If you’ve been having problems getting your opt-in email into inboxes, it’s probably because ISPs are rightly getting tougher and tougher about filtering and blocking spam. But legitimate email is getting caught up in the backwash.
One immediate improvement you can make is if you send your email through a professional third-party list host or email service provider (ESP). Fortunately, these are pretty cheap. For a few bucks a month you can get access to all their fancy tools and technology.
The Email Marketing Reports website has a list of relevant services and solutions.
The good thing about using an ESP is that they have staff whose entire job is ensuring good email relationships with major ISPs. Something you can never do on your own, unless you’re a very big email sender.
On the other hand, if email deliverability is getting you down, you can always stick to RSS feeds. RSS feeds always get delivered! (Hint: you’ll find this site’s feeds in the right-hand column...)
Wordpress supports "future" posting. I am writing this at 7:13am local time on October 7th, but it shouldn’t appear on the site until 7:15am (yes, I’m impatient to see the results)
To access the future post function, hit the "Advanced Editing" button on the Write Post screen, then change the "Edit time" section towards the foot of the resulting page to reflect the date/time you want the post to appear.
The post won’t appear anywhere until that specified date and time, after which it will automagically be included in your blog and feeds. If you combine this future post function with a "cron" job that pings remote blog aggregators, you could theoretically queue up weeks or months’ worth of posts in one fell swoop in advance, then let them trickle out over time while still benefitting from the traffic blip that each new post’s distribution will bring. A plugin such as wp-cron might be just the ticket...
If things have been a bit quiet at Mastering the Web recently, it’s partly because I’ve been working to get Incoming Links finished as quickly as possible. My experience has been that directories are a great source of links (as long as you have a quality, on-topic site to submit) since most exist specifically to catalogue sites! But it’s finding those directories that’s the real trick...
Although I’ve kept a few goodies to myself, I’ve sifted through 9 years of bookmarks to put together a directory of over 500 directories that accept listings. Hopefully that will save a bit of time when you’re looking for places to promote your site - of course, depending on your niche, there may be other listing options as well. A good way to find such opportunities is to take a look at which sites link to your competitors - there’s a chance they might link to you too!
While you may already have listed your site in the Yahoo! directory, with a bit of luck you may find additional opportunities with the Big Y, so long as your site can clearly be seen as an authority on the topic it covers. Yahoo!’s Full Coverage directory of themed news channels covers several hundred topics, from Aviation Security to Stem Cell Research, Alternative Energy to Wireless Technology.
You can explore the full extent of the Full Coverage in each main subject area (U.S., World, Business etc.) by clicking on the "All full coverage" link at the foot of the appropriate category. From there, you’ll be presented with a list of topics that Yahoo! has deemed coverage-worthy. Within a particular topical page, you will find a summary of the latest news on that topic, followed by a list of half a dozen or so authoritative sites. You can suggest additional sites for an individual topical page by choosing the "Submit links or send feedback" link at the foot of that page.
A word of caution: Yahoo! is very demanding when it comes to selecting quality resources - hardly surprising when it crowns only a handful of sites out of the thousands on a particular topic. So you really have to BE an on-topic authority site; suggestions are reviewed by the Yahoo! editorial team and nothing less will do the trick.