Art Marketing Buzz

Pinging.  What is it and why is it important?

 Ok,  hopefully you are convinced you need to be blogging.  I will spend some time coming up reviewing some resources and helping those who want to start blogging do so.   I will have the first training vid up next week.  But this is for those who already have a blog up…and are adding solid relevant content for your target market.  

Pinging just means you are going to contact several sources and let them know you have added fresh content to your blog.  When you “ping” these companies they in turn will notify the blog directories and let them know you have new content. 

This was adopted from Wikipedia….

 “In Blogginghping is a push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. A specific signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Open ping servers, like VeriSign’s Weblogs.com, let other web-services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.

In addition to open ping servers, there are an increasing number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.”

Unlike open ping servers, proprietary servers with their own subscription applications have no incentive to share their received ping data directly with other servers, which may offer competing services. As these servers do not share their data, bloggers have to ping a large number of individual servers to receive the desired publicity. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Pingoat or Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers.”

Cool names huh?  Ok, so lets take a look at a service called pingoat.  Pingoat is a service that pings services for you.  Rather than you submitting your awesome new blog content to a bunch of ping-servers one by one you decide to leverage your time and have pingoat do it for you.  So you go to pingoat.com, scroll down past the opt-in box, where it says, “get started”, put in the name of your blog, the URL of your blog, (you can skip the XML feed if you don’t know what it is), click on the “general” category and you will see that it checks all of the boxes in that category.  Check the appropriate categories for your  blog.  Then at the bottom click on “go pingoat”.  That’s it.  Pingoat just sent each one of those servers a blurb saying hey “your blog” just updated with fresh new content.  Cool huh?  FREE! I love tools that allow me to leverage, usually I have to pay for them.  Check out the short video tutorial on how to use pingoat…it’s under videos.