Now It’s Time To The Ping

Once your www.my.yahoo.com is set up, every time you’d post a new entry on your blog, you’ll have to go to www.pingomatic.com . Fill up the appropriate fields, then submit. This will inform a lot of blog directories that your blog has new entries. And this would drive the search engine spiders on a feeding frenzy. It’ll be a reminder for them to check out your blog come the next relevant query.

Again, you have to do this every time you will post a new entry. No exceptions!

How powerful is the blog-ping combo?

Your new website will get indexed in Yahoo within 5 days. This is guaranteed! And with Yahoo picking up your website, and with www.blogger.com being owned by Google, it wouldn’t be long until the world’s most widely used search engine would index your new website as well.

And if the blog-ping combo could do this for new websites, just think of the possibilities it could provide for older ones. Fantastic, isn’t it?

It’s About RSS As Well

Blogs produce RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, a technology that would allow you to broadcast any changes on your blog to subscribed systems. This is actually the heart of the blog-ping combo. You have to learn how to syndicate your RSS feeds.

If you’re using blogger, it’s easy. Take your blog’s URL. For example, it is:

www.thisisyourblog.blogspot.com

Now, all you have to do is to add the extension atom.xml. So, it should appear like this:

www.thisisyourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

This is the URL of your RSS feeds.

Now you need an RSS aggregator somewhere which could pick up your RSS feeds. Preferably, it is a website that can be easily crawled by search engine spiders. The perfect spot for this is www.my.yahoo.com . Simply create a Yahoo account, then go to the said page. Find the ADD RSS button, then press on the same. Then paste the URL of your RSS feeds.

Every time you’d update your blog, RSS feeds would be generated and displayed in www.my.yahoo.com .

It All Starts With A Blog

Web logs, or blogs as people have fondly referred to them in recent years, were originally designed for social purposes. People used it as online diaries where they could post their thoughts, the events of their days, their secret desires and the likes. But blogs possessed some very special qualities that internet marketers found hard to dismiss.

* Blogs figure prominently in search engine results. The first few pages of some queries would yield many blogs occupying premium spots.
* Blogs are basically free web publishing tools. A little tweaking and it could become a website of its own.
* Blogs are easy to update. Just press EDIT or PUBLISH and you’d have new content in a flash. No need to change the source code. The system will easily take care of that.
* Blogs have their own communities. Bloggers often link with one another. This is a level of connectivity that is pretty hard to come by in other mediums.

Hence, online businessmen started using blogs for marketing purposes.