Automatic ping of your backlink pages - What do you think of the idea?

Hello,

I have a system I developed for my personal use that I'm thinking of opening up to the public at large, and I would appreciate some comments from warriors. Assuming people feel it's a worthwhile idea, I'll be looking for a few beta testers, who would get free lifetime membership in return.

OK, so the problem started when using link packets like Angela's, Paul's and so on, to create profile pages that contain links to your site, although the same goes for Squidoo lens, Hubpages and similar.

As many people know, you get a lot more from these links if you ping them. The problem is that this adds time to backlink building, requires you to keep track of which you've pinged, and also requires care to make sure you don't ping too often.

So, I developed a system where I create a profile for each web site I want to promote (very quick and simple), then as I create backlink pages, I just drop the URL into my system. The system then builds RSS feeds and web pages from these links, and automatically pings them over a period of time. As a feed is changed (say if a new URL is added to it), it will ping the feed again. It will also periodically ping feeds that haven't been changed, but that haven't been pinged in a while.

It adds URLs to feeds randomly, so feeds get updated fairly regularly, and keeps the maximum number of URLs per feed to 15, so that all URLs get noticed. From what I've read, many feed aggregators and png services only read the first 15 or 20 URLs in a feed, so I prefer to have more feeds with max 15 URLs each.

I find that this saves me a lot of time, and takes away something that would otherwise require a fair amount of tracking.

I would like to know if fellow warriors think this would be a useful service to offer. If not, why not?

If you do think it's a good idea, please could you give me an idea of:

*) how many sites you would feel is reasonable to be allowed to add. Obviously, this will be balanced with the monthly fee, so the more sites you are allowed, the more the service would cost. I really don't have much idea at this stage how much to charge (see later question), but I need to know that it would be worth my while. The more sites, the more pinging, and the more work I need to do to ensure that everything runs smoothly, without setting off any alarm bells with excessive pinging.

*) how many URLs for each site. This could equally be how many feeds should be allowed per site as the two are related. This has the same issues as the previous question.

*) how much you think would be a reasonable monthly fee for such a service. I want to make it low enough that people will think it's worth using, but it has to be high enough to make it worth my while.

*) any problems you can see with the idea

*) any suggestions that might improve the idea

I would be grateful if you could answer these in the thread and not by PM, as I would like everyone to be able to read all the comments, so I can get a better picture of what the overall impression is.

If anyone is interested in beta testing the service, please let me know by PM (and NOT a reply in thread), including an estimate of how many sites you would add, and how many URLs per site. This will give me an idea of how many beta testers I can take on.

Also, if there are any techheads out there, I would be interested in you being a beta tester as I want to see if you can break the system! I'd prefer someone testing to break it and let me know, rather than someone hacking in and doing damage!

As I said, anyone who tests this for me will get free life membership assuming the project goes ahead. Warriors will get a special price as well

Thanks in advance for any comments.
Alan

P.S. I don't know if it makes any difference, and I don't even know if I would publicise the fact, but I am seriously considering setting this up so that all the money goes directly to charity. I am a trustee of a children's charity, so would probably just set up a PayPal account for them, and any monthly fees would get paid directly to them. I would pay the server charges and work on it for free. If you have any comments on this point, please feel free to speak up