Adult blogs, being commercial in nature, often times make use of sponsor provided RSS feeds.  In order to import feeds into your blog, you will need a plugin to accomplish this task.  In our experience, there are two reliable, maintained and updated plugins which you can use to import rss feed into your blog or splog as blogs composed entirely of rss feeds are called.

The one that we like the best is called WP-O-Matic.  There are several advantages to this feed plugin.  Primarily, it allows one to customize the layout of incoming feed posts and morph (changing some text on the incoming feed to avoid duplicate content penalties from Search Engines) automatically.  We also find it to be somewhat more customizable in several areas and more stable. 

WP-O-Matic has one downside, however, from our point of view and that is it requires the use of Firefox or Safari as your browser within Wordpress and extends that requirement to several other Word Press functions.  We find that to be a downside because, as professional webmasters, we default to IE because, very simply, that is what most of our surfers use.   Regardless, if we are running a pure splog, we will use this plugin as it gives us more customization in order to avoid looking like every other blog out there with the same feeds.

The other feed importer that we use, primarily on our blogs that supplement original content with feeds, is Free Word Press.  This is also a good plugin and almost comparable with WP-O-Matic.  We simply use it because when updating a regular blog with rss feed supplementary content, we always like to default to how the post looks in IE first.

Documentation for both of these plugins are provided on the links provided.  As we have time, we will publish some additional tricks we have learned about using these two valuable plugins for adult blogs using Word Press.

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I am generally not willing to commit significant time to a publishing property of any kind where I do not control every aspect of that property – meaning primarily the domain name and where it is hosted.  There is simply no reason to build significant value in terms of traffic and/or PR/Trust value in a property that belongs to someone else.  From some points of view, that may mean that my simple criteria as stated would eliminate the use of the free hosting platform for any kind of web promotion.  That, however, would be an oversimplification.

After thinking through the issue thoroughly, I have concluded that there are several good uses for the free hosted blogging platform that do not require a significant time or financial investment and can help build on your primary efforts to build traffic and trust in your own properties….

As any good logical diagnosis begins, however, let me emphatically state the things I would not use the free hosted blog platform for:

 Building a Destination Blog- If you wish to spend your time building your core site or blog to which people will bookmark, you are much better off investing that amount of time in a domain that you own, at your own hosting service, and gaining the future return yourself.  While many people might think that free hosting services minimize their start-up costs, it is actually more expensive to put your time and effort to the benefit of someone else.  Consider that you are adding to the value of their domain name more than any amount you can earn from your sponsors and putting substantial effort into building a destination blog on a free blog hosting service is somewhat akin to servitude.  Since you can get started with your own domain and hosting for as little as about $25.00 US, the return on our time is astronomical from doing it that way.   If you cannot pony up the $25.00 to start a business, get a job at a fast food restaurant and spend the first $25.00 of your paycheck doing so.

Building Core Traffic- Again, why would you put most of your effort into an enterprise that the foundation of which could disappear tomorrow, someone else could shut down the service and take your hardwork and earn from it, or that you cannot legitimately sell.  Put it this way, had you invested a year into building a PR 1 free hosted blog and you no longer have time to maintain it, what can you sell it for?  If you guessed $0, you would be correct.  If you had invested the incremental $25.00 in doing it the right way, and another $40 from hosting it the rest of the year, that PR 1 domain would be worth a minimum of $150, and potentially alot more.  Any sane businessperson would opt for spending the $50 to $65. 

Traffic Feeder Blog - Again, building traffic takes time.  Why spend that time on a domain that could disappear tomorrow and you cannot transfer those efforts?  The whole conversation about feeder blogs or sites vs. other sites is a bit nonsensical.  Traffic is traffic and a feeder that gets traffic somehow is not a feeder as it becomes a destination.  If you think about it logically, there is not real definition for a “feeder blog”.  Now, a feeder site, because it is static and can collect some hits and send them along, is a legitimate site.  But a feeder blog?  Since blogs take longer to build and develop than a collection of static html pages, I see no sense in developing something popularly known as a feeder blog at all.

Having eliminated those avenues for putting to use the offer of free hosting, the following are simply suggested uses of the platform for intelligent returns on your investment (some of which I have started to deploy):

 Back Link Building:  If we assume that all we want the blog to accomplish is get indexed by major search engines and provide legitimate “distant” back links, setting up a backlink blog on a free host is legitimate.  It certainly takes more time than setting up a simple html site, but the advantages the blog format gives you in quick indexing make up for that disadvantage.  Furthermore, using free blog services allow you to put up multiple, rss fed blogs across quite a number of C-class ips (the distance factor) and for those blogs (and their links) to get indexed quick.  Using syndicated sponsor feeds minimize the set-up and daily work.  And, you are really not trying to build traffic for the site to be a feeder; you just want the indexed backlink.  Be careful, however, to not create the appearance of a network when building blogs for backlink value only.  That will be identified by the search engines and could get every site on your network banned.

Specific Site Reference Blogs:  I have a bunch of sponsors offering quality, morphed feeds but not the blog itself to be promoted.  I use the feeds to build blogs and promote in plugs and specific static html sites to drive business to a particular sponsor site.  Again, I could care less about the organic or link exchange traffic; these blogs are part of my promotional network I send surfers through.  And, managing your surfer network and where they go is part of the talent any successful commercial web enterprise needs to develop.

Quicke Site Reviews:  Site reviews convert at a rate of about 50% better than other sites.  Developing a set of site reviews, morphing them a bit, and publishing them on a wide swath of free blog hosting services is an efficient use of time as long as you are finding some way to use them to force your exit traffic to.  Furthermore, they can double as backlink blogs should they become indexed.

Now that we have identified some potentially valuable uses for a free hosted blog platform, the next issue is choosing the free blog hosts to use.  My criteria is as follows:

 Current indexed listings of blogs in major search engines:  Are there blogs on the network that have a PR value of more than 0?  If not, the network is either new or has been penalized by the search engines.  Check blogs on the network as this is critical.  If the network is more than a couple of months old and you have difficulty finding indexed blogs, this is a potential problem.  I could list all of the things that some of the services do to get penalized and, therefore, make it difficult for subdomains to acquire listings, but simply make sure that something is getting listed from the domain.

Reasonable Ad Space:  The standard has been set by Twan’s Thumblogger program, and that is at most a small and unobtrusive single bar for advertising.  Services that offer something similar or less are competitive.  Those that require more advertising space are, therefore, less competitive offerings.

Non-intrusive 404 Redirection:  Some of the services have invasive and obnoxious 404 redirections.  If they do, your trust level will drop with both SE’s and any surfers you acquire – blogging programs create more 404 issues than any other web publishing platform, and this will be an issue if the program operator is aggressive in the treatment of 404 errors.  On the other hand, 404 redirection is a source of income that provides the ability to free host your blog.  If the service has no 404 redirection and limited advertising, that concurrence leads to several other questions pertaining to either their survivability or their intention of providing the free service in the first place (domainers will develop a domain until it has page rank, dump the content and sell the PR ranked domain, for example)

Attractive Templates:  Some services only offer a couple of very unattractive templates.  While I don’t recommend using free adult blog hosts to develop destination sites, an attractive site will make it more likely you surfer will stay on the site and click a link or three. 

Free Image Storage:  The only reason to use free blog hosts are their efficiency of building backlink and promotional vehicles quickly and inexpensively.  If the service does not offer image storage or disk space, you need to find another source to provide this service which the cost and/or time to execute a viable strategy using free blog hosts.

Your Site Must be on a Subdomain:  There are several services offering free hosting as a folder of the primary domain (i.e. xxxxx.com/folder).  You need to only use services that allow you to use a subdomain (xxxxx.xxxxxx.com).  Folders are more than twice as difficult to get recognized by the search engine’s initially.  Remember, we are after speed and efficiency.

With that criteria in mind, these are the free hosted blog services that I have found that seem to meet them – I will indicate the ones I currently use (all the links open in a new window/tab):

Thumblogger:  The longest running free blog host with the most committed operator gives you the advantage of being able to forecast that they will be in business for the next year with a fairly high degree of probability.  Also, this service is one of the more well developed of the available options.  RSS Syndication available.

Sensual Writer:  Run by the same people who run Thumblogger, but, as opposed to that service, runs from a Wordpress platform.  Personally, I have had problems getting syndication to work well with the service, but many people are sucessful with it.

Smut.com:  I have more blogs on smut.com than any other service.  It uses a Wordpress platform and I find that my new blogs get indexed fast.  They also offer 100 mb of storage with every blog, and I consider that a big advantage.  RSS Syndication Available.

Pornblink:  I just started using this service, but their services seem similar to Smut.com.  Please note that you cannot use RSS feeds on this service as they do not have a syndication plug-in on their Wordpress.mu platform.

Blogtur:  Both adult and mainstream blogs are hosted here.  I have not tested the service but it seems to meet all of the criteria that I established.

My Porn Blogger:  Another service that I have not tested, but, according to their splash page, offers the features that I would look for in a free adult blog host.

Pornblogz:  This service seems similar to smut.com and has made my list to test.

Seductive Blogs:  Another seemingly good platform, it is on my list to add a couple of blogs with.  They also, however, do not have a syndicatio plugin.

Triplexblog:  A promising new service that was just introduced.  The operator seems interested in offering a state of the art free adult blog host.

There are some other interesting services out there that I find attractive but have some questions about before I will either try or recommend:

3blogger: This service meets all of the criteria yet requires not advertising.  As far as I can tell, they also have no advertising on their 404 redirection page.  On the surface, this appears to be a very attractive alternative.  The problem is that there is no obvious method they are using to monetize this service in order to at least pay for bandwidth.  It is something that I intend to ask the operator about and will post an update when I get an answer.

BDSMLog:  Appears to meet all of the criteria except I cannot determine whether they provide any disk storage.  At some point I will follow up and update their offerings.

BlogSexy:  Owned by the same operator as BDSMLog with the same question.

ErosBlog:  Same issue as BDSMLog and BlogSexy

XLogz:  Same issue as 3blogger.

The following services are those that I would give a try as additions to the most recommended services, but they fall somewhat short in an area or two:

Blogbugs:  Three lines of ad links on the top bar.  A few too many for my taste. 

Easy Porn Blog:  Two lines of multiple ad links on top; again, a few too many compared to other offerings.

iBlog Adult:  Two lines of multiple ad links on top; again, a few too many compared to other offerings.

MySexyLog:  They seem to meet all of the criteria except they appear to offer limited, rather boring, templates.  While not a critical criteria for our purposes, it is nevertheless nice to present visitors with an attractive site.

Pornlivenews: They seem to offer only one template and their ads are a bit prominent for my taste.  Like the services listed above, it remains an adequate service for the purposes that we would use them for.

One final note as an additional warning about the dangers of using free adult blog hosts, the following services that were online as little as one month ago were offline when I checked them to compose this post (they may very well return, but were offline when I checked):

Adult Blog Press:  adultblogpress.com

Pimpsblogger.com

I know there are other services out there.  Some have been omitted simply because my belief that it is better to identify the positives and, as a consequence, the services I find useful.  Of course, there are services about which I am yet aware. 

Suffice it to say, the services I recommend come with my intitial caveats about using free hosting services – they can disappear or change their policies at any time.  Other than that, the services I recommend are those that I think it is worth investing a small chunk of your time in the suggested areas of promotional activity.

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If you do not know what a “ping” is, click here for the Wikpedia article on “pinging”.

If you do know what pining is and are somehow fearful of pinging your adult blog as you update, it is time to put that notion to rest.

First of all, pinging is an intentional service intended to allow Search Engines to access and provide results for fresh content that is published in the blog format.  It is specific to “blogs” because of their decidedly “news” and “opinion” orientation and bias in format of the publishing mechanism.

If you doubt that it is the intention of blog pinging services to wish to be let known of blog updates, following is a quote from the Google page introducing their blog pinging service:

“Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We’ll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community. Read more at our FAQ. “ 

This was published on this Google page in 2006.

Furthermore, pinging allows your new site to be indexed faster (I have put some blogs up on new domains that went from grey bar to a PR 0 in a matter of hours).  It will also bring fresh traffic to new posts. 

But, all webmasters, particularly adult webmasters, need to be concerned about being identified as a “ping spammer”.  Because there should be concern, however, does not mean or imply that one should not ping their updates…

Ping spam is something that every blog, adult or not, should be aware of.  In essence, ping spam is the attempt to ping pages or content that is neither fresh or recent.  In other words, pinging old pages/posts withing your blog or repeatedly pinging the same content.  This could get your blog identified and penalized as a ping spammer.

Adult blogs need to be particularly cognizant of this particular issue.  We all know that by the nature of their keywords, adult sites in general are more carefully parsed in the search engine algorithms because they are all by default labeled as potentially “members of a bad neighborhood” to use Google’s own terms.  None of that means, however, that adult blogs should be any more fearful of pinging their new posts and pages than any mainstream blogger.

What it does mean, from the very initiation of your blog, that you need to be more careful about pinging existing pages or stale content.  In fact, by the very nature of their offering the service in the first place, the search engines want you to ping them.

So, what do I mean by being careful to avoid “ping spam”?

Generally, you need to follow some basic and commonsensical guidelines:

• Do not ping when you are setting up your blog other than the initial ping when you bring the software (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) live.
• Do not ping older content, particularly if it has already been pinged.
• Do not ping back posts.  Doing back posts is fine if you are simply trying to add content for your users.  Do not risk pinging such content as the search engine will wonder which existing page it came from and may conclude you are pinging duplicate content.  If you are transfering older posts from a different platform (Drupal to Wordpress for example) and need to tell the search engines the new url, use redirection codes (we recommend only using .htaccess 301 redirection for this purpose).
• Do not allow your posts to be pinged when you are editing them.  Wordpress, by default, will ping the services each time you edit a post.
• Make sure your future posts are getting pinged when published.  Wordpress and other platforms do not necessarily do this.  In other words, if you make posts to be published in the future by changing the time-stamp, make certain they are pinged when actually published and only when actually published.

So, now that the rules are established, how do you accomplish this?

I am going to answer this starting from you initiation of your new blog on a new domain and assume you are using Wordpress.  If you are using another blogging platform, do the same things in the areas that allow you to accomplish the same things:

1. First, upon logging into Wordpress the first time, and changing your other settings and passwords to your normal settings, go to Settings >> Writing  and delete the update services until you have a change to get your blog up and operating and publishable.

2. Second, install the Ultimate Updates Smart Pinger.  If you have followed the guidelines I published in Essential Plugins for Adult Blogs, you would already have installed this handy plugin.  If, however, you have not, do so immediately.

3. Once you have installed and activated the Smart Pinger Plugin, go to Settings >> UP Smart Pinger.  You will see a page like the following…

Once you are on this page, there are only a couple of things you must intially do.  Until your blog pages and theme are ready to begin publishing, leave the checkbox to enable pinging unchecked (you will check it when you are ready to publish). 

You also should have received a list of pinging services in the folder from your download named update-services.txt.  Copy the update services from this text file and paste into the text box on the Smart Pinger Page.  Do not about the update services box on the default Wordpress page to list update services.  The Smart Pinger will override that setting – which you have left blank.

Pre-Publication Settings for Smart Pinger

 4. Now, you are ready to configure your theme, test posts, and test css styles on your theme without pinging anyone. 

5. Prepare your first page (s) and post (s) and save in draft form. 

6. If you are backdating some posts or transferring posts over from another platform that will now have a new url, publish them now.  This is very important to avoid any sort of spam labeling.  Again, for posts that have moved or have a new url, prepare an .htaccess 301 redirection and upload it to your root.

7. Once you have your new blog site configured and ready to go and have prepared your first page (s) and posts but prior to publishing anything, go back to the Ultimate Plugins Smart Pinger configuration page Settings >> UP Smart Pinger.  Put a check in the tick box labeled “Enable Pinging”, save changes, and now you are ready to publish.

Enable Smart Pinger

8. Publish your new pages and posts.  If this is a brand spanking new blog, this is all you need to do.

Assuming you make no additional changes to your blog’s theme or css, that is all you need to worry about.  The Smart Pinger Plug in will do the following: 

1. Ping services only when a new post is created, not when a post is updated
2. Ping services for future posts only when the post appears on your blog
3. Provide you with a detailed overview of each ping operation the plugin makes
4. Provide you with a “ping now” functionality
5. Check if a service supports extended or normal pings and ping accordingly
6. Use the new URL instead of just the homepage URL to ping, resulting in a much higher quality ping (extended pings) 

In other words, each time you make a new post or add a new page, the plugin will ping services that notify all of the major search engines and blog directories of your update.  If you have used their list of ping services, you will not be duplicating pings, pinging duplicate content, generating redundant pings or any other spam type of pinging. 

You will, however, get all the benefit from pinging that everyone in the mainstream does without being labeled a spammer.

As a side note to non-Wordpress users, you need to make sure to enable your blog platform to do the following things:

1.  Do not allow your platform to ping on edits, back dated content or duplicate content.

2.  Make sure that the platform blogs your future posts when they are published.

3. Make certain you are not pining posts as you edit them.

You can handle these tasks manually by turning off the pinging feature of you platform and then pinging only the following services each time you update so as not to ping the same service multiple times (List effective as of 03/18/09): 

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

The reason you restrict your list to these services is that some of them, most famously pingomatic, already ping other services such as Google.  Multiple pinging of the same content will get you banned.  To be safe, ping only the url of the new post/page although mainstream folks will ping the main page of their blog and the post/page url.  Only ping new content.

One final note is that we highly recommend that you also use this plugin with the All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress.

So, ping away without fear sisters and brothers.  There is no reason you should not benefit from this service without being banned or penalized by any search service.

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