All right, I admit it, I did it.

I spent $1 to vote for my favorite Beauty And The Geek team via SMS. I also went online and voted—giving up such personal information as my email address and zip code for the privilege. Twice!

Fortunately, I was well-rewarded for my $1 and online endeavors. Jasmine and David (pictured) won on Tuesday!

I was happy as could be. Thanks in part to my text-message vote, and me going online twice, the more deserving team emerged triumphant and walked away with $250,000.

Yeah, maybe I was “sucker,” at least in the minds of non-fans of the TV show who probably can’t understand the excitement. But a willing sucker.

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It’s common for older generations to lament that “kids are growing up faster these days.” This can be associated with good news (children themselves get the idea to hold fundraisers for good causes) or bad (children get arrested for horrendous criminal activities). For mobile marketers, though, the news is very good: More than a third of U.S. youths ages 8 to 12 now have their own cell phones.

That’s according to a new study by Nielsen Company. A survey of 5,500 so-called tweens found that 35 percent of this demographic owns a mobile. In addition, 20 percent of tweens use SMS, while 5 percent access the Internet via cell phones.

We’ve already written about how to court the youth market with digital marketing, in the series All The Kids Are Doing It (read all five parts here, here, here, here, and here). Regular readers of this blog, then, know how important it is to use SMS, email, and other digital means of communication in order to reach the young demographic.

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Some copywriters face difficulties because of one important requirement: Making their copywriting SEO-friendly. They want to write the “natural” way, without even thinking about search engines and optimizing for the last ones. But the truth is: Natural writing results in SEO-friendly content.

Why? Because keywords are the thoughts, the ideas you are writing about. If your writing is good and you know the subject, you will use the keywords anyway. And if you use them, search engines will find your stuff.

But of course you still can and should optimize your copy if you want higher rankings— and thus more readers. I’ll explain how. In return, I only ask one thing: Don’t oppose SEO, it is not your enemy, it’s your friend. You can write for people, be user-friendly, and still attract web spiders. And most importantly, you have a good reason to polish your text for search engines: You want your target audience find what you have written for them, don’t you?

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Recently, consumer advocacy groups have been clamoring for the establishment of a Do Not Track registry for online users, similar to the ones already implemented as Do Not Call and Do Not Fax lists. It would forbid marketers to use cookies and other similar behavior tracking technology with any consumer who signed up to the registry.

Such technology is widely used by most major web sites to personalize the visitor experience, from recommended items based on previous purchase behaviors to highly targeted ads that appeal to their areas of interest. Features like that can indeed enhance a user’s interaction with a site but thanks to Orwelian notions of being tracked by an unseen presence, some people have begun to protest their ongoing use.

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