If you are writing a blog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want sites such as Technorati listing you and recommending you, but these all require a ping. So what does pinging do?

Are You There?
You can ‘ping’ a lot of things, not just a blog. Many years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping machines remotely and if we got an answer back, then we knew they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your computer, maybe across your network to other machines.

And that is basically what a ping is – one computer seeing if another computer is responding.

How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our blogs. The ping service evolves a bit from just a basic message saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a website service, rather than just them answering that they are there, it is taken as an indication from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.

The site receiving the message will reply back that it has received your message, usually with a “success” message. Of course, to reply they need to now what site sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your website address as the sender.

Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the message apart and stores your website address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, usually because you have created new content that you want them to look at.

Identify New Content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, maybe later that day – it is entirely up to the service what they do – their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is new. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your website.

And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other websites that we have new content and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I’ve seen Google come visiting quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.

The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab new content as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want – get new content and quick – and helps us do what we want – get our new content onto the search engines.

A Little Message Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various important websites that we now have an update on our own website and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.

If you want to create your own business at home, then you need a product to sell. But what? If you are skilled in an area, then maybe you could make something or provide a service. But what could the rest of us do?

For a start, unless you desperately want to, the product or products that you will sell through your work from home scheme do not actually need to be delivered to you for repackaging and sending elsewhere. There are loads of other choices!

You can try drop-shipping, where you accept the orders and then pass them on to a wholesaler who sends the items out for you. But, this still leaves you handling payments and orders. Not only does your business grind to a halt when you go on holiday, you are exposed to chargebacks and fraud.

So, for me, the best items to sell for a homeworking plan are affiliate products. Here you are only matching possible customers and available sellers. Let someone else deal with packaging, chargebacks and customer complaints whilst you move on to the next customer, earning commissions along the way.

But, where do you start? Well look to your interests and hobbies. Not just does this make you more authoritative in creating your adverts, it makes the marketing more interesting and later steps such as article writing much simpler.

Once you have decided on a niche, such as golf, scuba diving or soccer, pay a visit to affiliate forums and affiliate directories. Also, visit some of the better known, and maybe not so well known, retailers in the industry and see which ones advertise their own affiliate schemes.

Now that you know what retailers you could work with, see if any offer up stats let’s say Earning Per Click (EPC), which will show you for every affiliate click to their site, what the average order is. Be aware that some may offer stats for Earnings Per Hundred Clicks and still call this EPC, or EPM, which is per thousand clicks.

This can give you a good idea as to which stores to sign up with and maybe start working with. All you need to do now is to maybe decide which of their product range you are going to work with at first.

But keep your mind open to change. You might like to pick a few products from several merchants and see which stores work best for you, rather than relying on general trends.

Of course, heaps will also depend on how you will be selling. If you are merely promoting within your own country then this works well, but if your promotion will work outside of your country, but your merchant could’t handle foreign orders, then you have a problem.

In this case, someone like ClickBank who provide electronic goods that could be sold round the world might merely have an edge. Maybe, instead of trying to promote highly expensive drivers, which each pay good commissions, lower cost ebooks that sell around the world would be a better choice.

Find a product you are happy to work with, but be ready to change if the merchant is not serving you well.