3.11 Blogger Buzz

Up until now, you haven't been promoting your blog to the public as you've been trying out new features. When you're to the point where you want to attract visitors to your blog, you'll introduce your blog to the world, inviting people to stop by and read what you have to say. In the blogging community, this is known as generating buzz.

The first step to promoting your blog is to change the settings from being a non-public blog to a public one. This is accomplished through the Blogger Settings view, by changing the drop-down menu value of No for the field labeled Public Blog to Yes. Once you've done this, this adds your blog to the blog verification process — Pyra reviews the entry to ensure that it doesn't violate the TOS. Once verified, your blog is then added to the Blogger Directory. It also shows up on the Blogger web site when you make blog updates (though only briefly, and only if your update is within the time frame of the current view on Blogger).

The second step is Ping Weblogs.com whenever you make a change to your blog. You can do this through various automated approaches, outside of the scope of this book. Or you can do this manually, through the Weblogs.com update notification form at http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm. In this form, type in the name of your blog (keep it short) and your blog URL. For the demonstration blog we've built so far, the values would be:

Essential Blogger
essentials.burningbird.net

This adds the update to the Weblogs.com queue, and your blog will show — within a minute or two — on the Weblogs.com page. By adding your update notifications to Weblogs.com, you're also "adding" it indirectly to several other resources that use Weblogs.com as feeds to their own notification systems.

If you're a Blogger Pro user, there's a checkbox in the Settings view, in Publishing, that you can check. This makes edits to your blog automatically update Weblogs.com.

The third step to promoting your blog is to add it to Blogdex and Daypop. They are services that scan blogs to see what people are pointing to. See http://blogdex.media.mit.edu and http://www.daypop.com.