That's some great tips for improving open rates Dewane. One you actually covered in another post is avoiding "flagged" words which will just wind posts into the spam bucket and the headline is no exception there. Lately one technique I've been experimenting with good results is to use a "dangling" sentence. That is one that starts to say something and trails in a ... (dot dot dot). This makes the person more inclined to open it as it feeds natural curiosity. (The key is not to give away the punch line in the first sentence, which is previewed in most browsers).
Good stuff!
Kim
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Great list here Dewane, and all three points are highly valid. We can definitely take #3 however and build on it. By networking with others in our niche, with similar sized lists we can again "network through anothers network" by forming an ad-swap agreement. This is where 2 people each mail to their list ABOUT the promotional offer of the other. Ad swaps are powerful stuff. I have a couple posts on my blog about them but they serve as one of the foundation list building tools of the real IM niche pros. Great tips,
Kim

Thank you! I'm about 6 months into this same hiccup and while it occasionally gnaws at the back of my mind I generally dont worry about it too much. I did recently apply for reconsideration though. Its almost unfortunate that I had no perceivable misbehavior I could clean up. Mine started after a domain name change our our best guess was that all in the redirecting did not go as planned initially and the google gods frowned.
Kimberly

Hey girl just a quick note that the BlogEngage was giving me a 404 for some reason. Not sure if its on your side or theirs. Hard to say. Submit it and I'll vote from there :)
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Yeah I'm on broadband, but a small provider, and while my address does not change daily/weekly, there are enough diruptions that it probably changes every month or two. I keep up with these things since I use them for analytics filtering anyways.

Thanks for the headsup on all this information Gail, appreciate it.
My recent post WordPress Plugin Review- Defensio Anti-Spam and TypePad Anti-Spam

Nate, the problem here is that your spam que will tell you nothing. Once akismet has added an ip ban to a dns (ip) address, the visitor is able to visit and submit a comment fine - but it VANISHES before going to the spam que. Poof - gone - just like that! This is not the usual "false positives going to the spam box" problem that all of these plugins have (and isnt really that big of an issue).

For example if you visited my blog and had been ip banned by akismet - I would never ever see your comment and get to chose to approve it. It would just vanish. This is the complaint. It would make it look to you like I was a nitwit that was deleting your comments as trash.

Not a fun situation :(
My recent post WordPress Plugin Review- Defensio Anti-Spam and TypePad Anti-Spam

Thats cute, lol. I came in hoping you had a code replacement for "what would seth godin do" or "wp greet box" (which both do similar but not identical things). Sadly this one is no use for me just yet until I get the PBY membership site up and rocking :)
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Any word on who's picking up work on pullilng the functions/gpl side into a new theme? Have they got a site or forum up for it yet?

Kimberly
My recent post WordPress Plugin Review- CommentLuv

Really cool post even just from the technical aspect. I'm one of the unusual folks that doesnt like Feedburner. I think that the early loss of SEO credit for traffic through the feed links can be painful to a young blog. There's more than one SEO guru thats of the oppinion that Feedburner and related services can be bad mojo when I blog is young and struggling for SEO traction. All of that shifts later, once a blog has good traction and desires to offload the "weight" of the feed management to a service. There has been a lot of speculation and hope that google will correct the issue of giving feedburner credit for the traffic that belongs to our blogs, but so far it has not happened. So far Feedburners PR8 copy of our link remains a distinct entity. Of course, theres a chance that Google has already corrected for it and people havent figured this out yet, but I think there is little harm in staying on a default WP feed for a while in the beginning. That's all just my 2.5 cents though! (Adjusted for inflation of course, hehe!)
Kimberly
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I think its really going to depend on how much traffic they generate on average. The costs have gotten pretty darn steep. With 5 or 600$, most of us could do some pretty wild SEO work or outsourcing work that is more likely to pay dividens over time. That's a really big gamble for a small site.
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