“Is It Pingable?” Becoming a Feed Pimp

Thu, Jan 17, 2008

Are you missing out on free traffic sources?

Yes, I guarantee that you are!

Unless you are asking yourself : “Is It Pingable?” after every step of your social marketing efforts, you are bypassing oodles of potential RSS subscribers, trackbackers, pingbackers, and customers.

What Is A Pingable?

A pingable is “technoratically” (pardon the pun) any url that contains your “unique” content and has been formatted as an RSS feed.

Most bloggers, authority site owners and even some experienced social marketers think that their blog’s original RSS feed (for example: http://www.yoursite.com/feed) is the one and only feed they’ll ever know.

However, I am here to tell you that it is time to go out there and cheat! Cozy up to lots of feeds. Call up the sexiest feed on the planet -Feedburner- and replace the orignal blog feed (that did nothing but take up space in your header) with this younger and sleeker version.

But don’t stop there… You need to be a real “Feed Pimp”…

What you may not know is that practically every social network, whether it be a bookmarking service like del.icio.us, a social news aggregator like Sphinn or Mixx, or a community forum, has a personal feed that you can hire and manipulate… as you strut around in a feathered hat and a white fox fur coat and snake skin boots… (sorry, daydreaming…)

Your Pingables

So, before you do anything else today, you have to get your pingables in order.

Break the news to your original feed and start hooking up with as many feeds as you can.

Open up an Excel spreadsheet and begin listing each RSS url from every social site that you have content on. (We are assuming that you are already a social marketing disciple or have just recently paid hundreds of dollars for SMARTS and have frantically began to add content to lots of social sites.)

A bit of a warning however. The feed link is not always easy to find but, trust me, it’s there… you have to look around.

Check your profile page, it might have an RSS feed.

Check your tags, check your votes, check your faves and notes, they all might have a feed.

Add them all to your pingables list and start pinging!

Pinging the Pingables

So, you’ve got your list of pingables in hand, right?

Now, head to pingomatic.com, input each RSS url (one at a time please) and ping to each service possible.

(IMPORTANT: Don’t ping your blog’s original RSS feed or Feedburner that you should have set up in Wordpress to ping automatically. Just ping the feeds on social sites so you don’t “over-notify” the ping services and get a ban or restriction.)

Doing this will give each of these content sources Marion-Jones-like “legs” and push them further up the chain on the SERPs and the social rankings, giving your blog a bigger footprint on the net.

So don’t leave those free traffic opportunities dangling, put your feed pimping outfit on and get that pingables list started.