Blog Traffic | How to Blog a Book

Jonathan Fields on Blog Traffic, Subscribers and Content

January 26, 2012 By Nina 1 Comment

Yesterday I published a blog post on my other blog, Write Nonfiction NOW!, based on a very interesting interview I conducted with Jonathan Fields. In that post, Jonathan and I discussed what it takes to create a bestselling book: author’s platform, a business model, hard work, great release strategies, and a great book. (You can read the post here.) Today on this blog, I’ve published the remainder of our conversation, which covered tips for bringing in blog traffic, getting blog readers to subscribe to your blog and creating a better blog.

Jonathan is the author of Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love, which was named a Top 10 Small Biz Book by Small Business Trends, and Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, his latest book, which has generated extraordinary praise for its provocative, science-meets-art approach to embracing uncertainty as a catalyst for innovation and action. It’s a must read for authors—yes, even authors of blogged books! I wrote a short review yesterday, but it bears repeating for those of you blogging with the hope that your book will be discovered in the process. All writers feel uncertainty, and that can stop us in our tracks. When you have no readers—or few readers—to your blog, when you aren’t sure if what you are writing makes sense, has meaning, is touching anyone—or ever will be purchased by a publisher or readers, it’s hard to keep moving forward. That’s why you want to read Jonathan’s book, Uncertainty. There you will find advice on how to make the uncertainty we all feel at times less unpleasant and to use it as a way to fuel your creative process.

Jonathan, a dad, husband, author, speaker and serial-entrepreneur, blogs at JonathanFields.com. Check out his blog if you want a taste of a successful blog. He’s been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Inc., Entrepreneur, Forbes, USA Today, People, CNBC, FoxBusiness, Vogue, Elle, Self, Fitness, Outside, O Magazine and thousands of other places. He also runs a book marketing educational venture TribalAuthor.com, where he shares what he has learned about marketing his books and becoming a successful author. (He shared a ton of great info on this topic in yesterday’s post.)

What follows is our conversation on blogging. Enjoy and learn!

For those authors who are beginning to blog, blogging a book or wanting to improve their blogs, can you offer a few tips for bringing in more traffic?

Bringing in more traffic…that’s an interesting question, because a lot of traffic is moving away from blogs these days and towards social media. There’s so much attention getting split. I would say leverage Twitter to build relationships. Where you can, share links to your blog. Make sure that when you share links, it’s both a much smaller part of everything else that you do, so you should be 90 percent other-serving, and 10 percent or less self-serving. Same thing with Facebook, but when you do it in Facebook, you can have more of a conversation. So share a link to a post, but then you can also put in content. Share a paragraph or two from the post, and then ask a question that will inspire a conversation in the comments on Facebook. Sometimes this defeats the comments in your blog, but…

Other ways to drive traffic are to create what we call “flagship content.” Create a major thought piece that’s provocative and establishes a position and a strong voice and builds leadership that people will want to share. It can be a series. It can be a long blog post. It can be a manifesto. We actually used a manifesto to launch Career Renegade.

It was called The Firefly Manifesto and was a PDF.

And once the readers show up, how do we get them to actually subscribe to the blog?

One, offer them something in exchange for their e-mail. That may be a mini-course or an eBook or a teaser chapter from a book. Feature the call to action to subscribe boldly, either at the top of your blog, the top right, or underneath your blog posts.

Second, ask them at the end of your blog post to subscribe. Throw in a sentence that says, “If you’ve enjoyed this…” or some variation of “if you’ve enjoyed this post, sign up for the weekly updates,” or whatever works for your format.

Any other tips you might want to add on blogging well?

I can go way down the rabbit hole with this. Just because you know how to use the technology doesn’t mean you have something to say. Blog because you have something to say, not because you have a place to say it.

One of the questions I get all the time is, “I’ve been blogging for six months, and nobody’s listening.” And I’ll look at the blog, and I’ll realize It’s because the person’s not saying anything. It’s like white-washed content, or there’s no voice, no position, no story, no value. If you’re going to put in the effort, have something to say, offer real value, tell great stories, be provocative (if that’s in your nature), have a voice. Give people something to say “yes” or “no” to. If you don’t, nobody will care.

Take Jonathan’s last comment to heart. It is especially true for book bloggers. Why would anyone want to read your blogged book if you have no voice, nothing to say, aren’t adding any value to anyone’s life, have no story to tell that touches people in some important or deep way? Write a book, blog a book, that matters–that’s worth reading.

Comments or questions about this post? Leave them below! I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Don’t forget about my upcoming “Blog Your Way to a Book Deal” 4-part Teleclass starting next week! Preorder a copy of How to Blog a Book and SAVE $30 on registration fee! Get all the details here: http://bit.ly/BlogaBookTeleclassOffer

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Increasing Traffic, Publicizing Your Blog Tagged With: blog subscribers, blog traffic, creating valuable content, Jonathan Fields

Darren Rowse: On Creating Profitable and Successful Blogs

January 10, 2012 By Nina 7 Comments

Not only do I want my book blogging to result in a traditional publishing deal or a successfully self-published book, I also want that effort to create a successful blog that continues to attract readers and income after the book is published. This should be your goal as well. That’s how you create a business and a career around your book and your blog.

To find out how to accomplish this feat, I asked Darren Rowse for an interview while I was at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles this past November. Darren is the author of the extremely popular ProBlogger blog and the co-author of ProBlogger, the book, which was published in 2010 by Wiley. (If you recall, my last two posts consisted of interviews with his co-author, Chris Garrett.)

I was excited to interview Darren, a warm and humble man not above sitting on the floor in the hallway of the convention center for our interview, for several reasons. First, I wanted to find out about his blog-to-book deal and experience and to write a post about it. Also, since he blogs about both how to become a successfully blogger and one who makes money at this endeavor, I wanted to pick his brain for great information on this topic to share with you here. Why? Because if you can create a great blog as you blog your book, your odds of getting noticed by readers, agents or publishers increases tremendously. Plus, by making money as you blog or blog your book you can create a job, as well as a career, as an author in the process. (Remember that a blogger is an author and a publisher, and to have a career as either you do need to earn an income.)

Darren began blogging and, like many bloggers, learned by experience. He’s shared those lessons generously—as he did in this interview—for almost ten years on ProBlogger. He also has a photography blog, called Digital Photography School, and writes FeelGooder and TwiTip as well. He makes his living as a professional blogger.

My interview with Darren was quite long. I’ve broken it into two parts. Part one covers a variety of topics, including researching your blog, increasing traffic (readership) to your blog, creating a profitable blog, and producing a successful blog. Part two, which I’ll publish later this week, will deal with Darren’s blog-to-book deal, writing a book, and blogging a book.

What, if any, market research did you do before beginning your blog?

In 2002, when I started blogging, I didn’t really do any research at all. That blog was purely an extension of me. I was writing about everything and anything, but as I blogged I realized my readers wanted less. They wanted a more focused blog because I was blogging about photography, blogging, church, movies, and all kinds of stuff I was involved with. The more topics I wrote about, the less people I found who had all of those interests. Like most people, I’m a fairly eclectic person.

That’s when I started to focus on niches. The first one was a photography blog, which wasn’t really researched. ProBlogger isn’t a blog that was overly researched, but it was probably more intuitively researched. I realized a lot of bloggers were starting to talk about blogs and debate the idea, and I was beginning to debate the idea myself. It was more a blog I wanted to read and that I thought my friends wanted to read.

Do you recommend people do research before they start a blog?

It’s probably more important to start with a topic you are interested in and engaged with. It is probably worth testing that topic with other people; that’s worth a little bit of research. Obviously, if you want to make a bit of money, then you want people to read it. If there is no one is interested in that topic, then it is probably not a good topic. The global usage of the Internet is so big now, though, that there is always going to be someone interested. Even quite tiny niches can grow reasonable good sized audiences.

How long did it take for you to gain blog readers, and can you pin point any certain event that created a tipping point when readership noticeably increased?

I don’t remember a lot of the readership stats from the early days, but it probably took about a year or so on that personal blog before it began to get reasonable well read and quite well known in some of its areas. ProBlogger took about a year and a half to grow to a point where I would say it was a full-time income and enough to live on.

On that blog the tipping point in terms of traffic was probably when I actually revealed that I was making money from blogging and talked a little bit about the reality of it and that it was a full time thing. I kind of avoided talking about that; I didn’t want it to be a sensational post, like “Darren Makes This Much Money!” But I had to talk about the personal aspect of it almost in that way to give some credibility to topic.

Most of my other blogs have had fairly steady growth; there’s not been a whole heap of “this moment changed everything.” There’s been a series of posts I’ve written that have grown the audience and shown a spike in traffic, but then things died down. Over time things trended upward.

I know a professional blogger who says you have to write a certain number of posts before you see a big traffic change—actually 1,000 posts. Would you agree?

I’ve often said the fist thousand posts are the hardest. I’ve talked to bloggers who in their first week have had massive traffic because they’ve written something that hit the mark with people. And then for others it takes years. You certainly grow as a writer and learn the skills of blogging the more you do it and practice it. Like any type of writing, you improve as you write. I’d be hesitant to put a number on the number of post you need.

What are the 3-5 top things you do to drive traffic (readers) to your blog?

Writing the content that will serve them is the thing to do first. It doesn’t bring the readers in, but it certain helps when they are there to keeps them. I think that is really important. If I were starting again and trying to drive readers I would go through an exercise or try to work out who I want to read the blog and define their needs and where they were hanging out.

Working out where the readers are on line. With Digital Photograph School, they were all on Flickr at the time. On Flickr photo sharing site people have cameras. So that’s a place where I developed a Flickr group, which is like a Facebook page, and I began to develop relationships there and share the links to what we were writing to build engagement on another site. As a result of that, we were able to drive people back to our site. That was probably a fairly significant thing.

Developing relationships with other bloggers who had my potential reader. LifeHacker is a big tech how to site and they let you submit story ideas. I was constantly submitting story ideas, and probably one in four they would pick up. After a while you get the feel for the type of things they are interested in. They drove a lot of traffic in to Digital Photography School. Even though they weren’t a photography site, they had technologically inclined how-to articles that related to ours. I developed that relationship, got to know the editor of that site. They started watching us, and I didn’t have to submit so much. Ten others might pick up the thread on your post on that site as well, and you get on the front page of Delicious or Digg because of the accumulation of traffic.

Social media can be good if you pick the right one for your audience. These days a lot of our readers hang out on Facebook; they don’t use Twitter so much in the photography space. Developing a space there proved good.

Set up an email newsletter list. This didn’t help us find new readers, but it helps us drive traffic every week. We send out a newsletter each week, which is basically just a recap of our posts for the week. That drives our biggest day of traffic by far; it doubles or triples our normal day of traffic because we send out an email to all the people who have subscribed over the years. We have a nicely designed template and list the posts and feature a few photos in it. We have a few ads in it either for our own ebooks, or we sell the ads. If we don’t send that out, our readers say, “Where’s my newsletter?” They love it. They come to expect it. It’s a useful way of keeping in touch with the site. That’s why we promote our newsletter so heavily on the site. Also, it makes it easy for them to know what posts ran that week. Most of our readers have no idea what an RSS feed is or what Twitter is. Some don’t understand what Facebook is. So they’ve got no other way of getting notification of new posts other than email, and so they thank us. It’s certainly not seen as a spammy type thing by our readers. I don’t do that so much on ProBlogger, but on the photo site it’s gold.

How did you become profitable with your blog?

In the early days, I did so was mainly with ads, or ad networks, like Google’s ad network, and a little affiliate marketing, like recommending books on Amazon—so mainly books. As I started the photography site, I recommended cameras and earned a small commission on those—four percent. But if you’re selling $1,000 cameras, it can add up.

Would you say that’s pretty doable for most bloggers?

It comes down to having a readership. If you don’t have anyone reading your blog, you won’t have anyone clicking those ads. But that certainly is very easy to implement the ads. You just copy and paste some code.

What kind of readership do you need to start implementing ads and seeing income?

It varies a little from niche to niche because some of the ads will pay more in some niches than in others. I was always aiming for 1,000 readers a day; in my mind that was what I needed to start making enough for it to be a part time job. Then again I now know other bloggers with a couple hundred readers a day who sell ebooks or their own products or services, and they are well on their well to being full-time bloggers because of the price of their products and the engagement they have with those readers. If you’ve got really loyal readers and they are going to buy the things you recommend or that you make, you can build an income stream quite quickly.

Can you offer my readers 3-4 tips for producing a successful blog?

It’s a combination of things.

Heart.

Telling stories. That is gold. It certainly has worked for me—being personal on the blog. Telling my own story, and giving reader a space to tell theirs, either in posts or in comments.

Building interaction and community on your blog. A lot of bloggers just provide information and don’t actually provide interaction. For us, that meant setting up a forum area. For others, that would mean setting up a Facebook page where you can have that engagement. For others, it’s purely in the comment section. Asking lots of questions. I think building community is very important.

Then you have to be strategic. How am I going to find subscribers for my blog? Doing analysis on the different technologies. Maybe its RSS feeders, maybe its email, maybe it’s Facebook. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe you need to send them letters? Some people don’t hang out on the Web much at all, but you can drive them there in some other way. Working out those kinds of strategies: How will I find those readers, how do I hook them into the site, and then what journey will I take them on? After they’ve subscribed, then what next? Do you want them to follow you on Twitter? Do you want them to comment on a post? You might send an email that says, “Here are 10 of our most popular posts. Drop by and let us know what you think of them. Leave a comment.” It’s thinking strategically and asking yourself, “What journey do I want to take my readers on?”

Look for part two of my interview with Darren later this week. Until then, his tips and advice should keep you busy building a better blog and blogging a better book. Feel free to leave your questions and comments here for Darren or for me.

About Darren Rowse

DarrenRowse has been blogging since 2002 and doing it professionally — earning a full-time living from the medium — since 2004/5. You can find his blogs at ProBlogger, Digital Photography School, FeelGooder, and TwiTip and find out more about how he became a full time blogger here.

Before he became a blogger he worked in quite a few jobs but had primarily been working in churches as a minister (mainly with youth and young adults) for around 10 years. He has a degree in Theology and half a degree in marketing. He is also an entrepreneur who loves dreaming up ideas, starting new things and letting his “creative juices loose on projects that I often start up on an impulse.”

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Professional Blogging, Selling Books and Information Products Tagged With: blog readers, blog traffic, Darren Rowse, income from blogs

Chris Garrett on How to Turn Blog Readers Into Book Buyers

January 3, 2012 By Nina 3 Comments

As part of this blog’s new focus, this is the first of a series of posts I’m going to publish during January based upon interviews I conducted at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles, CA, in early November 2011. While there I had the opportunity to speak with Chris Garrett, Darren Rowse, Liz Strauss, Mari Smith, C.C. Chapman, and a few other successful bloggers, social networkers, and content creators. I hope you will read the posts based upon these interviews, and then start the New Year by applying all the great information provided by these experts. They talked with me about how to produce a better blog, drive traffic to your site, get your readers engaged, sell books and products, and many important things that help blogged books get discovered by a publisher or, at a minimum, build the readership you need to eventually turn out a successful self-published book. At the very least, if you apply the tips and lessons they offer, you’ll produce a better blog to help you promote your book.

Given that we are discussing blogged books, your ability to create a successful book—one that sells many copies—depends in part upon converting blog readers into buyers. If you also want to make a living—or at least some income—as a blogger and as an author, you need to accomplish this feat. A variety of factors contribute to how many readers you attract to your blogged book and later to the printed book or ebook you self-publish or a publisher produces for you. These same factors determine how easily you sell any ancillary services or products you might choose to offer to loyal readers, such as webinars and teleseminars, coaching or home-study courses, all of which help produce income for bloggers and authors.

So, how do you convert blogged book readers (or simply blog readers) into ebook or printed book buyers? More important, how do you get readers to your blog in the first place and then get them to stay around long enough to later buy your ebook, printed book, other products and services?

I had the opportunity while at BlogWorld to get answers to these questions from Chris Garrett, co-author of ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, and an online business consultant, teacher, coach, new media industry commentator, writer, speaker, and all-round web geek. Chris has been involved in several startups and has written for some of the web’s best-loved blogs. He also has co-authored four other traditionally published print books and many ebooks. (See the end of this post for a full bio.) Below, find my questions, and Chris’ answers, in part one of this two-part blog post:

What are the most important things bloggers should do to build loyal readers that translate into book buyers as well as purchasers of ancillary products and services, such as webinars and teleseminars?

There are four main things a blogger has to concentrate on: attraction, retention, conversion, and, referrals, or sharing.

The big mistake bloggers make is they only concentrate on one—traffic, or gaining attention. Instead, bloggers should focus on attraction and then retention.

A lot of bloggers think they have to drive traffic, which is a mistake in itself, and forget about the people they have already attracted. Get people to subscribe (especially by your email because hardly anybody outside of technical geeks understand RSS), and nurture that audience so you get them to stick around.

And then you can take action, which is the conversion. Taking action could be a blog reader making a comment, signing up for your email list, signing up for your webinar, buying your book. But you can’t just get someone to give you their attention and then buy straight away or take an action straight away because they don’t know who you are; they aren’t sure they like you or trust you yet. That retention piece is really, really important.

If you do retention well, then the fourth part is getting referrals, getting people to talk about you, getting people to share, and that’s how all of this becomes less of an uphill struggle. You have that compounding affect because you are attracting what in the corporate word we would call advocates. They are basically your fans, people who are going to talk about you.

Is there one mistake you see often that those building a blog readership and wanting to sell something—like a book—should avoid?

A lot of bloggers try to sell something straight away without building up any good will, or they burn out their audience by constantly asking for things. You see this in social media as well. People say, “This social media doesn’t work. No one is clicking on my links,” but you see that all they are pushing out there are links. This is like going up to someone on the street and asking for ten dollars rather than asking a friend you’ve known for years for a loan.

You have to have that good will, and that comes from building relationships. That means you have to retain people’s attention, and that means you have to keep giving people good stuff and telling them what to expect in terms of their future.

So from the point of your audience, it comes down to “What’s in it for me, why should I care, what am I going to get out of this,” and you’ve got to nurture that.

For a writer or aspiring author blogging—someone who may not be a “blogger” per say—what are the things they need to do to attract, retain, convert, and then gain referrals so they might attract a publisher or buyers to a self-published book?

If you are a writer or an aspiring author, you’ve got lots of content to share. Start telling people about what you have to offer. Don’t tell people about your website. Telling people about what they are going to get, what they are going to achieve, by listening to you or the results they’ll get by taking your advice is always better than saying, “I have this awesome website or book I want to tell you about.” Instead say, “Here’s a tip that will help you achieve your goals or solve your problem.” Even if [your book] is entertainment, the focus is on what’s in it for them. That’s what you start with.

You might begin with a tiny audience of people who know you—your network. If you do a good job of articulating the benefit and the outcome of what they are going to get, word will spread. And you can encourage that by sharing more content relevant to their interests and to what they need.

If there are people in your network who can help you spread the message, that’s always better than you saying, “I’m awesome.” If someone else says, “You need to check Chris out because he’s awesome, and this is where you go to check him out,” it always sounds better than blowing your own horn.

In Mari Smith’s session [at BlogWorld], she talked about Social Media Examiner going from zero subscribers to 150,000 in a really short time. Mike Stelzner went to Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman and myself and said, “[Social Media Examiner] is going to be great, and will you help me get it off the ground? Will you use your influence to get people to check it out?” We knew it was worth people checking out because he had put a lot of value into the site. It wasn’t like telling people, “Please follow me on Twitter.” This was going to help them achieve what they wanted to do. So we helped.

Again, the main thing to remember is to focus on your audience and on what they want and need rather than on what you want.

Check in on Thursday for Part 2 of this interview with Chris Garrett. In the meantime, if you have had success turning blog readers into book buyers, please share your experiences by leaving a comment.

More About Chris Garrett

Although Chris Garrett has been “online” since the 1980?s, it was in 1994 Chris first became addicted to the World Wide Web. Since then he has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips such as Heinz, Toshiba, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Durex, amongst others, make the most of the internet.

In 2005 Chris left the advertising agency world and founded a company to help smaller businesses and solo-entrepreneurs profit from their skills, knowledge and experience, achieve more with Online Media, and grow audiences of people who know, like and trust them. See how your business could benefit from working with Chris on the services page here.

As well as coaching and training companies and individuals, Chris also regularly speaks at conferences around the world about internet salesmanship, writing compelling content, and social media for business. He has spoken at events such as BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the Successful Outstanding Bloggers conference in Chicago, Think Visibility, Affiliate Expo, Wishlist Member Live, WordCamp, the Netherlands Social Media Congres and the Institute of Fundraising, along with the dozens of webinars, teleseminars and virtual events he holds or contributes to annually.

Chris was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1974. He lived in the UK for most of his life but now lives back in Calgary with his wife, daughter, cat, and a three-year-old Cocker Spaniel.

www.chrisg.com

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Increasing Traffic, Publicizing Your Blog, Selling Books and Information Products Tagged With: blog traffic, Chris Garrett, conversion, ebooks, selling books

Using Video to Drive Traffic to Your Blogged Book

July 15, 2011 By Nina 2 Comments

An increasingly popular way to drive traffic to blogs these days involves video. YouTube has become a huge source of information and entertainment. You may find that by posting videos to YouTube you can drive enormous amounts of traffic to your blogged book.

Most computers, especially laptops, have video capability, and flip cameras are pretty cheap and easy to use. Without going into a ton of detail, let me just say that once you have figured out how to video tape yourself, you an easily upload that video to YouTube.

Here’s what you do: Create an account on YouTube. Then sign in. Upload what you have already recorded either on your computer or with your webcam. If you don’t like the quality of your videos, you can add in lighting or a mike to your tools when video taping.

What do you record? You can record a blog post or information about your blog. You can record your mission statement or details about the benefits of reading your blogged book. You can tell people about your process. You can give them some tips or tools from your blogged book. You can create a book trailer. You can record whatever you like that you think might be fun or interesting. Who knows, maybe your video will go viral. And by all means, share it wherever you can…on all your social networks!

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Filed Under: Increasing Traffic, Promotion, Publicizing Your Blog Tagged With: blog traffic, driving traffic, Promotion, video, YouTube Videos

Content is King and Key

December 2, 2010 By Nina Leave a Comment

I’ve heard it said that content is king. I’ve also heard it said that content is key. The two sentences mean the same thing. If you want to produce a blog people will read–one that will generate traffic and get the attention of a publisher sometime down the road (or simply gain you readers when you self-publish your book), you must produce good content and lots of it. No other way exists.

Sure you need to promote that blog. Sure you need to write about a topic people want to read about. Sure you need to have a unique angle on your topic, especially if your blog has a lot of competition.

When it’s all said and done, though, great content draws readers. Period.

Here’s a story that speaks to this very fact. In fact, this guy, Tucker Max, a best-selling author and a blogger, says, “content is key.” Now, I have no interest in his subject matter, but other people do–and so did a publisher. Read the story here.

Filed Under: Blogs Turned Into Books, What Subjects to Blog About, Writing Posts/Chapters Tagged With: blog content, blog promotion, blog traffic, blog-to-book deal

How to “Ping” Your Blog Posts to Ping Servers

May 30, 2010 By Nina Leave a Comment

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: