Ping for Fun and Profit
When you publish articles online, it isn't enough to rely on the built-in distribution service to get the word out about your genius. Getting involved, you can increase traffic dramatically by notifying interested parties of your contribution to the information-hungry world wide web.
The notification process is called PINGING. Blogs are generally set to ping automatically as soon as you hit Publish. The original site to which you publish an article will probably also ping the article. Still, you can add to its publicity by pinging it yourself.
Locate the published article
Find the article on the Internet (not on your hard drive). Often this is done by logging in to the article service and selecting view or preview so that you see the article in the same way a visitor may see it.
(1) Make sure it's the view the public sees.
(2) On the Internet (not on your computer).
For most article services, find your article by logging in, going to your list of articles, then clicking View. Here are the steps for American Chronicle: Go to http://www.americanchronicle.com/spool/login
Choose My Articles
Choose the Articles to View
Scroll all the way to the bottom and click Preview
Though the command says preview, the resulting view is the Internet location of the published article. Send your friends the link!
Step 2 - Open a new browser window
Open a new browser window or browser tab. Switching between windows can be managed from the keyboard, so I find new windows faster to use.
Step 3 - Ping-o-matic
In the browser bar, type P I N G O M A T I C . C O M and press Enter.
Step 4 - Bookmark (Favorite) the site
(1) Make sure the name of the site is on the name line
(2) Create a new folder called "Ping"
(3) Double click the new folder to put the bookmark into it
(4) After OK-ing the bookmark or favorite, return to the bookmark menu. After it opens, right click to Sort by Name (alphabetize) your bookmarks.
Step 5 - Copy your article title
Switch windows (Alt-Tab in Windows) back to your article. Highlight the title only with your cursor. Copy it, either from the File menu or Ctrl-C.
Step 6 - Paste it into the ping service
Switch back to the Ping-o-matic window (Alt-Tab). Paste (Ctrl-V) the tile in the line that says Blog Title.
Step 7 - Copy your article address
Switch back to the article window (Alt-Tab). Highlight the address that appears in the browser window. Copy it, either from the File menu or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-C.
Step 8 - Paste it into the ping service
Switch back to the Ping-o-matic window (Alt-Tab). Paste (Ctrl-V) the address in the line that says Blog Home Page.
Step 9 - Select services
Click "Check Common" to select all the services available to you.
Step 10 - Send
Send your pings. You need to do this once for each article, but you may have trouble if you ping several articles closer together than 15 minutes or more. If you get error messages like "Slow down Cowboy," just wait a bit then try again for the next article.
Ping More Services
Other useful services to bookmark and ping are:
KingPing - paste only the article address (web URL) here; no title.
AutoPinger - scroll down a bit; again, only the URL goes in