Get Your Fresh Content Crawled Faster – Interview with AutoPinger.com

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Trying to get your fresh site content crawled quickly can be quite a mean feat. With the sheer number of blog aggregators and search engines around, it can place a significant burden of time on a blogger who wants to ping as many of these services as possible to get maximum exposure.

AutoPinger.com is a free web service which tries to get around this issue by helping you manage all your pings and aggregators in a single location. With 6100+ blogs and counting having signed up, it looks well on it’s way to becoming a success. I recently managed to catch up with it’s founder Vinson Wang, and managed to talk about this fascinating niche he’s carved out on the web.

Tell us a bit about AutoPinger and why your service would be better, or at least different from existing services, say – Pingshot or Pingoat?

When comparing to Pingoat, I would say that the main difference lies in the approach Autopinger takes. Autopinger takes an automated and disconnected model of pinging. This would mean that users no longer need to manually ping their blogs or sites whenever they update the contents but instead Autopinger will check their site for updates and in turn ping their sites for them. All these are done automatically. As for Pingoat, it still relies on the traditional manual ping process

Pingshot, is a late addition to Feedburner’s range of services but it only cover a few search engines and aggregators whereas Autopinger’s core service is to help you get your blog updates across as many search engines as possible. In addition to that, Autopinger provides another convenient way by providing one-click-ping-all button where you can click and ping all by just embedding it into your site/blog and click it to ping all whenever you update, this relieves you of the manual process. Anyone who wishes to get the maximum exposure would certainly like Autopinger services.

Sounds useful. What has the response been like from the blogging/podcasting community?

Autopinger was launched officially on August 2006 and we are experiencing a rising growth over the last 3 months, with over 20,000 pings per day, but I certainly hope millions out there will come to know about Autopinger and take full advantage of what it can do for them.

I would say Auto-Pinging mechanism is pretty well liked by our community of users and our recent survey on our site says it all. I have plans to expand Autopinger service into a blog directory with blog viewer as well as introducing “Friends” option like groups, blogs or internal communities but this will not be in the next few months as my schedule are pretty tight. I have currently no plans on monetizing this site but I may in future when better services are introduced.

This service is completely free. Do you fund this out of pocket, and how do you plan to scale and fund this once this service gets increasingly popular?

Yes, currently it is solely funded and managed by myself. If Autopinger gets really popular, I’m planning to get some investors help by improving the infrastructure as well as the reliability of Autopinger services where I will develop Autopinger into a community driven site by blog enthusiasts and offer premium services with useful statistics and other benefits.

What is next for Autopinger? What do you hope to achieve in the short and long term future with this type of service?

I would say blog pinging is here to stay for at least 3-5 years as this is already a recognized way of site publishing. Autopinger will evolve with time and more services will be incorporated so long as my time permits! I am also looking for partners to expand our services to more areas that benefits our users.

Can you elaborate on any features you would like to evolve and implement in the future?

I will incorporate some developer API for developers to tap into Autopinger ping mechanism to help them develop their own application and also offer better and more detailed statistics but all these will only be possible with a better infrastructure as compared to now.

I guess I would also like to put in a “Friends” factor into Autopinger. Pinging would be the common task that every member does but friends factor provides the cohesiveness among our members like interest groups, blog explorer, featured members, blogs and podcasts, discussion forum and blog review systems to get the members to interact with one another.

AutoPinger covers blogs as well as podcasts. Podcasts are an interesting beast. They take considerably more effort than blogging, but have less clear ways of breaking even, driven by the high cost of distribution, and the amount of time needed to produce one. While blogs can monetize with Adsense, what would you say podcasting’s best bet for monetization, especially for the smaller independent podcasters?

Podcasts are in fact, a more direct way of monetization as it can involve audio and video. It is visual way of monetization! The best bet to monetization with podcasts is to use it as home made video and make tutorials, knowledge based or personal hobby that can attract other like minded users to be part of your community. With targeted users, you are more likely to turn them into paying customers with the products that you promote or develop.

I see… so you’re saying that in your view, the best bet for podcast monetization is to have products to directly market now or in the future rather than rely mainly on advertisers.

Yes, certainly I believe so. With the rise of audio and video publishing, this provides a simple yet effective way of publishing their ideas and products to millions of Internet users. In the years to come, this trend will grow to be one of the most powerful advertising media. YouTube is a good example of how traditional marketing had given way to new wave of video publishing.

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers about AutoPinger or any future projects you have?

I have a few projects in my pipeline targeting to more Web 2.0 users in different niches like content sharing, community building and experimental projects. Keep a look out next year!

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Vinson Wang is an IT project consultant based in Singapore and founder of Autopinger.

[tags] autopinger, interviews, pingoat, pingshot, ping [/tags]

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