Silent Promotion Using Ping Services

When you approach someone to seek some advises on how to start promoting your blog, what does he tell you? Pretty sure you often given this so-called expert advise, “Submit your blog to search engines”. Lorelle, through her post described that you should do nothing but let the ping services do the hard work. Stunned? Read on.

The first step you need to do is nothing. Well, kinda nothing. If you are using WordPress, it has built-in function called “ping” which sends a note to many search engines and tagging services to say “Hello World!” literally. In fact, with WordPress, before you even publish your first post, the first test post called “Hello World” on WordPress issued pings the moment it was installed. Search engines and tagging services all over the world got the message that your blog is active and ready to be searched.

How Ping Works?
Every time you save/publish a post, your blog automatically sends a series of packets over a network known as “ping” to major services by notifying them that you have new contents on your blog. In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a blog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” (also known as “ping services”) which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material in their database. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one. Depending on how large is your ping services list; it can help to drive a number of visitors to your blog.

Ping List
So you get the point of how ping works but what exactly is a ping list? Most modern blogging softwares can be configured to ping certain ping services that acts as blog search engines or the like when new posts are made. These listed ping services are called “ping list”. This means the bigger your ping list, the wider your content will spread. That’s the reason why ping list is important.

How to Configure My Ping List
I cannot speak for other blogging softwares since I’m not familiar with them but I will guide you on how to configure your ping list in WordPress. Within your dashboard, click on “Options” then “Writing” then scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a textbox labeled “Update Services”. Put in your ping list there and click “Update Options” and you’re all done.

Be Careful With Pingers
So, you know how to configure your ping list. I can sense how excited you are. You start googling around in search of ping services. Be careful. Be EXTRA careful since abusing this utility will get you ban by those services. Pinging is like submitting to a search engine, do it more than once in a reasonable length of time and you can be penalized or worst. If you abuse pingers, they will block your access, so DO NOT go crazy with this list. Use it thoughtfully and wisely.

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Posted on: June 29, 2008 | Under Blog Traffic 
 

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