Sun 24 Feb 2008
A Random Walk Leads to Pingomatic
Posted by jtmcarthur under Affiliate Marketing, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing, Selling, Startups, Viral Marketing
[3] Comments
When I was growing up, my family would occasionally take what we called “Penny Walks.” We lived in western Colorado, where the towns were mostly laid out on a North-South, East-West grid. A penny walk involved taking a walk, penny in hand, and every time you got to a corner, you flipped the coin. Heads you go right. Tails you go left. You never knew where you were going to go, but you knew you weren’t going to get caught in a familiar routine. With penny walks, you ran into different people or different things. You had variety. Penny walks don’t work as well in Massachusetts, where I live now, because the streets are laid out in the rough equivalent of a meandering cow.
My random walks these days are as likely to occur on the World Wide Web, as they are to occur in my town. Did I mention we have almost no sidewalks? So here on the internet, thanks to a link from Jason Rakowski, I was lead on a random walk through his blog, to another blog by someone named Dejra to a service called Pingomatic. The service helps writers/bloggers raise the visibility of their sites by updating search engines. I’m trying it out today. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Given Dejra’s focus on affiliate marketing, I’m wondering if she knows my brother, Ken?
Dejra? Ken?
OK. Now I’ve tried it out. I got this copywritten notice, when I submitted my updated blog to Pingomatic.
“Slow down cowboy! You’re pinging us too fast.
Your last ping was less than a few minutes ago
Please only ping us when you update.
If you don’t think you pinged us, maybe some software automatically did. (Like WordPress.) The good news is we already sent out a ping for you.”
For the record, I use WordPress. So I was getting the service without knowing it. Check out your own blogging software to determine if yours automatically submits updates to Pingomatic.
-John
I live in Minneapolis in a turn-of-the-century gridded neighborhood. Thanks for the Penny Walk idea! I’ll use it with my family next chance I get.
Pete –
I used to live in Minneapolis on Portland Avenue, just south of Lake. A good place for a penny walk, but a wrong turn could give you more than your share of excitement. It was an interesting neighborhood, in which one little eight-year-old boy named Bud was known to sneak through unlocked back doors, rifle through the freezers, grab whatever ice cream he could find, shout an expletive and dash out, often with the owner in hot pursuit. He bagged my ice cream more than once.
Hopefully your neighborhood brings a little less excitement. I wonder what Bud’s up to these days.
– John