Marketing expert Seth Godin on the art of online ... - EPiServer

<strong>Seth</strong> <strong>Godin</strong> sporting his
LittleMissMatched socks in his
Hastings on Hudson office
in New York.
it's a little embarrassing,” admits
<strong>Seth</strong> <strong>Godin</strong>, internet marketing
guru, bestselling author and dot-com
millionaire.
<strong>Godin</strong>, who has been called “the
ultimate entrepreneur of the information
age,” by Business Week, is recalling his
first business venture, launched from high
school at the tender age of 14. “There’s this
astrological sideline called biorhythms, a
crackpot theory that says that every 30 or so
days the physical, emotional and intellectual
elements of your life go in an up cycle and
a down cycle. Well, I was selling biorhythm
reports produced on the school’s computer
system to people for $30 each. It turned a small
profit – but it turned my stomach more.”
The lesson <strong>Godin</strong> learned from that first
enterprise was, he says, to do work you are
proud of. A glance at his résumé shows that the
lesson has stayed with him. Apart from writing
13 books, including a “Forbes Business Book
of the Year” (Free Prize Inside) and a Business
Week and New York Times bestseller (The Dip),
he founded Yoyodyne, the first net-based direct
marketer, which he sold to Yahoo! in 1998 for
$30 million. He currently runs Squidoo, one
of the world’s 500 most-visited websites, and
his blog is ranked one of the top five marketing
blogs in the Ad Age Power 150.
While he spent a few years close to
bankruptcy getting his businesses off the
ground, <strong>Godin</strong> says his current success comes
from his ability to “notice things.” One such
thing is permission marketing, a concept <strong>Godin</strong>
made popular, which is when companies only
market to prospective customers who have
given their permission – explicit or implicit – to
receive promotional messages.
“Fifty years ago we had factories that made
stuff, be it cars, shoes or insurance policies,
and having figured out how to make stuff, we
needed to sell more,” <strong>Godin</strong> says. “The way we
sell more was with mass media. We ran radio
ads, we ran TV ads, we called people at home
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