“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.” – Steuart Henderson Britt, legendary ad-man

Substitute “Blogging” with “Doing Business” up there, and you get the idea. While blogging may be great for the mind, most are in it hoping to get  read. Getting your words out there is no easy “wink,” and using the advantage of free update, or “ping” services should be among your “must do’s.”

In essence, what you can do, is automatically “advertise” (alert) numerous search services that you have published a new blog post and then, “come one, come all readers.” This is done by sending out an XML-RPC ping, which tells popular blog indexing sites, such as Technorati, and FeedBurner (now Google) that you’ve created something new, and requesting inclusion by updating their catalogs.

You can do this manually by visiting these sites individually, or can automate the process to work simultaneously and seemlessly with publishing each post. The standard installation of WordPress gets you started with this automation, if you enable the option under the Writing Administration area. There, you will see listed the server address for “Ping-O-Matic” (a WordPress venture), saving you a trip to this site for updating manually to as many as twenty-seven individual indexing sites.

If this sounds too good to be true, you are partly right, and the convenience of this function is not intended as, “set it, and forget it.” You should do a bit of  “pre-work” before getting started.

Importantly, head over to Ping-O-Matic and take a look at the listed services. As said, you will see Technorati, FeedBurner, and many others. Each of these “services” are established, for-profit business concerns, and none have any obligation to do your “advertising.” Most require, or strongly encourage, your participation by firstly establishing a free account by registering your details directly with their sites. When completed, their search engines will be able to properly “give credit” to your account for future posts. Aside from establishing a positive relationship, you will be assisting to separate yourself from the spammers, and make it easier for interested readers to find your work.

Ping-O-Matic serving as your “notification aggregator” may be all (more than) you need, however, there are others you can, and should consider for inclusion. Avoid buying URL “lists” of these servers. Most are worthless, containing incorrect addresses or listing services gone defunct long ago. While writing this, I tested a “World’s Greatest” list of 169 “Secret” update servers “Guaranteed to Give Success,” and found only two functioning links – one being Technorati, the other FeedBurner.

Beyond the SEO hucksters, folks, this is the Internet – servers get moved, and businesses go, well, out of business from time to time, and are not going to let you know. If you would like an updated list for free, drop me an e-mail, I’m all to happy to oblige, and with complements!

As a final consideration, after enabling auto update notifications, think about what it is you are doing. When you hit the “Publish” button in WordPress, your post appears on the Web, and (hopefully) automatically, a whole bunch of people were “tipped-off” about your new work. It is not necessary to let Technorati and others know about this event more than once. In fact, “pinging” these servers repeatedly in short succession and/or without new content could get you branded and banned from their servers as a potential spammer!

It is very important to note that re-publishing the same post with a new sentence, or a corrected spelling error is not considered as new content, and multiple revisions/re-submissions will likely be construed as spam. This is not Twitter, and be careful -  “winking” at somebody excessively might get you nothing more than a black eye!