Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your status messages, blogs and micro-blogs quick and easy. Though Ping.fm does have a few competitors such as Hellotxt, right now it seems to be the most widely used crossposting tool. Most people use Ping.fm to send a mass message across all their social networks. Some even use it to respond to received messages (not recommended) across all their social networks. What I mostly see it used for though, is to answer the popular Twitter question, "What are you doing".

What I love most about Ping.fm is that it is not only a useful crossposting tool but it is also the ultimate blogging tool. Out of 15+ ways to post from your Ping.fm account, the method most geared towards bloggers is definitely the WordPress plugin. If you are a WordPress user looking for more ways to spread the word about your blog and increase traffic, the Ping.fm plugin is definitely something that will benefit you.

First, you will need a Ping.fm account to utilize it. The current beta code needed to sign up is "pingitlikeitshot" (without the quotes). What's nice about this plugin is that whenever you publish a new blog post, it will post it as a status message, micro-blog message and/or blog post. Where and what is posted, all depends on your settings within your Ping.fm account dashboard.

After signing up for Ping.fm, adding your accounts, and specifying what you would like each account to be used for (status updates, micro-blogging, or blogging) you can then specify your "triggers" in your WordPress dashboard. The triggers are what tell Ping.fm where to post and are linked to the account settings in your Ping.fm account.

Posting to micro-blogs and statuses at the same time usually produce quite a few duplicates (depending on what accounts you have setup), so it's better to choose one or the other. I prefer posting to statuses because most of the sites that I use support status updates but not micro-blogging posts.

You can also choose the format for your posts or just stick with the defaults. The default for micro-blog and status posts is "New Blog Posts: $title $link", where $title represents the title of your post and $link represents the link to your post. I highly recommend changing the "New Blog Posts:" to something more catchy and doesn't scream "automated post"; people will be more interested in checking it out.

The default for blog posts is "$post (continue reading»)" where $post represents your post text which comes straight from your blog post; you can choose how many characters to show or you can even show the whole post if you'd like. If you're on a site like Bebo, MySpace or LiveJournal, Ping.fm will create an entry in your blog for you on that site. So, it gives you the ability to promote your blog posts on all your other blogs as well. I would suggest not setting up your WordPress blog for Ping.fm though since that would create duplicate posts.

Another great things is that you can choose what to do with truncated text. You can leave it as the default, which is three periods (...) or you can change it to something else. Of course this will only be used when and if your post gets cut off.

If you want to control which services Ping.fm will post to whenever you publish a new post, you'll need to take care of that in your Ping.fm dashboard under settings. As you can see, it's very easy to disable and edit your accounts and once you get the hang of it, it's really a quick and painless process.

Well I hope you were able to take all of that in. I promise it's not as confusing as it sounds and in the long run it will greatly benefit you and your blog.