Announcing your Latest Blog Post

You have just finished writing a great new post, you hit ‘Publish’ in WordPress.  Now what!?  How are you going to attract new people to your blog post?  How will the search engines know to index your latest post?

If you have WordPress, you can configure your settings so that clicking that Publish button can also trigger announcements to a number of services to let them know that you have posted an update.  This process is known as ‘Pinging’ and can be very beneficial.

Login to your administration panel and navigate to the ‘Writing Options’ (from the sidebar Settings –> Writing).  At the bottom of this screen is the ‘Update Services’ section with a textbox.  By default this box will contain one line:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

This ensures that when you make a new post to your blog, it automatically notifies Ping-o-Matic that you have made an update.  Ping-o-Matic is a service that attempts to notify multiple sources of your update and many of these will then visit your blog to discover what update has been made. 

As well as Ping-o-Matic, I have added KPing, which notifies 60 different services of your update and automatically checks for new updates several times a day via your RSS or XML feed.  Along with KPing, I have also added a series of other services, whom I wish to ensure that I am informing of my updates.  My current list of services can be seen below:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.kping.com/ping/
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

If you wish to use the above list, feel free – there are many similar lists around the net.  If there is a service you feel I should be updating and is missing from this list, please let me know – it would be greatly appreciated.

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