Why You Need "Post + Ping" for Blogging

This is a "re-post: of literally one of the very first articles I ever wrote and posted to Ezine Articles many years ago. This is still good advice and recommended for anyone interested in learning how to blog. The original articled is posted below...

It does not matter if you are blogging as a pastime or blogging related to marketing a business online, you always need to remember to "ping" your blog updates on a regular basis. This is important because not all blogging platforms have automated pinging services.
If you are new to the concept of blogging, pinging is even more important. Many people start blogs scratching their heads and wondering why they never get any traffic to their blog. Just like commercial websites,blogs now have to be marketed through SEO optimization, press releases, social networking, directory submissions, word of mouth, and anything else that you can think of to create traffic.
One thing that works in favor of blogging is that weblog posts are considered timely and unique content. It is for this reason they are indexed quicker, bookmarked, and passed around to others with similar interests.
Blogging is also an easy way to get your feet wet in having an online presence, since you do not have to purchase domain names and hosting services. It also is a good exercise to learning some of the basics, maybe even a little HTML, although it is not necessary. There is an incredible amount of free tools and software available to help you get started.
Blogging is an excellent way to build traffic in an organic way to promote websites, as well. Since blogs are an informal way of communicating, they also are a way to build relationships and a good way to get and stay popular with your network. In effect, a ping for your weblogs is like a personal note or telephone call, and just a way of saying, "Hear I am and this is what's new in my corner of the world".
You also want to make sure that you stay on topic with the theme of your blog, and writing posts that are relevant. You will want to make frequent posts to build content for your blog, probably no less than a few times a week and make sure that you "ping" the update.
The way you build and maintain the information resources on your blog are also important to your efforts and success. You can join online forums, or do a search for help in building and maintaining your site with tips from other bloggers.
Social Bookmarking is also a popular way to network with other individuals that may be interested in your blog updates. You probably are aware of such services as furl.net. technorati.com, and del.icio.us.
A free service that allows you to automate your bookmarking is onlywire.com. The onlywire website allows you to create an account, and then insert your username and passwords for all the accounts you have at various bookmarking sites and "ping" these sites all at once.
Always make a point to "ping" as you "blog".
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Post and Ping Techniques

When most people hear "Post and Ping" they naturally will think this means to "make posts" to your blogs and then "ping" those posts manually on popular pinging services, or using a pinging tool. If you are already familiar with using Wordpress than you also know that this is a built in feature of Wordpress. Every time you make a post, it automatically notifies a certain number of the pinging services that you have updated your content. There are some Wordpress plugins available that will also allow you to customize some additional functions.

These certainly are good and worthwhile ideas, but I have a different take on "Post and Ping". I use a Blogger blog as a tool for post and ping. This only makes sense, because we know that Blogger is going to crawl new content on Blogspot and then quickly index it in the search engines.

This has also been termed a feeder blog, as you can use it to quickly feed links from any site to Blogger and be assured to get the links noticed and indexed by Google. Google makes it pretty easy by providing a "share" button for Blogger that resides in your Google toolbar. This is used almost like a bookmarking button to send a link to your Blogger blog. Another approach can get fairly sophisticated by employing a tool like Ping.fm to post statuses.

You have to use this in a way that is not considered spam, which means adding some content before and after each link that you are sending, but this can just be an extra sentence or two. Mix this in with some scheduled posts, or a free content resource like UniqueArticleWizard.com and you will have created a powerful mini-site for your link wheel that is automated. Then just ping your Blogger blog every once in a while on a service like Pingler.com.

As an example, I wrote 52 posts in advance that were then scheduled to post on this blog once a week for 12 months out. I occasionally can add articles I have written and published to EzineArtcles.com, and I can always add content from the email option function that Blogger provides (part of the scheme for using Unique Article Wizard).