loving the dot com

So you’ve got a blog, and you’ve got something written down. Make sure the almighty blogosphere know it exists, and make sure people can easily find it again.

Recognition - LOOK! I’M OVER HERE! (aka XML-RPC Pings)

Most blogging software has the ability to send what’s called a ‘ping’ to blog indexing services (basically big lists of who’s written what and when), Wordpress is no different. This ping tells the indexing service that you’ve written something new and they should come and take a look at it. You should find that as soon as you hit “Publish!” you’ll get a load of hits from various web spiders as they digest your latest offering.

You can see the list of place your Wordpress blog pings by going to Options -> Writing in the control panel and looking at the “Update Services” box at the bottom of the page. By adding a list of servers in this box you can get Wordpress to automatically send ‘pings’ to all the servers each time you post a new article.

Here’s the list of servers I currently send a ping to whenever I publish a new post:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

There will always be more servers you can add to this list, so it’s well worth keeping an eye on it from time to time.

Syndication - Getting acknowledgement, and getting people to return

If you look in the toolbar on the right (well, it was on the right when I wrote this), you’ll see a load of little buttons under the “Syndication” heading. Each of these buttons allows someone to easily link your blog into their blog service of choice. That way they don’t have to bookmark your URL or remember the address, it’s automatically added right where they want it. This is a good thing. I know this because as soon as I added these buttons the number of return visitors to the site started adding up (thanks to Google Analytics for those statistics)

That’s it for now, but I’ll be adding more very soon, with a round-up at the end of the week.

There isn’t really a day goes by when I don’t hear about how the ‘blogosphere’ is still expanding at a huge rate, and there is still money to be made from it - so I thought I’d put it to the test.

The question - how long does it take to go from a blogging zero to the point where your blog can give you a stable income? More to the point, is it even still possible?

There are a million and one sites which claim to tell how you to monetize your site/blog/etc in “10 easy fool-proof ultra-guaranteed steps”, but let’s be honest, the majority of them are con-artists people jumping on the band wagon with their pseudo half-knowledge of SEO claming to be authorities on the subject in order to drive up traffic to their site, or sell a few hundred thousand badly written e-books to the clueless.

It’s time to put it to the test. I’m not going to tell you how to monetize your blog, sell you cheap brand name laptops, or ask for your credit card/passport details because I have $50,000,000 waiting for you in a bank account in Nigeria. I’m setting myself a challenge, and that is to simply see if all the hype is true, you can see the results for yourselves.

Where to start?

To get everyone up to speed, theres a couple pre-requisite points, but if you’ve got a blog setup already and want to see what I’ve been doing to optimize this blog, sort out SEO and things like that, skip to step 1.

Make sure you’ve got a decent publishing platform which you can easily understand and know how to use. Wordpress is a shining example of this (it’s what I use), it has built-in support for displaying many themes so you can make your blog/site look however you want and a huge list of user contributed plugins to add all sorts of fancy bells and whistles.

Of course you can’t have a site without some form of web hosting, but these days setting that up is a doddle too thanks to the vast array of free providers, such as wordpress.com

You’ve already got a publishing platform setup, what now?

I’m assuming you’ve got some content, something to fill out your pages which doesn’t start “Lorem Ipsum…”. If not, that’s probably a good start. Write about what you know, what you like, what interests you. Thinking “nobody will care what I think” isn’t the right attitude - because if you think like that, you’ll write like that, and nobody will care what you think.

Ha. I can cheat, I can pull in RSS Feeds

Please, for the love of God don’t do it. Yes, there are cheap shortcuts to getting content on your site. You can pull in content from 800 million of the most popular blogs on the Internet, but seriously, what’s the point. If you’re replicating content you’re not the only one doing it, which means there is absolutely nothing special about your blog and the search engine’s know it. Not only will the search engines quickly disregard your little corner of the Internet as little more than a mirror, but people won’t bother reading it either. Stop. Write your own content. I have enough duplicate search results as it is. Seriously.

Next time I’ll be letting you know the first steps I’ve taken toward SEO goodness and blogosphere loving.