Increasing Traffic | How to Blog a Book

In addition to pinging your posts each time you publish them, you’ll want to use social networks to get the word out about what you’ve written. This means using Twitter, Facebook and even Linkedin to let you “tweeple,” friends and followers know you’ve written something informative. This will help drive traffic to your blog or blogged book.

If you aren’t already using social networking, start now. Join all three of these networks. If you aren’t blogging about anything business related, I suppose you could get away with not joining Linkedin. However, Facebook and Twitter constitute the essentials of social networking today.

If you want to know how to use these networks, there are plenty of books out there and tons of information on the Internet. Just Google “How to use Twitter” or “How to use Facebook” and you’ll be up all night reading for a month.

To not end up spending all day and all night socializing on the Internet, you must become a savvy networker. You can use all sorts of products like TweetDeck and Ping.fm to help you consolidate what you do on line. Just join the networks and ask around. Find out what other people are using to help them make their social networking time fast and easy. They will be happy to tell you.

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss Twitter in more depth and explain how to publicize your posts on Twitter.

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How to “Ping” Your Blog Posts to Ping Servers

Every time you write a blog post and hit publish, you want to be sure that post is “pinged.” This will help you increase your blog traffice. In other words, it will increase the readers of your blogged book.

What is a ping? A ping is a push mechanism by which a blog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal, which is a set of specifications and implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems and in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet, is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which then generates a list of blogs that have new material. That’s a complicated way to say that when your blog post is pinged, a blog catalog or aggregator knows you have added new content.

In some cases, you have to manually ping your content or set up an account. I used to do that with Technorati when I used Blogger. In most cases, this service is automated if you set your blog up correctly or if you sign up with a blog catalog or aggregator. In WordPress this is an automated service.

How do you set up your blog to get pinged? It’s pretty simple really–at least in WordPress. After you log into your WordPress blog, go to “Settings,” then “Writing,” then scroll to the bottom where it says “Update Services.” You’ll see this copy: “When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services. For more about this, see Update Services on the Codex. Separate multiple service URLs with line breaks. Then you’ll see a space to add site update services.”

Here are services to add. I suggest you add at least the first one on this list. It’s best to add them all: