Promote your blog: technique 3

This obscure reference is not about adding any dynamic code to your blog, as the nerdier amongst you might think. That is a discussion for another post, one that, as yet, I am not qualified to write. Instead, as I have focussed on more direct and intimate ways of driving traffic and subscriptions in earlier posts, I did not want to ignore the large-scale methods. We are of course speaking of the world wide web.

As well as bringing individuals’ attention to your blog you also need to be able to say “hello” to the world. With a new blog, you may have few inbound links, and be poorly indexed by search engines. So who’s going to know that you just posted a ground-breaking discussion on the advantages or firefox 3 or how the mac/PC divide is actually a wider metaphor for the split within the human soul? All this brilliant discourse will be lost, unless…

You can tell people it’s there. The most common way to alert user to a new post in your blog is to use a pinging server.

Ping Servers

In the blogosphere pings are notifications sent by updated blogs to ping servers. So if you can tell these servers you have added new content, this can then be pushed out to the wider web. Unfortunately many ping servers are proprietary so you will need to alert multiple servers to cover as much ground as possible. Ping-o-matic, BlogFlux Pinger and some other sites provide multiple pinging services to do this for you.

If this all seesm to complex for you, don’t worry. In the blogosphere pinging is so common that many popular platforms have this service automated for you.

“WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!”
(from http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services on 19th July 3:32)

Expression Engine allows you to ping its servers (for paid accounts) or you can add you own list, which you will need to do manually. Movable Type also provides a similar service. If you don’t know where to begin there are many places which provide a list of suggested servers, such as the list supplied by Elliott Back, or you may just want to target a service like Ping-o-matic and allow it do do the hard work for you.

Blog Directories

The next service you will want to employ to get make your blog known is blog directories or blog aggregators. Whilst pinging a server may be enough to make these sites aware of your content you can always add your blog manually, and this way you can include a description and keywords with your submission. Master New Media has a great list of these sites Many such as Technoarti also have methods of ranking blog for relevance and quality. Technorati calls this its authority rating, and is based on the number of inbound links to a blog. Very useful when comparing your own blog to other blogs which cover similar topics.

So go out there, tell the world what you’re up to!