Wednesday Apr 4th, 2007: Issue #788
It is almost Easter and Kickstart is taking a short break for the holiday. The next issue will be next Wednesday.
I hope that you, too, will be able to take a few days off work or business to relax and enjoy a rest. Of course, if you are not one who celebrates Easter (even at the most basic level of over indulging in chocolate), then you probably have to wait for your own festival to come around.
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JohnF posted an interesting link on the forum this morning that points to an article over at ThemeZoom which tells of the latest move that Google have made in their fight to list only good, spam-free web pages. They have, apparently, filed patents for a new algorithm that will allow them to compare phrases on web pages according to latent semantic indexing.
If you’ve read my book ‘You CAN Write Articles’ and some of my follow-up articles, you’ll know that LSI is the means by which search engine can determine if frequently appearing phrases on web pages relate to one another. For example, if the two phrases ‘Writing articles’ and ’spell and grammar check’ were to appear on the same page, they might have a high latent semantic index - they would be seen to be strongly related. However, ‘writing articles’ and ‘dog training report’ might have a low index - they are not obviously related.
If your article, or web page has a lot of high indexing phrases then it would be seen to be more ‘on target’, whereas a lot of low indexing ones would be seen to be a poor web page.
The result is that typically junk articles and web sites would be naturally downweighted because they would, by their own content, be flagged as poor matches to the searched-for keyword or phrase.
And that is great news because it automatically rewards ‘natural’ writing - exactly the kind of content that we should all be writing.
Bear that in mind when you write articles. Don’t worry too much about all that SEO stuff - SEO can only ever be thought of as search engine optimism anyway - just write sensible content with a clear beginning, middle and end, and keep in mind words and phrases that relate to your primary keyword.
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I had a call on Monday from my doctor’s surgery. Apparently they run an annual check-up service for diabetics and she was calling me in for a meeting with a doctor. She made the appointment for yesterday morning.
So I turned up at the appointed time and was shown in to see the doctor.
She tapped away on her computer for a while and then looked up.
“What can I do for you Mr Avis?”
“I’m here because someone called me yesterday to make this appointment for my annual diabetic check.”
The doctor looked a bit flustered at that.
“Your test results don’t appear to be back yet.”
Now I was puzzled. “What test results?”
“The blood and urine tests that I need to see for your annual review.”
“But I haven’t had any tests. I just had a phone call yesterday telling me to come in today.”
“Well that’s no use, Mr Avis. You are wasting both of our time if you don’t have the tests done first.” The doctor was clearly irritated with ME! But as I’ve never been called in for an annual check before, how was I supposed to know the form?
I won’t continue reporting every word that was exchanged. The result was that my time and the doctor’s was wasted, and now have to make another appointment to have the tests done, and then yet another appointment to see the irate doctor again.
And all because some idiot on the phone took a short cut and only did half of her job.
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I guess it must be rant day today because I’ve been severely pissed off by my bank as well.
Having just incorporated a new company, I need to open a new business bank account. Sounds simple, doesn’t it - I already have five accounts with the bank, so it isn’t as it they don’t know who I am!
On Monday I happily went in to my branch to make an appointment to see someone about opening the new account. That was when I felt as if I’d stuck my head through an inter-dimensional portal and was gazing out on an alternate reality where all the rules of common sense are reversed.
First the bank clerk said that they can’t open new accounts there.
But, I argued, all five of my existing accounts were opened there - in that little room over there (I pointed).
“Ah yes, sir, but this is a BUSINESS account.”
“Yes, so are some of my other ones.”
“Then you’ll know that you can only open a BUSINESS account with a BUSINESS adviser.”
That was news to me. “All my other accounts were opened with Jim xxxxx. Is he a business adviser?”
“No, he shouldn’t have been able to do that. Who is your business adviser?”
He was asking me? “How would I know?”
“Your business adviser will have called you when you opened your other business accounts.”
“As far as I know, nobody has ever called me.”
I could see the cogs whirring and a ‘does not compute’ flag popped out of the clerk’s ear.
“Give me your number sir and I’ll get head office to contact you.”
I went home and five hours later got a call from NatWest head office.
“I understand that you want to open a business account.”
“Yes, I went into my branch but they couldn’t do it.”
“That’s right sir, you need to see a business adviser. Who is your business adviser?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t that why you are calling me? And why can’t I just go into my branch and open the account?”
“The branch doesn’t hold the correct paperwork for opening business accounts - only the business advisers have the right forms.”
The lady went through the same confused spiel as the clerk, but ended up conceding that if I could give the account number of one of my business accounts she could look up who my business adviser is. We did that and the conversation took a turn for the bizarre:
“Oh yes, your business adviser is Susanne. Good news, Mr Avis. Susanne is based in your branch in Sidcup.”
“Then why did my branch not say so? Why did they pass me on to you?”
I didn’t ask, but it occurred to me that if Suzanne is based in my branch, and yet Head Office says that the requisite paperwork is not held in my branch, where is Suzanne going to get the forms from? The newsagent across the road?
Suzanne, I was assured, would contacted and told to get in touch with me to make an appointment to open my new account. Probably some time after Easter.
I’m not a stupid person. I am completely aware that the only reason that my bank is so insistent on me seeing a ’specially trained person’ is so that the full force of her ’special training’ can be brought to bear on selling me all kinds of extra products and services that I don’t want or need.
It would be simpler for me to keep all my accounts under one roof and NatWest is convenient, but I’m now seriously wondering if there might be a better home for all of them. Somewhere with customer service that is focused on serviceing the customer and not adding even more billions to the bank’s bottom line.
Or did I just slip into a different reality again.
Ok, rants over!
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I’m sure it hasn’t passed you by that most of the money I make online is as a direct result of having built up several mailing lists. You are on one or more of my lists.
When I first came online, the buzzword was ‘the money’s in the list’. I believed it then, when I didn’t have a single subscriber, and I believe it now. So does my accountant!
In fact, in my offline ‘marketing consultant’ role, the advice I most often give to my clients is to build a list. Every business should have one - and every would-be business person should be building one.
The biggest mistake I see - and I see it over and over again - is when offline businesses have a whizzy website built for them and have absolutely no means of capturing visitors email addresses. They are literally throwing money away in big handfuls.
But there is a problem.
Most people don’t know how to build their own list. They think it is something that only technical people can do.
I bought a book a few days ago that I will be recommending all of my friends and clients should read. It is by Larry Dotson and is called ‘List Building Mastery’. I recommend that you grab a copy as fast as you can.
http://www.urlnex.us/listbuildingmastery/
It is very good and it WILL put cash into your pockets.
Despite the fact that ‘List Building Mastery’ comes in three very well written volumes, the whole thing costs just $7. Yes, that’s right - it is one of those AMAzing value $7 books that you can pick up for a song and then sell on to your contacts (and keep all the profits).
But selling it on is not a prerequisite to success - reading and applying its wisdom is.
It is great reading for the Easter holiday and probably a whole lot cheaper (and better for you) than another chocolate egg!
Even though I have several successful lists that provided most of my online income, ‘List Building Mastery’ has taught me more than a thing or two.
http://www.urlnex.us/listbuildingmastery/
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An Inspirational Thought
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One of the most useful things in business (as well as in the rest of your life) is a day book, or journal.
All of us have thoughts flowing through our heads all day long. But unfortunately, our brains leak. Thought is fleeting - exciting and vibrant one moment and lost in a sea of forgetfulness the next.
How many award-winning, business-getting, money-making, life-enhancing thoughts will you waste today?
A small notebook (or handheld computer) is all it takes to preserve your best (and worst) thoughts. Just jot them down as they occur - making no attempt to refine them, or filter them. Then, every morning when you plan your aims and goals for the day, review yesterday’s thoughts.
Any that still seem good can be upgraded from thoughts to ideas. Once a week, the best of the week’s ideas can be upgraded to goals.
And goals, as we all know by now, are but a small step away from achievements.
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Albert Cliffe said:
“You don’t get ulcers from what you eat, but from
what’s eating you.”
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Today’s Easter Power Thought
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Chocolate eggs, fluffy bunnies, hot cross buns? What does Easter mean to you? Where do all these additions to a serious religious festival come from anyway?
To answer that, we have to look at the very beginnings of Christianity.
The early Church faced two problems: how to convert people who didn’t really want to be converted, and, how to avoid being persecuted in the mean time.
They came up with a clever and very practical solution.
Wherever possible, the early Christians adjusted their festival days to coincide with feast days of the other religions. This helped both problems. Firstly it meant that they didn’t stand out by celebrating when everyone else was hard at work, and second, by sharing feast days, and taking on a lot of the existing trappings of celebration, they de-mystified themselves and appeared more like regular folk.
Easter is an excellent example.
The Christians needed a special day to celebrate the resurrection - just about the most important day in the Church calendar. Luckily, the pagans, who populated most of Europe in the 2nd century and earlier, celebrated a spring renewal festival in the name of one of their goddesses, Eastre.
So the early church missionaries made a takeover bid and subsumed the Saxon feast day to their own ends.
The Church liked order, though, and Eastre was celebrated variously on all sorts of days of the week. So, in AD 325 at the famous Council of Nicaea, a new ‘Easter Rule’ was declared stating that Easter would always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. To them, this was imposing order! Simply put, it meant that Easter would now always fall on a Sunday, between March 22nd and April 25th.
Although different branches of the Church have tried to change the dating of Easter at various times in history, this rule still generally applies today, almost 1700 years later.
The Easter bunny may seem like a particularly modern invention, but in fact, predates Christianity by millennia. The Saxon goddess Eastre was the same lady that the Babylonians and Assyrians worshipped as Ishtar and the Phoenicians as Astarte. This many-named deity had as her earthly symbol, a hare.
In fact, unlikely as it seems, the Easter bunny and Easter eggs are bound together in the same ancient tradition.
Legend had it that in order to impress some children, Eastre changed her pet bird into a hare for them. The hare then proceeded to lay colored eggs.
That would have impressed me!
This story also explains why eggs are so inextricably linked to Easter.
Eggs as icons of rebirth date back into prehistory. Certainly, the Egyptians buried eggs in their tombs and the Greeks put them on top of graves.
But the giving of colored eggs as spring tokens seems to have started with the genetically modified hare that Eastre created.
The early Christians couldn’t be seen to take all of the pagan beliefs unquestioningly, so they got their own PR gurus to come up with a suitable Christian tradition to explain the colored eggs.
The Church said that Simon of Cyrene, the kind soul who helped Jesus to carry his cross to Calvary was an egg merchant. When he returned home to his farm after witnessing Christ’s death he found that all the eggs laid that day had miraculously turned into a rainbow of colors.
Although few records exist from early centuries to prove that early Christians kept the tradition, it seems likely. Surviving records from the accounts of the court of King Edward I show that in 1290 he ordered 450 eggs to be hand colored and coated in gold leaf to be distributed as gifts to members of his household.
Easter egg hunts, loved by children everywhere, had a much more sinister beginning.
In dark age Europe, it was an annual tradition for men to go hunting through the forests looking for eggs bearing specific patterns on their shells. Such an egg, when found, was much prized as a magical talisman. As belief in magic declined, the hunt continued but now with colored eggs being hidden in advance.
I don’t know … a Cadbury’s Cream Egg is still pretty magical to me!
The hare symbol may well have died out were it not for the Germanic Saxons who kept the image going through their own folklore. When many Germans moved to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they brought their traditions with them.
At the time, American Christianity was very puritan and the idea of colored eggs and fluffy bunnies was far too frivolous. But after the Civil War, the nation needed a symbol of rebirth and so the celebration of Easter became more widespread along with a relaxation of dogma. Frivolity had come of age.
At the same Council of Nicaea, in AD 325, it was also decided that the cross would be the official symbol of Christianity.
It was a good thing too, because Christian folk had been using the sign for ages, unofficially.
Which brings us to hot cross buns.
A modern culinary treat? Not in the least!
They were the official food of the festival of good old Eastre way back before the Christians had anything to do with it. The word ‘bun’ comes from the Saxon ‘boun’ which means ’sacred ox’. At the ceremony an ox was sacrificed and little cakes whose top was scored with the sign of the ox’s horns were passed to the celebrants.
As this was such an integral part of the pagan feast, the Christians kept the cake, but moved one of the lines on top so it was less of a ‘V’ and more of an ‘X’.
Anyway, hot vee buns doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Interestingly, in the archeological digs at Herculaneum, the city destroyed with Pompeii in AD 79, hot cross buns have been found still in the baker’s ovens. Only not quite so hot anymore.
Of course, in those early days, the recipe lacked currants and raisins, and sticky glazed frosting hadn’t been invented. But the thought was there.
Which came first, the bunny or the egg?
As far as candy treats are concerned, it must be the bunny. Those Germans who made it to Pennsylvania can be blamed for much of the tooth decay that happens at this time of year. In the early 18th century, they used to make elaborate confections from pastry and sugar in the shape of a rabbit to celebrate Easter.
The earliest known chocolate eggs were made in France and Germany in the early 19th century. Before then, eating chocolate was not able to be molded. The first truly modern chocolate egg was not made until 1875, when John Cadbury introduced them to his range.
So, this Easter, as you are enjoying your candies and cakes, spare a thought for the goddess Eastre, for the early Christians, desperate to spread their word and avoid persecution and for tradition-bound Germans. Without them all, our modern-day celebrations would be very different.
But most of all, remember who this is all in aid of. Without Him, it would all be rather pointless.
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Fascinating Facts
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If everyone on Earth was given the same amount of land,
we would each receive 100 square feet.
Where would you like yours to be?