Answering Reader Questions

I am finally getting a chance to answer two questions submitted by Wayne of Mercs.net. (Sorry it took me so long, Wayne )

1. I’m curious about your take on repurposing content to/from your blog. Should blog, autoresponder, and info products all share content or does it dilute value?

In my opinion, it is fine to reuse content from your blog, for example for an info product, as long as you also add something extra to it. Very few people read every post in a blog, so you are doing them a service by collecting all the information into an easy-to-read package with an info product.

I would include some additonal information that is not on your blog, for those few who might otherwise have read most of it already.

For the autoresponder, it depends on the purpose and audience.

If you are writing a newsletter to your blog readers, it does not make sense to tell them the same things you have already told them on the blog. In that case, it would be better to give them information in the newsletter that is not on the blog.

But if you are doing an autoresponder series for people who have not been reading your blog, I don’t see anything wrong with reusing content from your blog. It will be new to the people reading it, and that’s what’s important.

2. Do you ping blog directories? Which ones? Using sites that will batch submit your blog or manually?

The ping that Wayne is talking about is an automatic notification that you have posted a new entry to your blog.

I use the automatic pinging feature in WordPress. You can find this in the Admin area under “Options” – the “Writing” tab. On that page, you put the services you want to have pinged in the box under “Update Services”.

WordPress already has http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ there as a default. This is a service that will ping a lot of other services.

I always make sure to add http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to notify Technorati.

In the past, I used to have a really long ping list, but it took so long to publish a post because of all the sites that had to be pinged. I don’t think a long list is necessary.

I did add a few more, on the recommendation of Courtney Tuttle, if I remember correctly. Here is my current ping list:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

I checked Courtney’s blog just now to see if I could find the post where I thought I got the ping list from. I could not find that post, but instead I found this:

How Setting Your Blog To Ping Could Hurt Your Traffic

Courtney explains that he writes his posts ahead of time and sets them to publish at 7:00 am. I do the same thing, except I use 5:00 am because there seems to be a time difference between my time and whatever time WordPress uses (even though I have set my time zone in the Options).

He has found that WordPress will do the pings right away instead of waiting until the next morning at 7:00 am. So he believes that he is not being indexed in Technorati and the other services.

I have not found this to be a problem. I always find my posts indexed in Technorati. I have not checked elsewhere.

This is the first I have heard of this potential problem. I thought I should include it for your information, even though personally, I have not noticed a problem. I will keep an eye out for it to see if I notice in the future. Maybe it is just an error in one version of WordPress, and my version has it fixed…

Thanks for the questions, Wayne!

- Pat Doyle