Using Blog Ping to Boost Traffic ~ Ask The Admin

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Using Blog Ping to Boost Traffic

Ping Goat LogoWhen you first start out blogging, you dream of a mass wave of traffic your first time out. Of course this doesn't happen, and that shouldn't be your expectation. Like any other product (and yes, your blog is a product) if nobody knows about it, no one will want to use your product.

Mr. Admin already talked about a great way to boost website traffic using a number of methods. If you missed that post, you can catch it here. However that post didn't mention using "blog ping" sites. What blog pinging does, according to Wikipedia is, "sending an XML-RPC signal to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material." Pretty self explanatory right? When you have new material, you send out notices saying "Hey! Look at me! I have new material!"

Some blogs have an automatic blog ping tool (Blogger is no exception) but the built in one usually only pings one service. If you use a blog ping site like pingoat.com or kping.com (You can do a Google search and find a number of other free ping sites) you can ping a number of blog search sites or other services that pull content from blogs that update regularly. I like pingoat because it pings feedburner (among others) which is a service I use for syndicating my blog (You can check out my blog by looking under Mr. Admin's Links for Bauer-Power).

Like any new advertising strategy, use your analytics to figure out what is working and what is not. This is just one of many other methods you can use to drive traffic to your site.