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Category: Bill Sweetman

The Mother of All Emails

I still remember the day I received one of the most astonishing email message ever.
What was so special about this message? It was from my mother. You see, until that moment, I never thought I’d live to see the day that my mother would send me an email message.
Now don’t get me wrong, my mother is one sharp lady; it’s just that she abhors computers and most of the trappings of the digital world. She even hates just looking at computer screens – “How can you stare at that THING without getting a headache?” – and she still does all her correspondence by writing longhand on engraved stationary.
But I also saw how frustrated my mother would get trying to stay in touch with my father when he traveled overseas on business, where phone and fax communication is spotty at best. She would literally spend hours trying to get through to my father’s hotel to send him a fax. Between the three of us, we did come up with a primitive workaround; if my father had access to email, he’d send messages for my mother to me via email, and I’d relay them to her via fax.
Convinced there had to be a better way, I began to investigate how I could allow my mother to send and receive email from my dad without having to use a computer. Using the Internet to do my research (of course), I uncovered a whole sub-strata of consumer products known as ’email appliances’ that are designed to bring the power and convenience of email to people (like my mother) who will never use, let alone own, a full-blown personal computer.

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If You Blog It, Will They Come?

Most of us by now have heard how blogs are search engine friendly and can supposedly pick up lots of traffic quite easily. Last month, I conducted a ‘top secret’ experiment to test this theory. Now it’s now time for me to unveil the results for you.
On April 1, 2006 I launched my Internet marketing blog, which goes by the name Sweetmantra. “Launch” is perhaps overstating the case since all I did was remove the password protection that was blocking access to the site. Only a handful of people knew I was launching the blog, and they were sworn to secrecy and told NOT to visit it.
Since I’ve spent over a decade helping people drive traffic to their Websites, it was very ironic (and at times frustrating) for me to sit on my hands for an entire month and NOT market my new baby.
The only “marketing” of Sweetmantra that I did was the following:
# Registered Sweetmantra with FeedBurner, PubSub, Feedster, and Technorati
# Added links to my new blog from a couple of Websites I have editorial control over
# Published a new post once a week
That was it!
Here’s what happened next:

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Fast Facts from Search Engine Strategies Conference

I’m halfway through the amazing two-day Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto and wanted to share a few juicy tidbits with One Degree readers right away. I’ll be posting more info gleaned from the conference over the coming weeks, but consider this an appetizer.
Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch, proposed a new definition of search engine marketing: “desire expressed via keywords” and predicted that anywhere you can type in words, search marketing will be there.

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