You’ve pinged search engines, but what else can you do? If you’re all about sharing and traffic building, here’s a list of plugins to consider:

Jetpack by WordPress.com: An uber-plugin to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users. Highlights for those interested in sharing and traffic-building:

• Email subscriptions for your blog’s posts and your post’s comments.
  
• Social networking enabled comment system.
• Integration with and automatic posting to your favorite social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.
• Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks. (Previously provided by the Sharedaddy plugin.)

WordPress SEO by Yoast: A plugin that helps you write better content and also takes care of all the technical optimization. The plugin assists with page analysis, meta and link elements, XML Sitemaps, RSS optmization, social integration, and more.

Google Analytics for WordPress: Track your site easily with lots of metadata: views per author and category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews, and much more.

Wysija Newsletters: Spread the word about your site with newsletters! Here, you can create newsletters, post notifications, and autoresponders; as well as manage your subscribers.

BuddyPress: With this plugin, users can create profiles, post messages, connect with others in groups, and  more. You can build a community for a company, school, sports team, or other niche community.

Sociable: A plugin for ratings systems, as well as sharing to numerous sites, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and Inbound.org.

Add Link to Facebook: Got a great Facebook following? Take advantage of this by adding links to posts or pages that are published to your Facebook wall.

To explore more plugins for your site, browse the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Publishing a post is just one step in blogging — getting people to engage with you is another. How do you start a conversation?

Here are some tips:

• End with a prompt. At the end of a post, encourage comments by asking a specific question or two, which is a better way of generating feedback than more general “Leave a comment” or “What do you think?” prompts. Your blog isn’t just a monologue — you want to open up the discussion to others.
• Reply to comments. Your job doesn’t end when you hit publish. When readers leave comments, keep the conversation going with a thoughtful reply.
• But don’t reply to every comment. If you receive many comments and reply to each with a generic one-liner (“Thanks!”), your comment thread won’t be interesting. Feel free to reply to first-time visitors to welcome them to your site, but in general, reply only if you have something substantial to add to the existing conversation.
• Moderate with care. It’s best not to encourage or allow nasty and abusive comments. They intimidate new readers, derail conversations, and distract you from good blogging. It’s your online home — don’t be afraid to give polite warnings to visitors who aren’t appropriate.
• Post commenting guidelines. If you find yourself doing a lot of policing, one way to be transparent about the type of comments you will and will not permit is to post simple guidelines. This can help you attract the kind of commenters you want, and deter unwanted behavior.
• Return the visit. Developing friendships with your readers is one of the best parts of blogging. If you have loyal commenters, make sure you visit and engage on their blogs, too. If they like what you post, chances are you’ll be into their stuff as well.

Need a refresher or primer? As you fill in your blog details at Ping-O-Matic,  you can opt to ping multiple ping servers at once, such as Weblogs.com, NewsGator, Blo.gs, and FeedBurner. When you ping these services, they automatically notify subscribers that new content is posted to your website or blog.

Essentially, Ping-O-Matic is a service that notifies the larger community—from search engines and blogging platforms to aggregators and social networks—of the newest, freshest content on the Internet. This, in turn, helps improve the speed at which search engines find and index your content.

That said, driving traffic to your blog isn’t simply about enabling this service and letting it do all the work for you. Remember that getting more traffic requires more effort—posting well-written, original content in particular.

To get you started, we want you to stir things up on your blog and write about a topic that’s up for debate. At The Daily Post, we post Mind the Gap prompts that ask readers what they think about controversial and divisive issues. So, we’re particularly interested in what you think about kids in adult-oriented places. Most of us can agree that it’s not a good idea to drag little Sally to a bar at 1AM, but what about a museum? A fancy restaurant?

Here are the essentials to consider when drafting this post:

• Read up on the existing discussion of this topic: Researching this topic (and any other subject you tackle) beforehand strengthens your own stance. And it also allows you to link to related posts that enhance your discussion, as well as engage with other bloggers who have weighed in on the topic. Both are good practices and additional ways to drive the right kind of traffic to your site.
• Pick a good, relevant title: Blog post titles are like newspaper headlines. They need to be short, snappy, and attention-grabbing. On social networks like Facebook and Twitter, your title is the primary (and may be the only) text that readers see before clicking to your post.
• Edit, proofread, and proofread some more: Take the time to develop your ideas. Readers are smart—they prefer to read posts that intrigue them, make them think and question, and rouse them up. If you pique their interest, they will comment on your post thoughtfully in return.
• Generate your own discussion: After presenting your thoughts on kids in adult-oriented places, ask questions or create your own poll at the end of your post to prompt your readers.
• Share your stuff on social networks: Use the sharing tools available to you to share this post across the Internet. Make it easy for others to spread the word.

You can apply the process above to other posts you write. Overall, it’s important to remember that original, relevant, and well-written content is key, and from there you can share it and use the tools and services available to you to draw traffic to your blog.

We look forward to providing more tips on this blog. Stay tuned!

I’ve just performed a redesign on the Ping-o-matic website. The new look was launched a few weeks ago, and is meant to increase the usability of the service and make it look a bit more modern and well fitted for the WordPress/Automattic family.

For newcomers, there’s now a welcome message on top of the front page which gives you a Ping-o-matic crash course. Below this, you’ll find the familiar pinging form where you supply your blog details and select the services you want to ping. The whole form has been redesigned to stand out more from the rest of the content on the page, making it easier to see how it all fits together. The vertical space for the services list has been compressed. This list took up a big chunk of the screen before, but has now been compressed to 4 columns which saves a lot of space. …And the action button is now bigger than ever, so you can’t possibly miss it!

As for the Stats page, it’s received a minor update. The graph has been modified to fit with the new color scheme of Ping-o-matic.

The spirit behind the redesign was to give Ping-o-matic a graphical profile on it’s own, with bold colors that makes the service memorable. I also wanted to make it better tied in to the WordPress/Automattic family’s graphical profile and user interface ideas. You’ll notice similar fonts, navigation solutions and a fancy looking footer, as well as a good deal of “under the hood” similarities. Among those are the uses of CSS3 rules like border-radius, which gives people browsing Ping-o-matic in modern browsers a richer (and rounder!) experience.

I'll be adding them to the web form soon.  

Thanks for using Ping-O-Matic! 

UPDATE: Move complete. Let’s see how this new hardware holds up.

I’m not quite done with the performance tweaks yet, but it will probably be mostly on the outgoing ping side of thing, which shouldn’t effect the graphs that much. Once everything is done on the single box, I’ll start the process of replicating it to the other donated hardware. Performance is nice, but availability is more important.

Sorry for some of the bumps over the weekend, some of you may have caught me while the code was being debugged and seen strange messages or behaviour. As the first “hard part” is now over, these should be a lot less than they used to be.