My birthday was last week. I decided to pay a gift forward, and I donated it to Kiva. Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.

I donated to the Femmes Commerèantes N°6 Group (pictured above) in Thies, Senegal. Their goal is to fight family poverty. My donation allowed them to reach their goal of purchasing supplies for their retail business.

The group will repay their loan over the next 10 months. Once the loan is repaid, I will receive a credit for the amount I donated. Then, I can lend it to someone else. Of course, there is no 100% guarantee that my investment will be repaid, but Kiva has processed over $28 million in loans, and has a 98.4% repayment rate.

Loans start at $25. I know that our economy is in the tank, and everyone is finding ways to cut back. But, I also know that this $25 gift made a difference, and that’s worth a small sacrifice on my part.

Visit kiva.org and consider lending money to alleviate poverty.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about intent and follow through. It’s a theme that seems to popping up all over the place for the last few months.

For me, it began with Chris Guillebeau’s article, “What you don’t do doesn’t matter.” The article is fantastic, and I highly recommend that you click over and read it, but, even if you don’t, the title says it all. For example, if I just think about sending someone a thank you note, but don’t actually send it, the thought doesn’t count. Nothing has changed. Maybe you feel a little better because, hey, you did think about it – but I usually feel worse, because I didn’t follow through.

While Chris’ article focused primarily on relationships, I think that “What you don’t do doesn’t matter” can be expanded to include personal and professional work – which is why I’ve adapted it as my new mantra.

I could’ve done that.

Have you ever said, “Psh. I could’ve done that.” or “I could do better than that.” I know I have. The critical difference is that this other person invested time and energy to create something, whereas I just thought about it. It’s the difference between having a bunch of recipes and opening a restaurant. I have a long list of things I’ve been meaning to do. Some have been started, but not finished. Some are nothing more than a bullet point on the list.

I don’t have a very good reason for not doing these things. I used to say, “I’ve just been so busy lately.” But thanks to this other article by Chris Guillebeau, I’ve tried to drop that excuse. It’s a terrible excuse. We’re all busy. It’s up to me to decide what I want to be busy doing.

What are you passionate about?

Seth Godin wrote about modern procrastination. We can keep scuttling along, staying very “busy” and yet not do anything important. Not creating anything of value. You might consider doing this interview with yourself as an exercise to compare what you are doing vs. what you’re truly passionate about.

In the past week or so, I’ve swapped TV, email and Facebook for reading real books, writing, and exercise. And, you know what? I feel better. Writing the SEO series last week was challenging, but also so much more rewarding than watching a Law & Order: SVU marathon.

What are you keeping busy with right now? What could you be doing instead?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

This week, I’m trying something new. Each day, I’ll write about a topic that I’ve been studying. This week’s topic: search engine optimization (or SEO, for short). Check back each day for a new post, or why not just subscribe to the RSS feed?

Many of the factors relating to page rank rely on the talent of your web developer, web designer and/or copy writer. Hiring these professionals requires a budget — but there are things you can do on your own, for free, to help your site’s page rank.

On Tuesday, I shared some tips and resources about how to improve your rank, which included the importance of inbound links. You can ask other sites to link to you, ideally with keyword specific text as the hyperlink, but you really don’t have any control over whether or not that site will actually link to you or how they’ll do it. So, how do you get inbound links?

You can create (some of) them yourself.

1. Create business profiles on sites like LinkedIn, Biznik, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. and fill out the profile information. Include a link to your business.
2. Publish articles anywhere and everywhere you can. A site like Biznik is a great place to get published. Demonstrate your expertise by writing a helpful article, with an extended byline linking back to your website.
3. Create an HTML signature to use in Web-based discussion forums that uses your name (or business name) as a link to your web site. Every message you post becomes a link to your site that search engines can index.

These tips alone aren’t guaranteed to move you to the top of a search — but they are especially great for increasing the page rank for your name or business name.

Other tips to drive traffic

These won’t necessarily help your page rank, but it will help drive visitors to your site, which will hopefully result in conversions (see Monday’s post).

1. Include links in your email signature. Don’t forget your signature from your Blackberry /iPhone/Smartphone. You send out 300 emails a day? That’s 300 opportunities to share a link.
2. Comment on other people’s blogs. People feel like they need to have a blog or “a Twitter” because “everyone has one.” I have a journalism background and I like to write — but I’ll be the first to say that maintaining a blog is challenging and time consuming. Reap some of the same benefits, with less effort. Read blogs that your prospects read and leave comments. Most comment forms ask you to fill in your web address, which becomes a link back to your site when you comment.

Up next:

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share some additional SEO resources. Don’t miss it: subscribe to the RSS feed.