Next Tuesday evening, I’m offering a FREE webinar with Brazen Careerist about how to make money off the social media skills you take for granted, even if you have a full-time job. If you’re interested — and yes, I’ll be taking lots of questions! — here’s the sign-up link.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post about how I felt lost. New readers still land on that post every week; I get a good deal of search traffic from people telling Google, “I’m lost” or “I feel lost.”

If only there was a map for life.

I like that. I didn’t particularly enjoy feeling lost, but I like that people who are lacking direction and looking for inspiration land on this blog… and hopefully find what they’re looking for.

Yet now I finally feel unlost — perhaps more than ever before. A year and a half after writing that post, I finally feel content.

I’m content because everything that was up in the air a year and a half ago has finally started to settle. I’m living in a city I love. I’m doing work I enjoy, feeling challenged by my own standards. And fate has landed me in the arms of a smart, adventurous guy. I’m not one of those people who believes love is a cure-all, but it certainly helps.

Now, that doesn’t mean every single piece of the puzzle has come together. My travel memoir, the book to which I dedicated more than 15 months of my life, hasn’t yet sold. I still feel constant anxiety over bringing in enough money each month — the plague of the self-employed — even though I’m now making more than I did at my day job. And I continue to work late some nights, as showcased by my writing this post at 9 p.m.

But when you feel content on the whole, it’s far easier to deal with uncertainties and frustrations. I feel completely OK with making baby steps on those fronts because I’m making progress on the whole.

While I’ve worked my way into a state of content, however, some of my friends have managed to get lost in their own way. Which made me think about how we all get lost at some point, that we almost have to get lost before finding our way. We all have to live our own unique journeys, taking baby steps toward happiness and satisfaction — and sometimes those steps include a detour or two.

It’s OK to not know where you’re going, so long as you’re moving in a direction that feels like forward. So long as you’re acting on your aspirations and not simply planning for them, you will get there. Even if it takes living with your parents and bringing home a stray, raggedy dog and leaving a job after only a year.

Because everything you’re doing now is helping you get where you want to be. It’s all baby steps toward where you belong.

And when you get to that place where you’re content, you’ll appreciate it that much more.

Want to hear more from me? Content that's NOT on the blog? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer Newsletter.

Today I’m answering a question from a reader who asked: How do you use Google Analytics to grow your blog?

Google Analytics is a FREE tool that helps you analyze traffic to your website. Know the “Site Stats” option you have on the back end of your WordPress blog? Or the “Stats” option in Blogger? Google Analytics gives you the same type of information, but in greater detail.

Little things that make our day: seeing hits to our blog from a certain someone.

It can tell you where your readers are coming from (which you can use to write more targeted posts), what types of browsers they’re using to read your blog (which gives you hints about how tech-savvy they are), which pages and posts they click on (which tells you which of your efforts are successful and which need more work), how long they’re staying on your site, and much more.

You can only use Google Analytics if your blog or website is self-hosted. For WordPress, that means you’re using WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. Here are directions for installing Google Analytics on a WordPress blog. If this sounds the slightest bit intimidating, just stick with your WordPress or Blogger stats. Unless you’re really digging deep into your readership or trying to answer specific questions about traffic, those basic stats are probably all you need anyhow.

Now for my favorite feature on Google Analytics: the “network” function, which shows you how many hits you got from various service providers.

Service providers don’t sound that interesting, until you realize that lots of companies name their network after the company. That means while you’ll see plenty of Comcasts, Verizons and Road Runners on your list (which are often people reading via their home connection), you’ll also recognize networks belonging to companies, universities and organizations.

By checking these stats regularly, I’ve learned that I have regular readers at Colby College (my alma mater) and Hearst (the parent company of my former employer, the Houston Chronicle). I also see consistent traffic from The New York Times (who are you?), The Brookings Institution and a handful of universities. I can even see visits from publishing houses, which lets me know when people at Random House and HarperCollins click on one of my posts. Of course, you can’t tell why they’re there, and that could range from checking out my book to clicking on someone’s tweet about a post I wrote that’s interesting to them for a reason that has nothing to do with me.

That means this information is only useful to a point. But it’s still fascinating, especially if you want to see whether a certain someone has their eyes on your work.

To find service provider details, log into your Google Analytics account, then click on Technology, then Network. Don’t forget to specify the time frame you’re interested in at the top right corner of your screen.

If you use Google Analytics, what’s your favorite feature?

Want to hear more from me? Content that's NOT on the blog? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer Newsletter.

I hope you’re excited for the weekend! I know I am — a good mix of work and fun ahead.

Here are a few reads to check out in your spare time:

• Kelly Gurnett offers a guide to taxes for first-time freelancers. Your jaw will drop at what you didn’t know you didn’t know.

• Also have a look at C. Hope Clark’s tips for jumpstarting your freelancing career.

• Oh, the dreaded writer platform. Robert Brewer gives us 30 tips for improving it.

• You don’t want to look like spam on Twitter, do you? These 10 tips will help you create a feed that people will actually want to follow.

• Joel Runyon gives us a lesson in how to not suck at waiting, which, admittedly, I suck at. His suggestions are solid!\

• Finally, Justine Musk tells us how Joyce Carol Oates would launch a writing career today.

Enjoy your weekend!

Want to hear more from me? Content that's NOT on the blog? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer Newsletter.

Last night Chris Guillebeau’s new book, The $100 Startup, arrived in the mail.

Naturally, I got all excited because I love Chris’ stuff; it’s all super applicable to my own entrepreneurial and life goals.

There's that kick I needed.

Yet I also kind of groaned to myself. I’m trying to meet a deadline this month (finishing How to Create a Freakin’ Fabulous Social Media Strategy before giving a webinar on the topic), and I knew I couldn’t afford to spend several evenings plowing through the book.

I’ll just read a few pages while my dinner bakes, I told myself, figuring I’d then have to tear the book out of my own hands. Just several pages in, I hit this fabulous line:

There’s no rehab program for being addiction to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

I nodded at that one, and kept reading about what Chris calls the “quest for freedom.” I learned about several people who are hustling to make a living doing what they love.

And then I read this line, about a business method that Chris says works again and again:

Build something that people want and give it to them.

That’s when I stopped. I was only on page 19, but something funny happened. I realized that I was already in the midst of building something that people wanted, and I’d never be able to fulfill the second part of that task — the giving — if I didn’t finish it. I realized that the only way I would ever find my own freedom was by sitting down and doing the work.

No book, no matter how good, was going to do that for me. I had to do it myself.

Motivation and inspiration can go a long way toward helping you get where you want to be. Sometimes blogs and books and in-person meetings give me that push or ah-ha moment I need to get moving. But when it comes to creating something awesome, whether that’s a book or a business or some other exciting project, you have to step away from all those sources of energy and create. As Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote in a letter to Willa Cather, “you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.”

So while Chris’ book continues to stare at my from my bed stand, I won’t be reading it today. Instead, I’m heading to a coffee shop to finish. my. ebook.

Want to hear more from me? Content that's NOT on the blog? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer Newsletter.

It can be difficult to explain the magic of Twitter, which is why I like to provide anecdotal evidence whenever I can. And last night was a perfect example.

I was at D.C.’s monthly WordPress Meetup, checking in on Foursquare. I tagged my check-in with the event hashtag, #wpdc, and posted it to Twitter.

Twitter makes magic happen. Really.

If I’m confusing you with digital speak, let me take a quick minute to explain:

• Hashtags are a Twitter tool for grouping tweets. If you add a hashtag to a word, it makes it easily findable for others who are searching for tweets on that topic.

• Meetup is an awesome website that helps you meet new people with similar interests.

• Foursquare is a geolocation mobile app that lets you “check in” at certain places (like restaurants and events), so you can see who else is there.

Since I hashed my check-in on Twitter, anyone who was following #wdpc — mainly people who were at the event or wished they were at the event — could see my tweet. That’s the whole point; by making my tweet easy to find, I could then interact with people at the meetup, during the presentation, without communicating out loud.

Within minutes, I received an unexpected @reply from someone at the event. He was a long-time reader of my newsletter, he said, and was hoping we could meet in person.

Several tweets later, we realized he was sitting right behind me.

We chatted for quite a while after the meetup. I left there with a grin on my face, and not just because he said The Traveling Writer Newsletter inspired him. I grinned thinking about serendipity. Without Twitter, I could’ve been in the same room as one of my newsletter readers and not even known it.

But because we both took advantage of this digital tool, we got to experience a face-to-face interaction. Pretty cool, right? The best online connections are the ones we bring offline.

If you’re not using Twitter strategically, who might you miss out on meeting? What if the person who could help you find your next job or land your first book deal or create the life you want to live is in the same room as you, and you don’t even know it?

Want to hear more from me? Content that's NOT on the blog? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer Newsletter.