So What Caused The Traffic?

If you read my last entry, something happened to my blog that pretty much doubled my traffic over at TechBasedMarketing.com . Well, my suspicions were wrong although related in some way. You see, I was trying to make the blog by email feature on WordPress to work so I installed a plugin that would simulate cronjobs.

Unfortunately that plugin worked WAY too well may have been an error on my end too - not blaming the devs. But when I came back to my computer the next day I had over 200 repeated entries. And because I'd set WP to ping only upon publish it kept publishing and pinging 200+ times. I don't know how often in between the script did that.

But I can personally attest now that blogging (and pinging) often increases your traffic because after I cleaned up everything my traffic came back down. Still better but not as good as the 200+ entry days.

In some ways, this is worrisome. Don't you think it encourages spam?

Almost doubled my traffic

In my last entry I told you about the delayed ping plugin. You know something? I have every reason to believe that combined with the extended ping almost doubled my traffic. Now I've done a few things after I applied that plugin so I can't be 100% sure. Will enter more here when I gather more information. Meanwhile you can get the plugin here

More technology powered marketing

Delayed or Scheduled Ping With WordPress

I've been waiting for this forever! You can now delay or schedule your pings for those future dated entries with this cool plugin. Previously, WordPress would ping the update services immediately after you hit publish so even if you schedule the entry for tomorrow or next week, it would ping immediately. This is not good because when a crawler comes looking or when people click through they may find that the blog has not changed or be presented with a not found page and can be percieved as spam.

This plugin will basically supress the ping at publish function and then check every so often to see if the blog has new entries. If it does it will automatically ping the update services. And another nice thing about the new 1.5.1.x Wordpress, it supports extended pings. What is that?

In a basic ping, the update services only receives your URL. But with extended pings, update services receive both URL and RSS feed URL. How is that better? From my research, I found out something I didn't know.
"Some update services (like PubSub), won't read your blog unless they get your RSS feeds too" - from As I May Think.
Because of that, we're not maximizing our syndication opportunities, SEO or whatever the reason you blog and ping. Hmmm something to think act on huh?

I only started researching this today and I'm certain there are more benefits than just that because in Dave Winer's blog he said
"In December 2004, as an experiment, we implemented an "extended" ping handler that allows a caller to specify the address of an RSS feed in addition to the address of the weblog. This could make it easier for applications that use the output of weblogs.com to do interesting things with RSS." I wonder what interesting things...

Leverage technology for your marketing