Wow, I finally finished my first week long series called Technology in our lives. I had a few bumps along the way (the last two posts were two days late), but I think overall the entire series went fairly smooth. Now, the question is did it help traffic to my blog. The answer is no. I haven’t seen any measurable increase in traffic, be it actual visitors or number of subscribers. This doesn’t discourage me though because I know a large number of people read the series and that makes me happy.

This morning I followed my usual schedule. I woke up, fired up my laptop, checked my blogs for any new comments, checked my feeds for any new posts and then opened my email client. As I was wading through the numerous emails (I have five different emails that I go through) I came across this email from a blog that I commented on yesterday:

Here’s the original article “How Not to Reply to an Email“

Yesterday I posted “Why did you start blogging?” and it was the best post I’ve written to date (in my opinion of course). It was interesting, it was easy to write, it got the attention of other bloggers and it brought in a decent amount of traffic. Here are a few tips on writing a great post.

[Read The Rest]

Yesterday Easy C Tutorials experienced a prolonged downtime from about 10:00AM EST to around 4 or 5:00PM and I’d like to apologize to everyone that visited. Media Temple (our hosting service) was extremely quick to fix the problem once they knew about it.

Downtime is a problem that has plagued every blogger at one point or another. Maybe you were changing themes and had to take the site down for a few minutes, or maybe your hosting provider encountered a problem and your site(s) didn’t load for a while (like me). Whatever causes the downtime it can hurt your blogs reputation if it happens often so the question is what can you do to minimize your downtime?

Monitor Your Sites
One of the reasons why you’ll rarely see a large blog/site down for any extended period of time is because they monitor their sites religiously. If their site goes down for any length of time they lose money, simple as that. If you don’t monitor your site how are you supposed to know that it’s running slow? Emails? A friend telling you? Monitoring your site is definitely the quickest way to make sure your site is running properly.

Monitoring your site doesn’t have to mean that you’re on it 24/7. If you have more important things, and unless you’re a professional blogger you probably do, go and do those things and check in from time to time. At a minimum you should be checking your site at least once a day. If theres a problem and it’s lasting longer than a day you’re going to lose a lot of viewers. When a viewer comes to a site and sees that it’s down they often remember and will avoid the site from then on. This is one of the biggest reasons to minimize your sites downtime.

Contact Your Hosting Provider
Once you know that your sites down (or unusually slow), the next thing to do is to contact whoever is hosting your site. Often times it’ll be a problem with the server that they’re using to host your site. When I contacted MediaTemple to tell them about the lagginess of my site they responded very quickly telling me that they were resolving the issue as quick as they could. This kept me calm and I knew that my blog would soon be up. If you don’t contact them however they may not know that there is even a problem. If you’re a paying customer then they’ll most likely be quick to fix it because they want to keep your business.

“I’ve contacted them and they don’t seem to be doing anything to fix the problem” I’ve heard of a few people who ran into this problem, with their hosting provider not really caring about the problem. At this point you have to decide whether the service they provide is worth the downtimes then theres nothing you can do. If it’s not worth it you can threaten to leave if they don’t fix the problem. If they don’t fix the downtime quickly, leave, find a new hosting provider.

Try Other Fixes
If your site is just taking a long time to load (isn’t completely down), try putting a small static index page telling the viewers that your site is currently experiencing technical difficulties and will soon be back up. Hopefully this page will load quicker since it is small and wouldn’t have any PHP (or whatever SSLs you use). This fix really only works if your site is experiencing slow load times. It won’t help if you’re site is totally down.

These are a few things you can do to minimize the amount of downtime your site will see. In the end though everyone experiences downtimes and you just have to deal with it. Hopefully your site will experience downtime as few times as possible.

Easy C Tutorials is celebrating its second month of life. While this definitely isn’t that big of a deal since some blogs have been around for years but I’m still proud of my creation. I’m surprised that I’ve actually kept around long enough and continued to post even though school is going on.

This month’s statistic and blogging tips are about statistical counters and which ones I use. Here’s a list of things I use on my site to keep track of my visitors:

• Feedburner:
  Most of you know what Feedburner is and what it’s used for. For those who don’t, Feedburner is a feed “enhancer”. It takes your default feeds, and ads more functionality to it without you having to modify it yourself. Feedburner also allows you to keep track of everyone who has subscribed to your feed. This gives you a general impression on whether or not people like reading your stuff. I use Feedburner to keep track of my feed subscribers as well as make my feeds nice
• Sitemeter:
  Sitemeter is simply a tool that keeps track of your visitors. All you have to do is signup, add a few lines of javascript to your blog (they supply the code) and then watch your statistics flow in. The great thing about Sitemeter is that it’s real time statistics. You can see the statistics as the people visit your site. There are a few problems with Sitemeter though. The first problem is that it only holds data for the last 100 people unless you sign up for their premium service (which is $6.95/month or more). The second problem I have with Sitemeter is that unless you sign up for their premium service you have to place a little graphic on your page. While this graphic isn’t too obtrusive it doesn’t look great. Oh well I guess thats the price you pay for real time statistics
• Google Analytics:
  Google Analytics is basically the same as Sitemeter except it doesn’t give real time statistics and fixes all of Sitemeter’s problems. Google Analytics gives you detailed information on every visitor that comes to your page. It gives you search details, referral details and more. The only problem I’ve ever had with Google Analytics is that it only updates once per day (hence why I use Sitemeter). Other than that it’s really good. You can look at almost every aspect of your blog as well as an overlay of your blog and the number of clicks there (this is extremely helpful for advertising). I prefer Google Analytics over Sitemeter any day of the week.

I use these three statistical counters to view the performance of my blog and I know a lot of other bloggers use them as well. If you have any that you use feel free to comment about them.

Now on to Septembers Statistics

My goals for September were as follows:

1. Get over 3300 visitors and 5000 page views.
2. Increase the average visitors time on the site to 2 minutes or more.

So how did I do?
Visitors: 2862
Page Views: 4602
PV per Visit: 1.61
PV per Day: 153
Visitor per Day: 95
Time on the Site: 1:54

So I didn’t actually make any of the goals that I had set out to make but I’m still extremely pleased with my stats, wanna know why? With the start of September came another year of University for me. With the start of University came a decrease in the number of posts. I haven’t posted a new tutorial since September 6th. While I’ve still kept posting in my blog the number of posts have decreased.

I’m pleased with my stats because they show that I can still get visitors even without posting every day (or week in the case of tutorials). I’m not going to make any goals for the month of October because I’m going to try to post a lot more so I really have no idea whats going to happen.

What can you expect from October
Well you can expect a lot of things. First theres going to be a few tutorials this month, one of them will be on pointers and I haven’t thought of the other one yet. As for this blog you can expect a week long series on “Technology in our lives” coming soon. You can also expect a few posts on Halloween gadgets and safety. I’m doing this do try to capture seasonal search traffic. Well those are a few things to expect in the month to come. I hope you stay around and continue reading.

Here’s a list of five extremely useful Wordpress plugins that I use or have used.

1. WP-Polls:
   WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
2. Google Sitemap Generator:
   This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
3. Ultimate Tag Warrior:
   This plugin allows you to add tags to each post and page. These tags can be used for meta keyword tags, tag clouds and tonnes of other things. I’ve been using this plugin since the start of this blog and love it.
4. TD Word Count:
   This plugin provides detailed published and unpublished word count stats for Wordpress authors. The output is on a single page which allows searching using the browser’s built in commands and can be sorted by date, post title, number of most and least words.
5. Related Posts:
   This great plugin allows you to add a “Related Posts” section to each of your posts. It’s great because it uses your existing tags to match related content. This is a great plugin because it gives your readers more options and keeps them on the page longeer (hopefully)

I use most of these plugins and I love them. They’re a great way to keep your visitors on your site and hopefully convert them to lifetime readers.

If you’re blog relies on search engines for the majority of your traffic than this post is going to be fairly important. If most of your traffic comes from feeds or referral traffic than this information might be as relevant.

Anticipating seasonal search traffic (anything other than regular traffic) is the art of knowing what people will be searching in the future and capitalizing on that knowledge. Most of the large blogs already do this (Problogger comes to mind) and get thousands of hits every day from this extra search traffic. You may ask “How can I get this extra traffic?”, but there really isn’t one single answer. Here are a few tips for capitalizing on this seasonal traffic.

• Anticipate what’s going to happen in real life.
  A good part of the seasonal search traffic is knowing what is happening in real life. Lets say for example that its the middle of September and you know that Halloween’s coming up. You could write an article about ‘Safety Tips for Halloweening’ or something like that to capitalize on the search traffic coming from people searching about Halloween. Other things you could post about are: The Olympics, American Idol winners, Christmas (or other holidays), the Superbowl or Stanely Cup, etc…
• Stay inside your niche:
  Obviously some of the things you could write have nothing to do with your blog. While you could write about these things (for example I could cover the Superbowl but this blog is technology related) you probably wouldn’t get any returning visitors or readers. Think about things you can write about that relate to your blog, so your readers stay interested in your other content. If you’re blog is like this one you could write about the top 10 gadgets for this Christmas, or maybe the new technology in the latest Olympic games.
• Write great content:
  This point is extremely important when it comes to seasonal traffic. Unfortunately a lot of bloggers try to get their posts out too quickly without reading over what they wrote. This can lead to posts that are of poor quality and make the readers less interested in your blog.While writing posts to capitalize on seasonal search traffic gets the people to your site, if you’re content isn’t up to their standards than the readers will leave without reading any of your stuff. If you write great stuff than the readers will read more, and hopefully sign up to your feeds, or bookmark your site. The main goal for your site is to get people returning and reading your articles.

I have a few ideas for up-and-coming posts that I’m going to write to try to get in on some seasonal traffic:

• 10 gadgets to keep your kids safe at Halloween
• How to optimize your blog for Christmas
• Blogging in University
• 10 Must Have Gadgets for the Camping Geek in You

As Darren over at Problogger puts it “The key is to anticipate search traffic - but not to compromise on your reader experience.”