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Here are a few traffic-building tips that are worth reiterating. We’ve mentioned these things before, but if you’re not doing them, now’s the time.

1. Promote the heck out of that audio interview.
It’s fresh content and a different type of post than your run-of-the-mill news story reaction posts. Tell your potential readers about it in any way that you can! Engage with your community, since you have exclusive content that they might be interested in. Search Facebook and other social networking sites for groups that pertain to your topic. Don’t forget to check out Ning. There are more than 2,000 people in Ning’s social networking site for coffeehouse baristas. Your topic probably has a group, too.

2. Market your site in all your online endeavors.
Chances are you have accounts for lots of sites and Web services. Make sure each of those accounts is plugging your blog! Link everywhere: G-chat status, Facebook status and profile, Twitter profile and tweets, LinkedIn profile and–most importantly–your Medill Reports Author Profile Page. There are lots of other possibilities. Make your online identity work for you!

3. Comment, Comment, Comment, Link, Link, Comment, Comment
To paraphrase the Beatles, the comments you give are equal to the comments you take. If you leave comments on a lot of blogs, viewers of those blogs will check out your site and the owners of those blogs will definitely want to know who you are. If they like what they see, visitors will become comment-leavers who will become subscribers. Also, charity starts at home. Read and comment on each other’s blogs! Usually if someone sees that there is a comment on a post, they will read that post more closely, read the comment and be more inclined to join the conversation.

4. Sexy Titles
The power of a keyword in your post’s title cannot be understated. That keyword appears in your URL, which gets indexed by Google, which leads people to your site via search. Also, repeat customers would much rather read a post with an intriguing title than a dull one. Wouldn’t you?

5. Get More Tips
If you truly are obsessed with your page views and absolute unique visitor rates, there are lots of online resources with tips about improving traffic. I’ve been subscribed to ProBlogger for a few months now and I’ve read a lot of useful tips and tricks there. Check it out!

Check out this Editor and Publisher story about the all-important “time spent” metric. If your visitors spend more than seven minutes on your site, congratulations! You’re beating the Chicago Tribune!

Building Traffic to Your Blog
In addition to the links below, check the Blackboard site for Liza’s presentation.

Google Analytics
We set up this account in class by pasting the necessary code into the “footer.php” file for your site. You should be receiving data now and be able to see that someone in Davenport, Iowa spent 4 minutes and 3 seconds perusing your blog on Tuesday night because she did a Google search for “crazy analytics stalker” and your blog came up. If you’re not seeing data, let me know.

Google Webmaster Tools
We also set up this account to ensure that Google is aware of your site’s existence. Google will send out its “spiders” to “crawl” your site soon (creepy metaphor, huh?) and index your pages. You can speed up this process by using the optimization tools found on this site. Unlike analytics, you probably won’t see data for a few weeks or a month because Google doesn’t know you exist yet. But check back regularly to see if you have data. And be sure that you have already followed the next link to…

Add Your URL To Google
Google is a great search engine, but it’s not psychic. Add your URL to its list of sites to be indexed by following the instructions. This will hopefully get the ball rolling so that you can get some data on your Google Webmaster Tools site.

Google Blog Search
Find bloggers who write about topics similar to you (a.k.a. the competition), but don’t look at them as competition. Add them to your Blogroll and engage with their sites by reading and leaving comments. Blog linking and commenting are a two-way street and you will probably boost traffic to your site if you do this.

Google Keywords Tool
Use this tool to find out which keywords appear frequently in your blog or related blogs. This will give you an idea of potential tags you can use for your posts to increase search engine optimization and make them easier to find by Web surfers.

Linkvendor.com
This site has a lot of useful Web site data just waiting to be harvested. Choose from the options in the left menu, type in your URL and watch the hours slip away as you find out everything from how many outbound links you have on your site (Outbound Links) and which words appear most frequently in your posts (Keyword Density) to how high your blog appears in search engine results for a given keyword (SERPs Position).

Websitegrader.com
Get a free “marketing report” for your site. Even if you leave all of the fields blank (competitors, keywords, etc.), you can get a nifty marketability effectiveness score. The report will also tell you if there are things you can improve about the content on your site to make it more easily “spidered” and recognized by search engines, such as adding Alt tags to photos (the little descriptive tags that appear when your mouse hovers over an image). My blog (See how I just plugged it there? That’s what you should do to build traffic! Plug away!) somehow received a score of 91 out of 100, so that’s the score to beat.

Audio Assignment Stuff
Grand Central is an awesome service that also offers free recording, but Google just bought it and you have to sign up to be issued an account now. Fortunately, I e-mailed someone at Google and asked if I could get invites for the class.  Supposedly you will be receiving an invitation shortly, so check your inbox (and your spam folder…in case it gets misfiled.)

Audacity
This is the audio-editing software you will be using to edit your audio assignment. You should already have fond memories of Audacity from your glory days in Methods, but if you skipped Methods or have a short memory, here’s the handout on audio editing. Export as MP3 and use the Anarchy plug-in to embed your interview in your post. See Blackboard for the handouts.

Here is an interesting list of tips about journalistic skills that bloggers should employ and blogging skills that journalists might adopt. I find it somewhat ironic that the journalistic tips for bloggers are actually things that journalists-turned-bloggers should keep in mind for their own blogging efforts. When journalists are forced to blog, it often seems that they think their blog is just a print column posted on the Web.

But our class knows better, right?

FYI: I found this article through Journerdism, a fantastic site (run by Will Sullivan, a fellow Medill MSJ new media alum!) that links to news and resources about online journalism. Subscribe to his feed and you’ll receive his del.icio.us links in your reader. I guarantee these links will introduce you to even more sites that you’ll want to subscribe to. He always links to quality stuff that you should be aware of as an online journalist.

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times today about anonymous comments on blog posts and online forums.

Follow these step-by-step instructions for configuring Feedburner to manage your blog’s RSS feed. My tutorial is based on the official FeedBurner tutorial.

1. If you haven’t already, set up a feed reader. I recommend Google Reader, as it is extremely functional and you can log into it using your Google account.
2. Go to Feedburner.com and set up a FeedBurner account for your site. Write down your user name and password somewhere!
3. Download the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to make your WordPress site play nice with Feedburner.
4. Log into your site and activate the FeedSmith plugin. Go to Options–>Feedburner and type in the feed address that you created with FeedBurner.
5. Your feeds are now managed through FeedBurner. Go back to your FeedBurner account and customize your feed settings.
6. Under FeedBurner’s Optimize menu, consider the following: Smartfeed, Title/Description Burner, and Summary Burner.
7. Under FeedBurner’s Publicize menu, consider the following: Pingshot, Chicklet Chooser and Creative Commons.
8. Use your feed reader to subscribe to your own feed. You should soon (immediately?) see this subscription activity in the FeedBurner statistics, ensuring that everything you just did was successful.

Freeconferencecall.com
Sign up for an account (by providing a name and an e-mail address) and you will receive an e-mail with your account information. To set up the conference call, you must use the conference dial-in number and the provided access codes for you and your interview subject. You will obviously need to send the dial-in number and the access code to your interview subject in order for them to participate in the conference.

When the call is in progress, you can begin recording by pressing *9 and inputting your subscriber PIN code that was included in the initial e-mail from freeconferencecall.com. After inputting your PIN, you will be returned to the call and alerted that recording has begun. To stop recording, press *9 again.

You can log into freeconferencecall.com and download the audio file of your recorded phone conference. Use Audacity to edit the file. Export your edited version in MP3 format and upload it to your site by following the handout on Blackboard.

Anarchy Media Player Plugin
Download and install this plugin to allow your audio assignment to open in a nifty little embedded media player when users click on it. See the “Posting Audio” handout for more details.

Feedburner
Your blog’s RSS feed is an important tool for delivering your content to subscribers in a quick and convenient way. WordPress automatically generates the RSS feed for your blog. Depending on your theme, you may have to add a widget to give users a link to your RSS feed. This is something you definitely want to have in a prominent location on your site to encourage repeat customers. Once  The Feedburner service allows you to customize, optimize and receive statistics for your RSS feed. This is optional, but encouraged.  See the post on installing Feedburner for complete details.

Building Traffic to Your Blog
In addition to the links below, check the Blackboard site for Liza’s presentation and various handouts about customizing the design of your blog.
Google Analytics
We set up this account in class by pasting the necessary code into the “footer.php” file for your site. You should be receiving data now and be able to see that someone in Davenport, Iowa spent 4 minutes and 3 seconds perusing your blog on Tuesday night because she did a Google search for “crazy analytics stalker” and your blog came up. If you’re not seeing data, let me know.

Google Webmaster Tools
We also set up this account to ensure that Google is aware of your site’s existence. Google will send out its “spiders” to “crawl” your site soon (creepy metaphor, huh?) and index your pages. You can speed up this process by using the optimization tools found on this site. Unlike analytics, you probably won’t see data for a few weeks or a month because Google doesn’t know you exist yet. But check back regularly to see if you have data. And be sure that you have already followed the next link to…

Add Your URL To Google
Google is a great search engine, but it’s not psychic. Add your URL to its list of sites to be indexed by following the instructions. This will hopefully get the ball rolling so that you can get some data on your Google Webmaster Tools site.

Google Blog Search
Find bloggers who write about topics similar to you (a.k.a. the competition), but don’t look at them as competition. Add them to your Blogroll and engage with their sites by reading and leaving comments. Blog linking and commenting are a two-way street and you will probably boost traffic to your site if you do this.

Google Keywords Tool
Use this tool to find out which keywords appear frequently in your blog or related blogs. This will give you an idea of potential tags you can use for your posts to increase search engine optimization and make them easier to find by Web surfers.

Linkvendor.com
This site has a lot of useful Web site data just waiting to be harvested. Choose from the options in the left menu, type in your URL and watch the hours slip away as you find out everything from how many outbound links you have on your site (Outbound Links) and which words appear most frequently in your posts (Keyword Density) to how high your blog appears in search engine results for a given keyword (SERPs Position).

Websitegrader.com
Get a free “marketing report” for your site. Even if you leave all of the fields blank (competitors, keywords, etc.), you can get a nifty marketability effectiveness score. The report will also tell you if there are things you can improve about the content on your site to make it more easily “spidered” and recognized by search engines, such as adding Alt tags to photos (the little descriptive tags that appear when your mouse hovers over an image). My blog (See how I just plugged it there? That’s what you should do to build traffic! Plug away!) received a score of 91 out of 100, so that’s the score to beat.

Audio Assignment Stuff
You need two-party (you and the person you’re interviewing) consent to record a phone call in Illinois. Don’t be sneaky.
Freeconferencecall.net offers free recording when you create an account.

Grand Central is an awesome service that also offers free recording, but Google just bought it and you have to sign up to be issued an account now. Even if you don’t get to use it for this assignment, it’s worth signing up for.

Audacity
This is the audio-editing software you will be using to edit your audio assignment. You should already have fond memories of Audacity from your glory days in Methods, but if you skipped Methods or have a short memory, here’s the handout on audio editing.

Copyright laws are a slippery area, especially when it comes to “borrowing” other people’s photos for your blog or Web site. Check out the Creative Commons Web site for a rundown of the various ways that work can be protected and shared. The icons representing each license type are fairly standard and you will frequently see them on Web sites that contain original content. If you want to borrow from a site, try to find their Creative Commons policy to ensure that what you’re doing is legal. You generally shouldn’t have to look too far to find this information.

For example, if you look at an image page on Flickr, you can find the copyright type under “Additional Information.” This image has “All Rights Reserved” and legally cannot be re-purposed on your blog. I took it and you didn’t. On the other hand, this image only has “Some Rights Reserved” and the Creative Commons license says that the photo can be used with attribution.

For an entertaining (and thought-provoking) take on copyright law, watch A Fair(y) Use Tale:

Now that you understand what kind of content you can and cannot use, check out the following 10 Places To Find Free Images Online.

There is also a previous post on finding usable images from last quarter’s Interactive Storytelling class.

FTP Software
You will use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software to move some important files and plug-ins from your local server (the folder on your computer that contains your Web site’s files) to the remote server (the Lunarpages host server, where content for your site needs to be in order to be available on the Web).

If you have a PC, you need AbsoluteFTP. Go to NU’s E-academy site, log in using your netid and password and search for “AbsoluteFTP.” Download the free software and install it on your computer.

If you have a Mac, you need Fetch. Go to the Fetch Web site, download the free program and install it on your computer.

WordPress Stuff
Managing Plugins

List of WP Plugin Sites

Official WordPress Plugin Site

Official WordPress Theme Site
For maximum design success, find a theme that has three columns and is “widget-ready.”