11. The Importance of Permission Menu | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4  With so much interruption marketing going on these days,  the way to succeed is to gain permission to market to people. Once you have it, you’re in clover. Without it, you’re in – I-don’t-want-to-say-it. Sometimes the student becomes the teacher. That’s exactly what happened to me when Seth Godin, co-author of three books with me, authored his own “Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers.” It changed my entire outlook about marketing and can dramatically change the beauty of your bottom line.  Seth, once a student of mine, now has enlightened me to the presence of two kind of marketing in the world today. The first, most common, most expensive, most ineffective and most old-fashioned, is interruption marketing. That’s when marketing such as a TV commercial, radio spot, magazine or newspaper ad, telemarketing call, or direct mail letter interrupts whatever you’re doing to state its message. Most people pay very little attention to it, now more than ever because there is so much of it and because many minds now unconsciously filter it out. The opposite of interruption marketing is the newest, least expensive, and most effective kind. It’s called permission marketing -- because prospects give their permission for you to market to them. It works like this. You offer your prospects an enticement to volunteer to pay attention to your marketing. The enticement may be a prize for playing a game. It could be information prospects consider to be valuable. It might be a discount coupon. Perhaps it’s membership to a privileged group such as a frequent buyer club, a birthday club. Maybe it’s entry into a sweepstakes. And it might even take the form of an actual free gift. All you ask in return is permission to market to these people. Nothing else.