Reading Daily Blog Tips I saw an article about Re-Activating Inactive Email Subscriptions. I have done this in the past to try and gain back a few lost RSS subscribers.

Sometimes readers can go inactive if their mailbox cannot be reached, maybe it’s full or the email servers go down for a certain period of time. Start getting them your emails again by simply clicking reactivate.

I only had a handful inactive on my blogs, but Daily Writing Tips reports they had 150 subscribers go inactive that are now active!

Take It A Step Further

More often than not you will have more UNVERIFIED subscribers than inactive. This just means that they never confirmed their subscription, therefore never fully subscribed.

This could be for several reasons like they misspelled their email, never got the confirmation (probably went into spam folder), or simply forgot about. They once wanted to subscribe, so a simple email reminding them to subscribe shouldn’t hurt.

While I had a handful of inactive subscribers, I have about 10 that were never verified. After sending out an email I will see how many end up subscribing.

Source and Image from Daily Blog Tips.

WPAds is a great alternative to OIOPublisher, but it can be limiting. You can read our review of the WPAds WordPress Plugin to get some basic information about it. It’s not as good as OIOPublisher but I just received a tip to make it a bit better.

WPAds in Widgets

Adam Fulford recently asked me a question on how to use WPAds in widget sidebars. I recently had tried to do this on another blog and failed. Instead I had to add the code directly to the sidebar.php file. It didn’t look as good the sidebar was off a bit.

Responding to Adam I had to say I didn’t know. Well he managed to figure it out himself and let me know how.

By installing and activating the Exec-PHP WordPress Plugin you can add WPAds to widgets. Exec-PHP executes <?php ?> code in your posts, pages and text widgets. The plugin is really easy to install and I had WPAds in my sidebar in just a minute or two.

Thanks Adam for this great tip!

Take your chances and try to win something with these new contests. Enjoy!

Apple iPod touch

Extra Income Guide Blog is giving away an 8GB Apple Ipod touch plus Visa Gift Card and Entrecard Credits. You have many options to enter: Sign up for different on-line services (see original post for details), write about the competition and, of course, subscribe to his RSS feed.
Ends on September 30th.

$25 Gas Card

A new $25 Gas Card Giveaway (or an equal amount via Paypal) from Save Money. Simply write about this contest using the link: save gas articles.
Ends on September 30th.

$50 Cash

Subscribe to Workout IQ and you could win $50 cash (via Paypal)
Ends on September 30th.

If you’re looking for blog contests, if you want to promote your own competition, don’t forget to visit About Blog Contests!

Here’s a quick introduction to building a brand based around you.

Personal Branding is complex field of marketing and branding that would take an entire book to explain, but I would like to give you a few tips as to how to build your own brand.

What is a Personal Brand

Your personal brand is how people ientify with you.  You may be the “geeky tech blogger” or the “creative photoshop genius”.   Your brand consists of your blog posts, tweets, videos, photos and even the links you save on Del.icio.us.

Be Yourself, Be Open

You can use an alias online, but this will weaken your brand and make you harder find.  I use the same username for most of my social accounts, that same username is the name of my blog and is indexed in Google – People see my username and know its me!  Its also important to be yourself.  When writing blog posts or tweets etc. don’t take on an alter ego as people see straight through this.

Be Social

Create a Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Youtube, Del.icio.us, Digg and Facebook account.  Your website used to be your homepage.  Now its spread across all of these sites.  Its also very important to use these sites properly.  Many people fail on Twitter by simply posting links back to their blog.  This just annoys the community. The same can be said for all other social networks.

Yes, you should be using all of those sites.  If you think they are useless its due to ignorance rather than actually believing they are duds.

Copy The Best

Take a look at Kevin Rose, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington.  They all have strong personal brands. So its a good idea to look at what they are doing and copy.  And yes, that does require passion and commitment.  All three of those guys love what they do….and it shows.

Join In

Comment, Comment and Link.  When I see a cool article I link to it.  All my profiles are linked so posting it to Delicious will distribute it out to my network.  Giving link love (to quality content) is your most powerful marketing tool – so don’t underestimate it.

And once again – don’t bother talking about yourself and your content on Twitter, FriendFeed or your blog.  Limit posts about your own ventures to 3 per month, max!

For more of my content check out my blog feint.me – or follow me on Twitter.

We’ve been with SurveySpot for over a year now since joining Surveyspot. Our first check was received March 15th, 2007 for $28. Since then I’ve been able to earn a pretty steady extra few bucks for just a few minutes of time. Not to mention free samples and got paid to try a few products.

Take Surveys with SurveySpot

Many survey sites are pretty dodgy and claim to pay you, but never do. Or maybe pay you once then just start spamming you. In a year of use, I’ve never had such problems with Surveyspot.

There are quite a few reasons to join SurveySpot:

Minimum Payout $5. This should only take 1-3 surveys to reach. I’ve found most surveys are $3-5.

No SSN/credit card. This is one of the few websites that pay me without asking for a social. Of course never join a survey site that needs your credit card information. Some continue to charge after you cancel!

The More You Take. It seems the more surveys you take, the more often you get them.

Payment History

Survey sites can be shady and I would never promote it without confirming I’ve been paid. So I took a screenshot of my payment history. For the last year you can see that in the last year I’ve earned $267. I can definitely confirm I haven’t participated in every survey and generally don’t take long surveys for the big $. That brings our all time total to $525.

Our good friend Sir Jorge is also a big SurveySpot advocate and has shared his payment status with us. He’s been with SurveySpot from October of 2006 – Sept 2008 and earned $509, including some Amazon money he earned through a particular set of surveys.

Are you getting paid for your opinions on surveys? Join SurveySpot today. Make sure to confirm your email to start getting your surveys.

Thinking of new ideas to write about everyday can be time consuming and difficult. I’ve been working on BAYB for coming up to 2 years this November. Sometimes it can be trouble to come up with new posts. So today I spent some time browsing the keywords people used to find this blog.

Use Your Keywords

People are using these keywords to find your blog, so it obviously that people desire whatever knowledge it is. Looking at my keywords several people found us through searching for information on Logical Media, NeverblueAds, John Chow’s Blog, Squidoo, and Mylot. Right there, I have found 5 different topics to write a blog post on.

Using that method can not only can further help your SEO rankings and bring more visitors to your blog with these keywords, it can also give those potential readers exactly what they are looking for.

Target New Keywords

By looking through your keyword list this can also show you what people are NOT searching for. Are you targeting specific keywords or phrases? Maybe it’s time for a follow-up post about your favorite affiliate program to try to drive visitors to your blog that way.

We put together the Bloggers Guide to SEO, which is a great place to get started.

How to Build Your Keyword List

Maybe I should tell you HOW to find the keywords people are using to find your blog. If you have Statcounter or Google Analytics installed, you are already a step ahead. If you don’t, do it now!

Statcounter will show you the last 500 visitors to your blog. To find the keywords they used to find your blog, go to Keyword Analysis on the side. This will display all the keywords used for the past 500 subscribers.

If you are looking for something a bit more longterm, you should use Google Analytics. You can set it up to any time period, the default setting is the past 30 days. Then go to Traffic Sources, and then to keywords. You can view the full report or just most popular 5.

A new feature I am introducing is a poll on the sidebar. This is just to gauge the BAYB readers to see what they think about whatever question I post.

I suggested which stat tracker to use. Our pick is Statcounter, I have it on all of my blogs. What was most popular on the poll?

Poll Results

Out of 22 votes, Statcounter ended up being most popular. 36% use Statcounter for their stat tracking.

Our second choice was Google Analytics, which tied for second with Sitemeter at 22%.

13.6% chose all of the above, while 4.5% chose other.

It was surprising to see that 0% used Awstats as their primary stat tracker.

New Poll

Do you own a blogspot blog?