At the Knoxvillle Internet Marketing meetup held recently, Felicia Slattery of Communication Transformation asked about how to set up Wordpress to ping the different blog directories that are available. (Pinging is a way to notify directories that you have made a new blog post. It’s good for traffic.) Although I am far from being a Wordpress/blog expert, I look for ways to add incremental traffic to my sites. I haven’t done the complete research to back this up but it seems to be the consensus that pinging is a good thing. (I absolutely HATE to pass on misinformation the web is so famous for!) With that disclaimer in mind, lets take a look at pinging.

Wordpress is set up by default to ping Ping-O-Matic, which according to its site is, “a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated.” So by default, your Wordpress blog is set up to ping around 20 services. You can also ping manually by going to individual sites and entering your blog/post information. The ping services are set up to automate this tedious task. Ain’t computers grand? Moving on.

So it would seem that the more pinging I do, the more traffic I get, right? Wrong. If you ping a list of services, some of your pings may be duplicated. Then you risk the possibility of being labeled a spammer. Not good. For example, if you ping Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat (both services that provide multiple pings for your post - is this making any sense?), then Technorati would be hit twice. So now a simple process to let the world know about your blog has become complicated. What to do? Read the rest of this entry

Rob Benwell has released his third edition of Blogging To The Bank and if you have never read his book, now is the perfect opportunity. It’s precise and to the point. I think you will like it.

However…

There is something in Rob’s sales process I really don’t like. I know I preach that you should watch the successful and do what they do. But don’t do this. When you go to the sales page, you can order Blogging To The Bank at what I would consider a very reasonable price. But if you try to leave the page you get an automated chat popup that will give you a discount! This tactic really bothers me. I think the reasons are obvious so I won’t rant on my soapbox. Bottom line - if you want to order, attempt to leave the page and take advantage of the $10 discount offered by the botgirl. (I don’t like the bragging on the sales page either, but he’s young so I’ll let it pass for now.) You should order Blogging To The Bank in spite of these irritations. Now, with that said, lets move on.

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