OMG, it's another thing I have to do to help grow my online business. Seems like it just never stops. Well don't fret; this one is easy and free. It only takes a minute or so to ping your blog.
Basically when you ping a site you are just telling different services that you have created new content on your blog or on other sites. These services such as Technorati will crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents.
This will increase the traffic coming to your site.
There are a number of services that you can use: Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat are two free services. Don't overdo it and use both at the same time. This can cause you to be penalized by search engines by not accepting any blog posts from your blog in the future.
Using these services is easy. You enter your blog name, your link and check off the sites that you want to index your blog.
If you have a WordPress blog on your own domain you can use the built-in pinging service. The problem with this is every time you update a post it will ping the post. This can really be overkill. What you should do is turn this off and do your pings with Ping-O-Matic or Pingoat.
To turn it off you can find the built-in pinging by going to Settings Writing and find the Update Services text box. To remove the auto pinging just clear all the links in the box.
Pinging should be done whenever you update your blog with new content.
Besides pinging your blog post links, you can also ping other content you create.
- Any new videos you place on YouTube or other video submission sites.
- Your Squidoo lens
- Articles you add to article directories
So don't lose out on more free traffic and remember to make pinging your blog and other sources a daily habit when publishing new content.