There’s More To Business Blogging Than Great Content

Content is critical when it comes to business blogging. That should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway.

But there’s more to business blogging than great content. You might have the best content in the world but if no one can find it you might be speaking into a blackhole. The same principle holds true for your business - you may have the best product or service, but if no one knows about it your competitors (with lesser quality products and services) might just win.

So you need to promote your business blog.

There are plenty of ways to do that, and a number of them are more technically-focused. One key to business blogging (and again, this holds true for running your business in general) is an attention to detail. Every little bit can help when it comes to promoting your blog, including the concept of pinging search engines and blog directories when you write new content.

Pinging? What’s that?

Simply put, it’s a way of telling the search engines, blog directories and blog search sites that you’ve written something new. It’s one of those nitty gritty little details that people may forget about.

John-Paul Micek from Advanced Business Blogging recently wrote a post titled, Blog Optimization: “Pinging Your Business Blog” and Ping Update List. It explains very easily, in WordPress, how you can set it up to ping a host of services to let them know you’ve updated your blog content.

He’s got a laundry list of services to ping, although some of them are duplicates in the list. So if you’ve got a business blog already, go check out his post on how to add these services to your ping list in WordPress.

One other tip — when you add all those services to your ping list it’s going to make publishing content slower. This doesn’t impact your audience, but it can be frustrating when you hit “Publish” and it takes 5 minutes to finish.

There’s an easy-to-install plugin that fixes the problem called No Ping Wait. Without getting into techno mumbo-jumbo, the plugin speeds up the process of pinging, so you won’t have to wait around after you try to publish new blog content.

Tags: john-paul micek, advanced business blogging, weblogs, blogging, corporate blogs, business blogs, no ping wait, wordpress, wordpress plugins, ping, ping list