As I write this, I am getting my affairs in order. I am organizing my paperwork, my possessions. I am writing letters to my children, telling my husband I love him. It may be a while before I see them again. Hopefully they’ll let me blog from my cell. By the time you read this, they will have taken me away to Bad Marketer Prison. I’m about to say something really, really bad.

Permission marketing ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

For the uninitiated, permission marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin. (For the really uninitiated, Seth Godin is The Marketing Guy.) The idea is that you will sell more shit if you sell it to people who have given you permission to sell to them. It is the opposite of interruption advertising — slapping an ad up on a bus somewhere or running something on TV and calling it a day. And it is essentially the entire premise upon which modern marketing — especially internet marketing — is based.

And in many, many cases, permission marketing is the shit. In an industry like mine, conversion rates for newsletters are five to six times higher than they are on the blog. So if I write a blog post about Marketing 101 and 5000 people read it, maybe 50 will buy. If I write an email about it and 5000 people on my Advance Discount List read it, 250 people will buy it.

People who asked me to sell them stuff are more likely to buy it.

Now, permission marketing is nothing new. Yes, pay per click advertising — sponsored Google results, if you’re the buyer — certainly falls under the permission umbrella. But thirty years ago, when you checked the little box on the magazine subscription form saying you were willing to hear from their sponsors, you gave them permission, too.

In an ideal world we would all have a list of 5000 people who are absolutely desperate to buy from us. I’m guessing you don’t. And that’s where the whole Permission Marketing Is The Only Thing To Ever Do Ever idea kinda falls apart.

What do you do if you don’t have permission?

What do you do if you’re new? What do you do if you aren’t running a big biz? The whole Get Permission thing is great when you’re Coke, or even IttyBiz. But what if you have 50 Twitter followers and 127 blog subscribers and no time to build up a list or money to buy PPC ads?

You find them another way.

Let’s say, and we’re going for the lowest common denominator of generic-ness here, that you make ceramic figurines. Let’s also say — and let’s be honest, this is probably true — that nobody is buying them. You have an ad budget of fifty bucks a month. Your husband is about to cut off your clay allowance if you don’t start selling some fucking knick knacks already.

You’re thinking to yourself, who’s buying figurines? Maybe you decide to take out some pay per click ads using “ceramic figurines” as your search terms. You spend your fifty bucks and nobody buys and you think that this whole figurine thing might not be working out. After all, who better to sell figurines to than the people who already self-identify as figurine buyers?

Except, well, no.

I think the best people to sell figurines to are the people who self-identify as the lovers of the things that you’re making the figurines of. Like, border collies. Or fountain pens. Or guitars.

Go onto a border collie forum. Meet people who like border collies. And then later, after you’ve made some friends, let them know you make figurines that look just like little Max or Rover or whatever the fuck people are calling their dogs these days.

Just because they’re not shopping doesn’t mean they’re not buying.

I buy from Sock Dreams because I got fansocks. (Go look. I’m naked from the socks up.) Was I shopping for socks? Hell no! I’m a Pisces — I don’t even wear socks! But now I have seen the socks and I like them and I want more of them. I buy from Blonde Chicken because Tara sent me an email and somewhere in her signature line it said that she sells cool yarn. I buy from Melissa because I like cats and I like Morocco and I was messing around on her other site and found the Moroccan cat one.

I wasn’t on Google typing in “photos of cats in Morocco”, for Christ’s sake.

Yes, I grant you, I wrote a book on SEO and I still think it’s really important. But being found by total and complete strangers is not the only way to get business.

If you’re a life coach for women in transition, FIND WOMEN IN TRANSITION.

If you make stationery with horses on it, FIND HORSE LOVERS.

If you paint guitars, FIND GUITAR PLAYERS.

You don’t need to get their permission to sell them stuff. Sometimes you just need to meet them.

Just because they’re not shopping doesn’t mean they’re not buying.