Learning a "Bouncing" Animation in AfterEffects

Today I am learning how to adjust an object to perform a bouncing motion on AfterEffects. I began by placing it into the new composition and selecting"pre comp". I made sure to move all attributes into the new composition and resized the precomposition to the size of my graphic. I held the command tool and positioned the anchor point down to the bottom. I started animating it by pulling it to the side and off the composition, dragging a ruler down for the "ground". I selected the position keyframe and moved the object in a bouncing manner (with it declining more and more each time). I used the pen tool again and made each transition curved. After finishing that, I altered the path I originally made by first selecting every other keyframe of the "top" points and hitting F9 to easy ease it. I can also use the graph editor and bring up these keyframes to make the bouncing motion "stop" for a few milliseconds to realistically resemble a bouncing obj...