When you’re in marketing, you often have to explain to a disgruntled CEO why you want to abandon your original year’s plan and move on to something else. You may even have been asked, as I have, “If I hire you can you stick with a plan that you make all year?” the unspoken inference being — or will you be “flighty” like all the rest of my marketing people, expletive deleted.

Well here’s a paradigm for why we do what we do in marketing that can solidify your strategies, and perhaps be used to explain them to significant others.

Important: This article contains opinions and information about copyright law. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer and have not been a lawyer in any past life that I am aware of. If you have specific questions about copyright law you should contact the appropriate legal resources.

Everything original that you write (or draw or paint or whatever), regardless of whether it is an email, a painting, an image, a thesis, a web page, a paragraph on a forum, or anything else is automatically copyright protected by you. It does, of course, have to be recognizable as an original work. Thus, the word “the” in a forum would hardly qualify. The exceptions generally must be spelled out in a contract that is agreed upon. For example, Webmasterworld’s Terms Of Service (TOS) modifies the copyright to both webmasterworld and the original author.

One of the greatest ideas I’ve learned to help me with marketing is to create a ‘swipe file.’ This is a tried and true practice with direct marketers around the world.

Today’s issue combines two interviews: one with an ecommerce veteran and the other with an ecommerce star-rookie. Both have unique ecommerce strategies, and reading about their methods for success will help your bottom line.

Please describe the most significant hurdle you’ve leapt so far, and explain why it was significant to your business.

To tell the truth, at first, multi-level marketing (MLM) did not work for me.

As a successful business man with my own business, I thought starting an MLM business to create another source of income would be easy.

I learned about the one hypnotic command that always works from hypnotists. A good hypnotist will never give a subject a choice or offer a list of “reasons why you should fall asleep right now.”

James Vicary, an advertising expert, went into a 1950s movie theater to test his devious new tool for persuading others.

In this article, I want to discuss 3 different approaches to generating traffic to your website; how each approach can help you promote YOUR website; and who REALLY benefits from these methods.

Assemble a Web site development plan that is integrated with your overall marketing processes. The content should be consistent with offline materials; the graphics/images don’t have to be identical with traditional media, but should be consistent with your overall branding, style guide, usage of colors, etc.

Here’s a report that might help you out. This is the latest update on what works and what doesn’t in online marketing (Dec. 2000).