I have a deadline in 37 minutes for a project that came in yesterday.

Why the hell don’t I keep chocolate in this house?

This is an emergency!

Warning: this post may make you paranoid…

I’m writing an article about organizations’ use of wikis, and I sent out a small email blast to a select group of contacts. I got a note back from my mother:

Beth, I don’t know if I have a wiki. What is a wiki?

I know my mom doesn’t have a wiki. Why in the world would I have selected her for an email blast about wikis?

Mom was in that select group of contacts because I created a list of people who had engaged in some of my previous emails. I wrote the email blast about wikis to make it look personal, and I sent it to people who had clicked on at least one link in at least one of my emails in the past.

Tracking email behavior is quite a science. Each time I send a newsletter out, I get reports of how many emails were delivered, how many people opened the email, how many people clicked on the email, how many times, etc. And I know exactly who clicked and when. I know that San Diego ex-boyfriend #1 opens each email exactly one time but doesn’t click on anything. I know San Diego ex-boyfriend #2 went to my website the other day, and that made my heart race a little (was he going to call? Nope.). [I also know that after this post, both San Diego ex-boyfriends are going to unsubscribe from everything with my name on it.]

My basic little email service costs $30 a month. As a freelance copywriter, I find myself creating more and more email campaigns for companies who have invested thousands in sophisticated email tracking/drip marketing services. We write one email, and based on what the person does from that first email (clicks this, ignores that), we write other emails that will go out automatically. For example, I get emails from Staples. I was looking for furniture for my new office, so I clicked on a furniture ad. For the next three weeks, I received all kinds of ads from Staples about office furniture sales. This is not a coincidence.

When I tell people I write email campaigns like this, I’m often surprised about how surprised people are that their behaviors are being tracked. But this has been happening for many years. Systems are getting more sophisticated, but for quite some time people have been able to determine if you’ve taken any action on an email you received. The same goes for your click behavior on a website. People can tell where you came in, what you clicked, how long you stayed, where you left, etc.

Of course, I teach sessions on improving your email open rate, and I’m equally surprised about the number of organizations that do not track email statistics. I work with a lot of professional nonprofit associations, and many are still using the BCC method for mass emails, where they officially send the email to themselves and put hundreds of recipients into the BCC field.

When I track people’s clicking habits, I find out what types of topics interest my readers. For example, my last newsletter focused on free and low-cost tech tools, and I had a small teaser of some of the tools in the body of the email. An unusually high number of people clicked on the link to the free wiki, and that prompted my decision to write an article about organizations’ use of wikis. I can also see who clicks through to my website, and that gives me info about who might be interested in my services. But I generally don’t bug people. I just like the stats.

Warning: philosophical life analysis ahead….

I was reading Alice Munro’s Runaway in the bathtub this weekend. It’s a collection of short stories I purchased after a strong recommendation from a friend. An amazing collection, for sure, one that makes me remember why I love literary fiction so much.

Tucked into the comings and goings of a woman named Juliet was a short reflection on her abandonment of her love of teaching and studying the classics. I almost missed the passage at first, with my penchant of skimming through paragraphs without action. But when I absorbed what I was reading, my breath caught.

Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away.

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

This is what happens.

When I was married, I packed the dreams of what I wanted to be into a box that we moved from job to job, house to house. And when my husband left, he took all the boxes he wanted, but I kept my box. But it took me a long time to realize I still had the treasure, the dream. I kept it packed even longer while I worked to make Money and start up someone else’s business.

I formally unpacked my box of treasures in August of last year when I finally decided to make a living as a writer. In the last paragraph of this lesson, Ms. Munro reminded me how important this is.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

I meet so many, so many people who long ago put away their bright treasures. They plug in different dreams followed by different excuses, sentences with, “Oh, I always wanted to …..,        but ……” Perhaps my blog’s stories of how I found my treasure again may help others to find theirs. It’s an ambitious hope, but a worthy goal, I think.

Being a freelance writer is so much fun. I just got this note:

I also wanted to report that we just got our first big customer from the campaign.  This person opened a letter that you wrote and said this is exactly what my issues are…as if someone read my mind…so she called us.  We made a trip to [her business] and sold her on the idea.  She called back today and signed the contract.

Thanks for an awesome job.