If you’re interested in learning about internet marketing (and who isn’t?), you’ve probably subscribed to a number of marketing email lists. Which means that right about now, you’re reading yet another post (how many is that today? Five? Six? Four hundred?) touting the virtues of So-and-so’s product launch. Internet marketers are an incestuous group, and they love joint ventures.

Mind you, I’m not blaming them or trying to seem ungrateful. I got on most of their mailing lists because they were offering me something of value for free. But it’s easy to succumb to email overload.

That’s why I subscribe to Internet Marketing News Watch. One or two or three times a day, IM sends me an email with a list of headlines and capsule summaries of that day’s news releases from every internet marketing guru worth listening to (and a few who aren’t). If anything looks interesting, I click through to IM Newswatch, then to the featured marketer’s site.

It’s a handy way to keep up with what’s going on in the internet marketing world without drowning in 500 emails a day.

If you’ve been kicking around the web for more than a couple of years, you probably remember the days when you’d visit a website, to be greeted with “This site is designed for Internet Explorer 3 and above,” or Netscape 4, or whatever. Annoying, wasn’t it?

I feel much the same way about business folk and software developers who seem to think everyone is using the same platform, the same browser, and the same web host.

Several times recently, I’ve encountered instructions on installing a web script that starts out with “ftp or copy the files to your public_html folder.” That’s fine, unless you’re one of the many people whose web host doesn’t call the root folder (the folder that contains your public web pages) public_html. Depending on the web host and the control panel used, that directory might be called public_html, or www, or httpdoc, or yourdomain.com, or anything else the web host chooses to call it. A geek like me can figure that out. But a non-geek is going to quickly become frustrated trying to find a public_html folder that doesn’t exist.
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Maybe it’s because she died four years ago on June 22 or because July 4 was her birthday, but I’ve been thinking about Eppie lately.

Eppie Lederer, that is, better known as advice columnist Ann Landers. For a couple of years in the 1980s, I was her personal editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, her home paper at the time. With some 90 million readers and syndication in 1,200 newspapers, Eppie always demanded—and got—an exclusive editor to work with. I have no idea how I got the job, which was added to my regular duties, but I am glad I did. It gave me the chance to get to know this remarkable woman.

In 1987 Eppie jumped to our archrival, the Chicago Tribune, and we lost touch (I’ve regretted that), but I have always admired her as one of the savviest business people I have met. She made mistakes—the most embarrassing one was reprinting columns without telling her readers she was doing so—but mostly she exhibited a number of entrepreneurial traits that made her queen of the advice business for more than 45 years:

• Be yourself. Eppie was in print just the way she was in person: level-headed, funny, feisty, tough, and endowed with more than her share of common sense. While she was wealthy and certainly had her vanities, she never ceased to be one of the Friedman twins from Sioux City, Iowa. Readers responded to her authentic Midwestern sensibilities.
• Know your niche, and own it. Actually, Eppie and her twin, “Dear Abby,” split the advice niche, reportedly the source of rancor between them, but anyone else in the advice biz came in a far distant third. “I would rather have my column on a thousand refrigerator doors than win a Pulitzer,” Eppie once said.

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