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.

Hello All! What a busy couple of weeks we have had. Wowza. This is crazy. Well, first I wanted to get a short plug for the podcast that is coming soon. We have a few already recorded and edited just waiting be published. Then I have a great line-up of very gifted and generous digital painters that are going to talk with us on the podcast. Starting the hit list will be Marylin Sholin. Many of you know Marilyn through the Digital Painting Forum. Marilyn has been on the forefront of the social marketing and web 2.0 wave. In addition to her many awesome tutorials and brushes, she has encouraged and taught (along with Chris Price) the benefits of blogging. We will be doing an interview so you can hear first hand her thoughts on the value of social marketing. You also can see a short intro and a cool animated video at Art Marketing Buzz Squidoo lens. If you are not up on social marketing yet just subscribe to our newsletter, and get your password for the free content page. Then go to that page and download the FREE ebook “Beginners Guide to Web 2.0″ I know the cover is hideous but the content is good.

In the coming months we will have several guest artists including: Darrell Chitty, Jeremy Sutton, Rod Evans, John Derry, Criag Kienast. If you have questions you would like to ask Marilyn send them to tim@artmarketingbuzz.com and we will try to get them in the podcast. Have a great day!!!

Okay if you are really far behind and need to know what the deal is with blogging this may help. Again, the question why.  Why blog…..awww geez do I have to?  No not if you’re willing to slowly let your business slip away.  Many entrepreneurs have stepped up the the use of  webblogs or blogs.  It is a fresh way of delivering your business message in a personal voice.  It allows some transparency of you and encourages the relationship side of things to prosper. Here are some other reasons why blogging may be a good choice for you.

Blogging positions you as a leader.

If you blog regularly and consistently add value to your readers, you’ll begin to develop a readership that likes you.  They begin to trust your musings, thoughts and opinions. This is where you can build your platform for being the thought leader or expert in your specific field or market.

It is Easy to Showcase photo and image galleries.

You have opportunity to profile specific customers, your business location or special event images easily and quickly.  As a visual artist this is cool.  You can show off your latest piece with an image while you talk about it.

There are many ways to add content.

You can use a variety of different means to publish and support your message.  It can be text, audio, video a combination of all of those.

You can do it yourself…no webmaster involvement.

Most of us are time poor.  How about not having to waste time and money on a webmaster.  Many blog sites are template driven and free.  You can log-in from anywhere, write a new page and publish it.

Communicate with your clients and prospects easily.

Would it be beneficial to you to allow your prospects and customers to share their comments, feedback, ideas, and concerns with you? This is the whole, “If you want to know why John Smith buys what John Smith buys, you have to see the world through John Smiths eyes”, thing.  Here is another way to do that. You can accomplish this efficiently through feedback forms on your blogs. Don’t worry about bashing or comments not pertinent to the posts.  You can moderate all the content coming in.

And finally one of the most important reasons: Be “findable” on the search engines.

No doubt you already have figured this out.  If not, here is the scoop. One of the ways to begin driving traffic to your site is by blogging. Blogs attract search engines and blog directories through some built-in notification features.  It helps considerably if you blog frequently. Daily is best. Yea right.  Ok a few times a week then is better than once a month.  I am definitely NOT an SEO expert.  How to be found is one of the hottest topics around. I do know that your blog can be a key component in the whole piece.  I have some articles and tutorials coming that can tell you a few ways to submit your blog posts and articles for a higher search engine rating. But for now, if you don’t have a blog get one.  If you have one, use it to communicate.