Things learned...
I added the
StumbleUpon toolbar today, which makes it easy for me to submit articles and add to my profile (to keep articles on-file) that I have interest in. I found that to be a cool feature. However, word-to-the-wise when you're adding the toolbar...be sure that you don't have any tabs up that you are in need of keeping track of because you'll lose those as your internet will "reboot" (not your complete computer system...just the internet, i.e., Internet Explorer).
Additionally, I've added
del.icio.us to my networking group. Their site seems, thus far, to be fairly easy to use. I've not yet had much interaction with my
del.icio.us network, as that seems to be the hardest part. However, I have just begun using them and I discover new things as I go and will continue to update you. Posting items on their site is fairly easy. Adding people to your network is fairly easy.
My message regarding these sites is that networking is a necessity in marketing your blog, increasing its traffic and attractiveness to advertisers. Additionally, just because one networking site doesn't work for my blogs does not mean it will not work for your blogs.
A sight for adding "Pings" to your blog is called
Weblogs.com. I signed up there to start adding "Pings" each time I add changes/articles to my sight, hoping it will drive traffic in my direction. Here is what they say about their sight...
"Weblogs.com, a VeriSign service, is a ping server that automatically notifies subscribers when new content is posted to a website or blog.
Weblogs.com is the original ping service and receives millions of pings every day from blogs that configure their publishing software to notify Weblogs.com the moment content is published.
The VeriSign-operated Weblogs.com ping server will continue to operate as an openly available service. This benefits the entire blogosphere because:
...Blog publishers can immediately notify the community when new posts are available
...Anyone can openly monitor the updated posts, enabling a wide range of intelligent blog monitoring tools and applications. "
That is the "dish" from them. I'll let you know how this experiment goes.
What is the definition of "Ping (Blogging)"? This comes from Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_blog"Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post (or updates an old one.) That is, the tool sends an XML-RPC signal to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.
Open ping servers, like VeriSign's
Weblogs.com and Yahoo!'s
blo.gs, 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. A few of the blog aggregators that can be pinged directly include:
BulkFeeds,
FeedBurner,
Google Blog Search,
IceRocket,
Technorati, and
YahooIn 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.
There is a conflict of interest here between the blogger--who wants his new post to get the widest possible publicity as fast as possible--and the web-service owner--who wants his search engine or aggregator to have new blog posts long before anyone else. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as
Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers. As the blogosphere has grown, other ping "services" have cropped up, such as
Pingoat and
BlogFlux Pinger."
Thus far, networking is the best tool for bringing traffic to my blog sites. I additionally tried
Ping-o-matic this evening. Since I've only recently started utilizing tools for "Pinging" my blogs, I'll update you on the increase of traffice flow once I have accumulated enough data.
I continue to experiment with the different tools available to build and sustain great blogs and I will continue to give you the feedback from my experiences during these experiments, hoping that they help you have great success.
Happy Blogging!
