Blogging 101

[Boogie]

Your RSS Feed

If you used any of the major systems for creating your blog, you should already have an RSS feed (atom feed, xml or other) built right in.

What is RSS? RSS stands for Real Simple Sindication. Its a 'whats new' feed for your blog. What this allows is for other websites to see whats new at your site and quickly and easily incorporate whats in your RSS into their sites, whether it be their search engines, the reprinting blog, their news readers, or otherwise.

What it means, in the end, is more viewers for your blog and more eyes on your text.

Read your blogging programs documentation and find its RSS feed. Once you've done this you're going to want to find places to start submitting it to.

There are plenty of important places, most can be found by a google search, but here are just a few of the more common places.

technorati.com
bloglines.com
Feedster.com
Weblogs.com
syndic8.com
........

Well, fortunately, our good friends at Ping O Matic make it a little easier for you.

For the price of zero dollars and no link back, you can plug your feed into pingomatic and let it submit your rss feed to some of the biggest syndication sites on the internet.

Some require you to visit the site firsthand and submit it by yourself the first time, but after that, each time you update your site (and your rss feed) you can hop over to pingomatic and let them know that your feed is updated, to send the bots over, and syndicate your text.

This may or may not be something you'll want to do, but for most scenarios, this is a great way to get people writing your blog, especially if you're writing about interesting topics that are being searched for. Hungry eyes want information and these sites can lead those readers to you.

Now, one of the neater features of Wordpress and Typepad, is the built in autopinging system. If you're using one of these systems you're probably already automatically pinging pingomatic each time you publish to your blog.

If not, read your blogging softwares help documents and find out how easy it is to set this up automatically. I've never been able to set it up with blogger but you'll find that with most other scripts its fairly simple to achieve.

Blogger already pings weblogs.com

There are also hundreds of other sites out there on the net that are pingable, and perhaps this would be an interesting turn for your blogging career.

Perhaps you'd like to have a site that republishes peoples rss feeds and is pingable. There are many facets to the blogging industry, choose your space wisely!

Now that you've gotten some entries on your blog, and your RSS feed is syndicated, if you're writing interesting articles the readers should start showing up...

the syndication bots are aware of your new space on the web and are watching it with hungry mouths ready to regurgitate it into the monitors of the world....

and the search engines bots cant be far away.....