If you run a blog and you want to garner more traffic, then you will want to ping your blog. Pinging your blog lets services such as blog directories, news sites, and search engines know that it has (supposedly) been updated, and instead of waiting for webcrawlers to take an indefinite amount of time to find your content, you let these services know that you have some fresh posts right away. With sites such as
Pingler and
Pingomatic, one can effectively send pings to hundreds of services in a matter of seconds. Since it is so easy, you should ping your blog multiple times a day, right?
If you ping your blog too many times in a single day, you may end up getting blacklisted, effectively killing your traffic flow. Instead, you should try to limit your pings to a maximum of once a day, and only if you have recently updated your blog. In addition, in order to maximize your blog's exposure, I would advise you to switch up the pinging site that you use from time to time.
Pinging your site won't necessarily bring in millions of unique views right away, but if done correctly, you are sure to see a spike in traffic a few hours after pinging your blog.