First it was “blog and ping“, then it was “tag and ping” and the thing of it is that for all the hype and smoke and mirrors during each brief burst of must have products and ebooks on both topics, it’s just a short time later and no one is really talking about them any more.

Why is this?

Well, it’s because both of these “systems” were actually just misguided attempts to use already in place and well used promotional tools.

You have to understand that there is nothing magical about pinging. Likewise there are no deep mysteries about blogging or even closely guarded secrets about tagging. Properly using these three things together in a responsible and reasonable way will generate results far beyond the wild ravings of those who sought to exploit them. It just takes a little more consistancy, time and effort than they were willing to invest.

If you have some small measure of farsightedness and are willing to put in the effort you can use these techniques to really create some great results.

It’s simple. Remember simple and easy are not always the same thing. Lifting an object is a simple process, lifting an elephant will likely require some extra help. So how do we go about lifting our elephants without breaking our backs? Simple….

• Step One: Post some targeted, valuable content to your blog.
• Step Two: Add Appropriate, relevant tags.
• Step Three: Ping select, appropriate Ping servers with your update.
• Step Four: Add bookmarks to your post on appropriate bookmarking sites using relevant tags. Relevance and moderation are the watch words here.

That is all there is to the basics of making pinging work for you.

If you are using wordpress for your blogging platform, there are several plugins that allow you to instert tags into your posts. My personal favorite is Ultimate Tag Warrior. But note that you can just use your categories as wordpress (2.o.x) automatically turns category links into tag links, and technorati and other tag engines recognize these tags.

If you plan to use a lot of categories, then this plugin is not strictly neccessary, but if you would like to limit the number of categories for your blog’s posts, and still be able to tag your posts with any variety of keywords, UTW is a great plugin.

You can further enlist the assistance of your readers by providing quick easy links to bookmarking / tagging sites. I use a plugin called Sociable to accomplish that here. It’s a great plugin, highly configurable and easy to install. You can try it out by clicking on any of the icons at the bottom of this post and bookmarking it at these various sites.

As to pinging, You want to ping, but you want to do it the right way. Just willy nilly loading up as many ping URIs as you can find is no good for you or anyone else. It is in our best interest not to over tax these services with unneccessary, irelevant, or duplicated pings.

One thing you can do is ensure that your ping list is clean. By that I mean you do not repeat ping URIs, and do not include URI’s that are also included by ping relays you might use such as pingomatic.com or pingoat.com. A good way to keep on top of this is to refer to the WordPress Compressed All-Inclusive Ping List. This presents you with two good clean lists, one using pingomatic.com, and the other pinging all services directly from your WordPress blog.

Another great idea is to use your own ping server software. This software will allow you to host your own private pingomatic like service. This way you don’t have to load all those ping services into wordpress. You just ping your relay, and let it notify all of the services for you.

Hands down the best ping server software you can get is Rocket Pinger. Not only can you store your ping services in this program, and assign them to your blogs, but you can choose to have your blog notify the software just like it would notify pingomatic. Or you can visit your admin panel and manually ping your blog after you post. Or you can even set up a timed ping schedule. This way if you go on vacation and load up a few days or weeks worth of posts, Rocket Pinger will dutifully ping each post for you without your intervention or presence. Very Nice Software! Check out Rocket Pinger Here.

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Dane Morgan wrote this in the wee hours: