Today, I got an email from one of my customers, who wanted a refund. No problem. That happens.
He bought my writing book, and said it was about writing, that he was more interested in tagging and article marketing and stuff like that. OK, I do have a free report that gives my exact article marketing strategy for getting to the top of the search engines at Pats7Secrets.com. But it really doesn’t say much about tagging because when I wrote it, the social bookmarking sites or folksonomies (which means collections of tags), as they’re sometimes called, were just beginning to take off.
Amazing how things change so fast in cyberworld, isn’t it?
Anyway, people don’t seem to get two concepts that are very, very simple. Yet, not many of us “specialists” talk about these terms. Let me ease your pain.
First, tagging is nothing more than creating categories for whatever it is you’re tagging — articles, blog posts, videos, press releases, etc.
Tags are created by you. The search engines pick up on the terms if you use them in your work all the time. Yet, they are simply words that people might search for, specifically in Web 2.0 sites that have something to do with your work.
For example, I’ll tag this post, “seo, search engine optimization, tagging, pinging, Web 2.0, folksonomies, Pat Marcello” and maybe a few more in a second or two. I’m interested in classifying my post for anyone who cares to search for it, no matter what they type in to find it. I’m also promoting me. I want people to find me, so I’ve decided to create a “Pat Marcello” category.
Someone can go into my Delicious account and find that my biggest tags are internet-marketing and ADHD. I studied that a lot when I was writing about it for Tellman. Very interesting stuff, but you can see what my major interests are when you look at my tag cloud.
That’s another way that you can help people to find you. People click on a cloud and find everything you or anyone else has written on the topic. Of course, if you own the cloud, like some people have tag clouds on their blogs, you’ll get back all the work that you have tagged with that word.
Tag wisely. Just decide all the categories that your work falls under, and tag it!
But let’s dive right into pinging. All that means is you’re nudging the blog search engines and telling them that you’ve made a new post and that they should go to your blog and find out what it’s all about.
You can ping manually by going to sites like Pingoat.com or Ping-o-matic.com and just plug in some information and BANG! You’ve pinged!
Or… if you’re smart like me and you have a WordPress blog, WordPress can do it for you. Just plug in the services you want to ping. Here are mine:
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
All you need do is copy and paste that list into your WordPress blog under “Settings” (on the right) and then, “Write.” Then, scroll all the way at the bottom of the page. Select the pingomatic URL because it’s already in the list. And paste the ping list above right into the blank. Save.
Then, you write a post and sit back and put your feet up. WordPress does the work for you.
Tagging and pinging are pretty easy, eh? Well… now you know.
December 14th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
I thought the beginning of this was extremely interesting, that you could write a book about something technology related, and by the time you get it published, the times have changed and technology has advanced. You must either be on the cutting edge of technology when writing, or you have to some how speed up the publishing process.