or four different angles, you can see what works and what doesn’t. You might pick up some trailing phrases that you didn’t think of just by writing the same piece with a slightly different angle and some alternate word choices.

Do Your Readers Want to Read Five Articles About the Same Thing?

Probably not. If you’re trying to build a regular readership for your blog, you don’t want to come out with five slightly different articles about how NCAA football needs a playoff.

Ahh, but are you worried about subscribers at Associated Content? Well, some people are. I’m not. I see it as a playground to write things that are destined just for the search engine minefield.  My writings at AC vary across so many topics that it doesn’t really make sense for people to subscribe to it.

That makes it the perfect place to test out writing techniques. For example, today I wrote up two pieces about Fallout 3 – How Do I Finish Chapter 6 of Fallout 3 Without Killing Everyone and How to Complete Chapter 6 “Tranquility Lane” Without Losing Karma.

Each article says substantively the same thing – it tells the reader how to complete the quest in a certain way. They do so in different ways, though, from the title right down to the conclusion.

Oh, and Get Your Backlinks While You’re At It

Like I’ve written before, Associated Content is also a great place to create some links back to your own content on your blog.

In this case, I’m writing a lengthier, illustrated walkthrough on Chapter 6 in Fallout 3 on this site. The Associated Content articles tackle the same topic in a more concise way, and they include a few well crafted links back to my content here. A reader that finds the AC articles could want more information and click on the links back here – earning me more traffic.

I wouldn’t say that Associated Content is better than a blog or that it has more earning potential in the long run. It is, however, a good supplement to a blog – allowing you to hone your SEO practices and improve your site at the same time.

Why don’t you go flex your SEO muscles at Associated Content? It’s a great place to test out all those theories without boring your regular readers.

Are blogrolls a good idea? Do they instill confidence in your readers, or do they just bleed search engine juice from your site?

The Positives: An Informed Author is a Trusted Author

There certainly is something to be said for a blogroll of sorts. When a new user finds your site, he may want to poke around and see who you are.

One place to look is the About page. This should give the reader some information. Another place to look is the blog roll. If you’re supposed to be an authority on the topic, who else do you read?

You can’t possibly keep up with the times if you work in a vacuum, so it’s of interest to the reader how you keep up with things.

A blogroll can also be useful for someone looking for more information.

For example, I’m always looking for more education blogs to follow. I’ve found a ton of tech-related blogs (duh), but very few that are written by Social Studies teachers. Whenever I stumble on a new education blog, I browse through the blogroll looking for something written by a Socials Studies teacher.

The Negatives: Sitewide Links Are Bad for SEO

There are definitely some downsides to blogrolls, though. Some people might not care so much, but if you worry about SEO then you should be worried about that giant list of sitewide links.

You see, sitewide links are like a giant drain on your search engine juice. Each page contains a certain amount of page rank worthiness, and each link on that page spreads the page rank love around.

Sitewide links within your site are great, because they help redistribute that link love. Since every one of your pages links back to the front page, it’ll have a higher pagerank than the individual pages in your site. Likewise, pages like category indexes – linked to by many of your individual pages – will have greater search engine visibility.

Sitewide links going out of your site aren’t so good, though. Each one is a trickle of pagerank going down the drain. One or two sitewide links aren’t going to kill you – but what if you have a dozen pages in your blogroll? Consider how many pages of content you have (hundreds, thousands even?) and multiply that by the number of links in your blogroll.

Even a short list of links – six or seven – could easily work out to thousands of outbound links. Yowza.

To authors who are blogging for a smaller audience and aren’t concerned with search engine traffic, this isn’t a big deal. If you’re in the market to monetize your blog, though, that should concern you a great deal.

I also think that sidebars can easily get over-crowded. With other necessary items (recent posts, categories, archive links, ads, etc) there just isn’t a lot of real estate to give up for that a list of links.

What to Do? Compromise.

I’ve decided to go with a compromise of sorts.

For the sake of my readers, I want to have a blogroll available. I want people to know what I read, and I want to reward those sites that I read regularly with some link love.

However, I don’t want to have a dozen or so sitewide links bleeding my search engine juice. I’d like to keep some of that for myself, so people actually find the site!

Instead, I decided to create a separate blogroll page. In actuality, it’s just another post in my index, but you could consider it a static page of sorts.

On the blogroll page, I include a link to a handful of sites that I regularly read. This is likely to change over time as I change my subscriptions, but I’d say that on any given day you’ll find 6-12 sites that I read. This also gives me a chance to add a comment (a sentence or two) about each site, so the reader knows what to expect.

Then, to make sure that readers can easily find it, I put a prominent link to the blogroll page in my header. Along with the About page, I think this provides some good information about me and my site without hurting my search engine placement.

What do you do think? Are you concerned about all those outbound links, or do you just include a blogroll anyway?

Without thinking, I headed over to Google and typed in “Stock Exchange.”  As soon as I hit Submit, I thought, “That ain’t gonna work!  I don’t want the real stock exchange!”

And then I saw the number one result: stock.xchng.  Wow.

Somebody has some good SEO.  They beat out the NYSE, NASDAQ, the Wikipedia entry on the stock exchange, and plenty of other articles that would be more meaningful to most people that searched for “Stock Exchange.”

Or, maybe Google is inside my head and it knows what I want.  Creepy.

So how do you get started? Is it hard to publish your first article at Helium? Not at all.

Each Topic Has Multiple Articles

On a writing site, you would expect to find a collection of articles. You might expect to find a list of titles – and each title represents one article.

This is where Helium is a bit unique. Helium is more like a collection of topics than headlines. For any give headline, there could be anywhere from a half dozen to a hundred articles.

For example, “The best ways to learn how to maintain a computer” has ten different articles. “Should cell phone use be banned while driving,” on the other hand, has 125 articles.

Once an author suggests a topic and submits an article – or the Helium staff creates a topic and requests an article – the topic appears on the site. It’s categorized by topic so that people can find it through browsing. Other users can then write their own article on the same topic.

How Do We Pick an Article to Read?

If there are 125 articles on the same topic, how does a user (or the computer) decide which article to read?

Another unique feature of Helium is the rating process. As well as writing articles for the site, users are asked to rate articles that have already been published.

When rating, you are presented with two articles on the same topic. You read each one and mark which one is better and by how much. The software uses this data to rank the articles from best to worst.

When someone clicks on a headline, they are taken to the #1 rated article. They can then browse other articles on the topic – but chances are they’ll only read the first couple. If you’re rated at the bottom of the heap… your article won’t get read much.

Get Started: Write On an Existing Topic

The easiest way to get started is to simply write on an existing topic.

Browse around the site and find something interesting. There are a number of general categories, and each one has a number of subcategories. You’ll find topics on everything from Religion, to Sports, to the Arts.

Once you’ve found a topic, click on the headline. You may want to read a few of the articles. If you don’t have anything substantially different to say – or if you don’t think you can say it better than it has already been said – then you should keep moving. After all, we don’t need a hundred identical articles under one topic.

If you do have something to add to the conversation, click on the pencil icon. This will take you to the writing screen, where you simply fill in the box and submit.

Your article will be instantaneously published. No review process required! Don’t you love instant gratification?

I’d suggest browsing the site for a while and then writing on some pre-existing topics. This will give you a chance to feel out what goes over well and what doesn’t. If your articles get rated poorly – then something needs to change! Otherwise, you must be doing something right.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

Get a Google Account: Start Reading

If you don’t use Google Reader – or another feed reader – start using one. Until you use RSS feeds on a daily basis, you’ll never know how wonderful they are, and you’ll never know how much your readers may come to rely on them.

Once I decide I like a site, I generally read it through Google Reader. If an article is interesting, I’ll click through to the site and comment on it. Other than that, I rarely go back to the site. Without the RSS reader, I’d probably never return to the site at all.

An RSS reader is a great way to collect relevant readings into one location – so you can sit there with your cup of coffee and read all of the new stuff out in the blogosphere. You can then decide what is important enough to comment on (on someone else’s blog) or respond to (on your own blog).

Share Items – Creating Your Own Feed

With Google Reader, there is a cool “Share” feature. At the bottom of the article you are reading, there’s a list of options – “Add Star,” “Share,” “E-mail,” and “Mark as Read.”

By choosing the “Share” option you are adding that article to a publicly viewable list. That list also generates its own RSS feed – which makes it easy for you to syndicate the feed on your own site. By doing so, you provide your readers with a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

It’s a more targeted and stable than a standard RSS feed that just shows every headline from a given website – which will hopefully make it more useful for your readers.

Grab the Widget, Style Yourself

This feed is available in a standard rss xml file. You could use SimpleXML to parse the feed and display the information yourself. Or, you could use the ready-made widget that Google provides.

The Google widget uses Javascript to access the information while your page is loading. This potentially stops your page from hanging if the Google server is not responding – the rest of the page can load while the RSS feed is updated. You can find this widget by clicking on the “Your shared items” link in Google Reader and clicking on the “put a clip of your shared items” link.

The only problem is that the pre-designed styles don’t offer you a lot of options for making the list blend in with your site’s theme. My suggestion would be to select “None,” for the color scheme. You may also want to leave the title blank, and add your own title to the feed.

If you do this, the feed will be generated with the following HTML. Note: This example uses the “Show item sources” option.

<div id="readerpublishermodule0" class="reader-publisher-module">
<ul>
<li>
  <a class="i" title="Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids" href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/good-for-hunters-bad-for-druids/">Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids</a>
  <div class="s">from <a href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com">For the Horde</a></div>
</li>
<li>
  <a class="i" title="Bornakk: Druids Not to be &quot;Big Green Blobs&quot;" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/Resto4Life/%7E3/279629927/">Bornakk: Druids Not to be "Big Green Blobs"</a>
  <div class="s">from <a href="http://www.resto4life.com">Resto4Life</a></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="f"><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/18391951200330501918/state/com.google/broadcast">Read more...</a></div>
</div>

By taking a look at this example HTML, you can easily style the widget yourself.

The entire thing is contained in a div with class “reader-publisher-module.” Each headline is contained within its own “li.” If you use the option to display the source of the article, it’s in a div with class “s” inside the list item.

My one gripe with Google Reader is I can’t create multiple shared lists. For example, I’ve divided blogs I read into ones related to web development and ones related to World of Warcraft. I’d love to be able to create a shared article list for each topic, so that I can syndicate each one on a different website.

If you want to see this in action, check out my World of Warcraft blog, Rolling Horde. It’s on the right hand side, in the middle column, underneath the recent articles.

I think it’s time to take a step back and look at a site where you can write for profit – without requiring any tech, design, or development savvy. I’ll be working on a complete section about Helium, but in the meantime here’s a quick overview.

Writing for Profit – Revenue Sharing

Helium is another online writing site, similar to Associated Content.

The site is a collection of articles – mostly non-fiction, but fiction and poetry are allowed. It generates revenue through advertising based on its traffic. When you post an article on the site, you carve out a portion of that advertising revenue for yourself.

The basic form of profit on the site is revenue sharing. When you article is read, you get a portion of the advertising revenue that the article’s topic generates. Helium hasn’t released specific details about the monetization formula, but basically more page views leads to more money.

Unfortunately, Helium doesn’t report the number of page views your article gets. It’s difficult to gauge, then, whether Helium pays more per page view than other sites (like Associated Content).

I have a little over 80 articles on the site. Many of these are highly rated – which means they appear towards the topic of their category – but many of them aren’t on highly monetized topics. As a result, I earn an average of $5 per month based on these old articles.

Alternate Forms of Income – Contests and Marketplace

One thing that sets Helium apart is the availability of alternate (and more profitable) sources of income.

At any given time, Helium is usually offering a contest or promotion that can net you a lot of cash. One popular contest format is the “Channel Champion” contest.

A list of topics (20-30) is generated for a given category. Everyone is eligible to write articles in that category for the week, and the most popular author at the end of the week wins a prize. In the past, first place has been $75 and second place has been $25. This can be a good way to build up a repertoire of articles for revenue sharing while also possibly earning a nice bonus.

The most profitable – and unique – section of the site is the marketplace. Publishers come to Heilum and request articles on a given topic. You submit an article on that topic. If your article is chosen, you get paid a premium rate for it. It’s essentially a marketplace for freelance writing.

Although some publishers pay poorly (less than $20 per article), there are many premium publishers. I wrote an article that was purchased for $80, and there are offers available for $100+.

A Final Plus – Community

Another reason I prefer Helium to Associated Content is that there is a strong, friendly community.

The Associated Content forums are generally populated by people complaining about problems with the site. There are some decent discussions if you dig deep enough, but I find little reason to frequent them.

Helium, on the other hand, has worked hard to develop a community within their site. The forums have sections for peer review of articles, suggestions for new features, critiques of the site, and general discussions about writing. Helium employees constantly frequent the forums and you can be assured that any issues you have will be noticed.

Check It Out

The bottom line is that you should check it out. Helium is a great place to start building your online writing portfolio, and it can even net you some real freelance gigs.

The revenue sharing isn’t as strong as Associated Content, from my experience, but you can more than make up for that if you participate in contests and the marketplace. The forums are also a great place to meet up with other writers and practice your craft.

If you’re truly interested in developing as a writer on the ‘net or in print, this is a great place to start. Check it out, and check back here later for a more in depth look at writing at Helium.

So how do you keep on writing? Where do all the new ideas come from?

Everybody’s got their own tricks, but here’s one that I love to use when I’m short on ideas. Go through your search engine logs and see what people are searching for – and not finding.

Here’s an example. Last week I wrote an article on How to Create Style-able CSS Tooltips.

As usual, I was browsing through the Google Analytics data a day or two later. While looking through the Search Engine results (the queries that people used to come to my site), I noticed that someone used the query “gradient background image gimp.”

The odd thing about this was that the article wasn’t about creating background images in Gimp – I just happened to mention at the end that you could use Gimp to create a gradient background image and add it to your tooltip.

This tells me two things.

First, someone is looking for this information. If I write it… they will come.

Second, someone else is not serving this information up. If a user stumbles on one of my articles that just barely mentions the topic, there can’t be a lot of targeted articles out there.

I decided to take the topic and run with it. A few days later, I wrote a simple tutorial about how to create a gradient background image in Gimp. I targeted the article at those major keywords – gradient, background, image, Gimp – and now it’s getting some nice search engine traffic.

So if you’re ever short on ideas, this is a great way to respark that creativity. Look through your search engine logs for queries that bring people in – but don’t bring people to what they’re looking for. Then… give them what they want.