This Stuff Still Blows My Mind ... Even When I Expect It

OK, OK … it has been way too long since I’ve added to this blog.

I haven’t lost interest in blogging … far from it. I just got overwhelmed with all the work of starting two new businesses, and I got behind on my housekeeping. My apologies to those of you who were following this blog.

Now for the point of this post. I have commented on this before, but it’s happened again, and I wanted to give you a “heads up" on one of the best benefits of blogging.

Here’s the deal … I started a new forum on one of my sites this week. It took me a few hours to put the thing together, but my customers had asked for it, and I thought it was a good idea.

The thing that blows my mind is how quickly I got it visited by the googlebot. HOURS.

People who don’t maintain blogs think we bloggers make this stuff up, but it really happens. I put up the forum, posted a link to it from the main site (which also contains a blog) and then dashed off a post on one of my other blogs, announcing the “grand opening".

That was this morning, less than twelve hours ago. A while later, I logged back in to tweak a few things on the forum, and noticed there was an “unregistered guest” nosing around. A quick DNS trace on the IP address revealed it was … the googlebot.

An hour later, it was back again, and just before I logged in here to write this post, I noticed it was there again, spidering the forum again. The forum only has five or six posts in it, almost all my own, put there to “seed” it and get it going.

ONE post to my own blog, and a static link on the main part of the site that contains the forum. And the dang thing is being spidered. By my count, the googlebot has been there at least five times today.

Are you blogging yet? Forgive me, but if your answer is “no” you’re out of your mind.

My blogs get my sites spidered quickly, bring me newsletter subscribers and customers, “deep link” any page that I want to on my sites, and certainly can’t be hurting my search engine placements.

Folks, you can blog for *free* … and get all the benefits described above. Oh yeah, I just remembered – I also make a little extra revenue each month from those AdSense panels you see on my sidebar, and many of my posts.

Why aren’t YOU blogging? Get started today!

John