Every once in a while, I look through my Google Analytics data to find new topics to write about.

1. Log into Google Analytics and choose a site.
2. Click on “Traffic Sources” on the left-hand menu.
3. Click on “Keywords” in the new sub-menu.
4. Browse through the hundreds of phrases that people used to find your site.

Here’s the key. Look for search phrases that are questions about things related to your site, but that you haven’t really answered directly. On my photography site, someone searched for “What is black clipping.” I had mentioned the term black clipping in an unrelated post, but this seemed like a good time to write a post explaining exactly what the term means.

Here’s another example, from the same digital photography site. One keyword that a few people used was “canon compatible zoom lenses.” I previously wrote an article about a collection of canon compatible lenses that I had owned. Apparently this isn’t a topic a lot of people wrote about, because that post ranks #1 in Google for the phrase “canon compatible lenses.” That article didn’t really focus on zoom lenses, though, so this coming week I plan on writing up a list of canon compatible zoom lenses.

And, to make it even more sweet, this is a great opportunity to write up a post with lots of links to Amazon… which has the potential to generate some referral income.

So go check out your Google Analytics data and see what people are searching for. They’re practically asking you questions and just waiting for the answers. Give it to them, and you’ll end up with content that people want and more visitors.

For a short time, it worked out well. Through November 2008, when I first launched this site, to December 2008 I kept up with it. After Christmas break, I started school up again in January 2009, and I just couldn’t keep up… the ironic thing was that I found something that I could write about and attract a whole lot of traffic – Fallout 3. Too bad I’m not younger, or I would just keep playing video games and blogging about them. I think I missed out on that boat when I was an avid gamer 10 years ago…

But, alas, I couldn’t keep playing Fallout 3 enough to write about it, and I didn’t have a lot of steam to write about my other topics either. So, this site and my NaBloPoMo pledge both fell by the wayside.

After starting up Digital Photography How To, I’ve been pretty consistent about posting. There have been some lulls, and I’m not doing as much as I originally thought I would… but I’ve come a long way from July. Recently, I came across a link for NaBloPoMo and I thought I’d try it out again. Maybe this time, I’ll make it through January and actually survive…

As part of NaBloPoMo, you can also create a profile page and mini-blog on their site. As if I needed something else to worry about. But, it is a good place to reflect on the actual process of writing that may not be so relevant for my actual blog.

But, you also want some quality to that traffic. Traffic with a high bounce rate – where people come to your site and immediately leave – isn’t so useful. If you have a high enough search volume, that may be ok. But, it’d be nice if people browsed around your site for a while. Users that read four or five pages in a visit increase your traffic numbers (and, therefore, advertising possibilities) a lot faster than one-off bounce visitors.

Today, I was looking through the Google Analytics report for this site. I haven’t been doing a good job of maintaining it, so the traffic isn’t amazing, but there are still a decent number of daily visitors that read some of my old guides/walkthroughs. When I looked for the pages with the lowest bounce/exit rate, I noticed one page that stood out from all the others: How to Complete the Main Quest Line, Chapter 6: Tranquility Lane.

What you see above is the navigation summary for that single page. On the right hand side, you’ll notice one interesting thing: only 15% of the people that get to this page then leave this site. 85% of them click on a link and stay on the site.

On the left hand side, you’ll notice a second interesting thing: people getting to this page are both entering the site (either from a referral or a search engine) and clicking through from another page on the site. The page is a hook that keeps people on the site – whether they’re fresh from another site or reading through for specific information about this topic.

What Makes This Page So Successful?

So what makes this page so successful at keeping visitors here? Here are two things I see that are beneficial here.

It’s part of a series. The site introduces a topic (a walkthrough for a section of Fallout 3) and then links to various parts of the walkthrough. People can then jump in to the specific point that they need to read about.

Each part of the series links back to it. There are six pages in the walkthrough, and each one contains links to the previous part, the next part, and this table of contents page. The left-hand side of the chart shows pretty definitively that people are reading one of the sub-pages, clicking back to the table of contents, and then clicking through to another sub-page. It’s an example where intuitive navigation is helping users find the content that they want.

So, there’s two components to this. On the one hand, there’s good content. People want this information, and I gave it to them. I wrote the walkthrough a year and a half ago, and people are still searching for and reading it. Two, I designed the pages to have intuitive navigation, and people are using that to stick around on the site.

So, if you want to reduce your bounce rate, start writing up some series of articles that address a big topic or theme. Then link them together with a table of contents, and make sure people can find it. If it’s good, they’ll stick around and click around.

Recently, I found a great plug-in that eliminates this step. I went out and found it because, somehow, I accidentally removed the code from the footer on this website. I don’t remember when or how I did that, but it became apparent when Google Analytics showed that I had 0 traffic for about two weeks.

The plug-in, Google Analyticator, is great for two reasons: it’s entirely automatic and it puts a snapshot of your analytics report in your dashboard.

To set it up, you activate the plug-in and go to the settings section of the dashboard. There, you can log into your Google account and authenticate your WordPress installation so it can access the Google analytics information. The necessary code is automatically inserted, and you don’t have to worry about cutting and pasting anything.

The snapshot of the stats is also cool. It definitely isn’t the full-featured report you get on the Analytics page, but it’ll give you a simple graph of visits and let you know the top performing pages/searches for the past 30 days.

I love the plug-in so much that I’ve installed it on all three of my current sites: this one, Olinda Gibbons Photography, and Digital Photography How To.

If you want to do this, here are a couple tips.

Write a original article about a topic you wrote about on your blog. For example, today I wrote up a quick review of Mozy, an online backup service. I had written about that several times before on my photography site. This allowed me to a) write up an original piece of content and b) naturally link back to my own site in the text of the article.

Use natural links in the article to “deep link” to your content. When I write up the article, I don’t just include a link back to the root page of my site. That’s kind of senseless self promotion, and SEO-wise it’s probably not the best idea. The idea here is to create deep links – links to actual articles that you’ve written. Plus, these links will flow better with the article that you’re writing for AC. Check out my AC article on Mozy to see what I mean.

Link to Your Site’s Root in the Additional Resources. There two kinds of links in the SEO world – “rel=nofollow” and follow links. When a search engine like Google sees the “rel=nofollow” attribute on a link, it discounts that link in calculating page popularity, search engine rankings, and such. The gold standard in SEO is “real” follow links.

When you’re writing an article on AC, you need to understand that links in different places work differently. If you include a link in the article (as per the above tip), it’s a real link, no “rel=nofollow” strings attached. If, however, you link to a site in the additional resources (which appear in the sidebar of your article), they have the “rel=nofollow” attribute. I typically use this area to link to my site as well as one or two others that might have general information about the topic.

The important thing to remember is to write something useful and don’t just link to your site. Read your article over. Does it include some useful information for the reader, even if they don’t follow the links? If yes, you did a good job and your article is acceptable. If not, then you did a lousy job and you should re-write it. Chances are, that kind of junk will not get read and could probably get flagged for removal.

But I digress. WordPress is awesome. You can have a blog, like this. You can set it up more like a static site (see this portfolio site, Olinda Gibbons Photography). You can do… just about whatever you want if you get a little creative with the template.

What’s more, there are tons of useful plug-ins waiting for you, so you don’t have to spend as much time custom coding stuff. One simple task I needed a solution for was backuping up my WordPress database and files. I used to use WordPress Database Backup, but I don’t think it’s compatible with WordPress 3.0 and it didn’t actually fulfill all my needs.

After some searching, I finally found a suitable replacement this morning: Updraft.

How I Use It

The cool thing about Updraft is that it doesn’t just backup your database. What good is the database if all your uploads are gone? You’re gonna have a lot of wholes in your posts where there used to be pictures!

Updraft takes this into account and backs up four things – your database (pretty important), your plugins (which you might not have locally if you installed them all automatically), your uploads, and your themes (well, you should have this saved locally for development purposes anyway).

You can schedule the back-ups. You can select a custom folder to save it in (anywhere on the server; not just in the wp-content folder). If you have a cloud file storage service, you can send the files there. And you can specify how many backups it should retain, so you don’t end up with a hundred backups floating around your server by the end of the year.

This solution is perfect for me.  I set Updraft up on all of my WordPress sites so that it automatically backs everything up. It dumps it into a folder above the public_html folder (something like /home/backups). From there, I can set up SyncBackPro with a scheduled backup to download the backups from the server and store them locally on my external hard drive.

So what are you waiting for? If you don’t have a backup plug-in installed already, go get Updraft. Hopefully you’ll never need it… but it could be a life saver.

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.