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.

Another site I’ve found useful is Gimp Tutorials. They’re a great place to list any graphics tutorials that you write for the GIMP graphic design program.

In case you don’t know what GIMP is, head to the Gimp homepage. It’s a free, open source graphic editing suite – similar in many ways to the expensive, proprietary Adobe Photoshop.

Gimp Tutorials is another niche directory where you can submit appropriate tutorials for listing. In this case, appropriate means just about anything related to creating or editing an image in Gimp.

I wrote a very basic tutorial to show users how to create a gradient background image in GIMP. Since I submitted the tutorial to Gimp Tutorials, slightly less than week ago, they’ve sent me 200 visits.

There was a brief spike on the first day, and I’ve been getting a steady stream of 20-30 visitors each day after that.

There doesn’t appear to be a lot of turnover on the site, so my tutorial is still listed third on the front page. That’s after five days. That’s a pretty lengthy period of exposure – considering that others sites (like Good Tutorials) turnover in about a day.

So if you write any tutorials for GIMP, don’t hesitate to submit them here. It’s a good way to drive a few extra users to your latest article.

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.

I’ve tried out a few methods, with varying success. What has worked really well, so far, is submitting an article to a niche site: Good Tutorials.

People often advise you to submit your articles to social networking and article sites. Often times this will get you a few backlinks and little to no traffic.

I stumbled on Good Tutorials when I was looking for some information on a different topic. After browsing around the site, I noticed that they take and review submissions of tutorials for inclusion in the directory. I thought what the hell, let me try it out.

I submitted the tutorial I wrote about creating a php script to send trackbacks. After signing up and submitting the tutorial, they told me it would take one to two days to be reviewed.

I never got an e-mail back confirming that my tutorial had been accepted or not. I forgot about it for a couple of days – kind of busy at work. Then, today, I logged in to see what the status was.

My tutorial had been accepted two days ago. In that time frame, it got 95 clicks. I logged into Google Analytics, and sure enough there was a big jump in traffic. Good Tutorials had sent me approximately 90 visits, and some of those people had looked around the site at other entries and articles.

I also noticed a bit of traffic coming from another new site – Tuts Buzz. I checked it out and it was another tutorial directory. A link to my tutorial had shown up there as well, probably from Good Tutorial’s feed.

Whether or not I’ll continue to get substantial traffic from these sites, I don’t know. It may be that I’m getting some click throughs because my tutorial is on the “Newest Tutorials” list. Maybe it’ll drop off to nothingness when it just becomes a filed away tutorial.

However, it definitely seems to be a worthwhile way to get some traffic. Unlike a lot of article sites – that send you a few low PR backlinks and no traffic – I got a real measurable increase in traffic.

So, if you write any tutorials on coding, software, or technology – head over to Good Tutorials and see about getting your own listing.