Hello discerning readers!
Today MarketingProfs is closing in on 74,000 subscribers. Not bad for a site that was founded less than three years ago and has marketed itself pretty much virally.
For the first two years of its history, MarketingProfs was produced solely by the efforts of Publisher Allen Weiss, who is also a professor at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, as well as prolific writer and musician.
Ironically, Allen had been in touch with me earlier, in 2000. At that time, I was still working as Content Queen at ClickZ.com, a web site and newsletter I co-founded a lifetime ago—in 1997. Not being especially interested in running a series of articles written by a university professor on what I considered a site geared exclusively to marketing professionals, I politely declined.
Okay, I fess up. I think I actually ignored him. Or worse. Whatever. Bottom line: the metaphorical door slammed behind him at ClickZ.
But as the saying goes, when one door closes, another often opens. Or, in the editorial world, never place a period where life places a comma.
Suffice it to say, Allen eventually recovered from the rejection, successfully founding a competitor to ClickZ in MarketingProfs in the June of 2000.
As for me, payback’s a… uh… bummer. A year ago, I unwittingly contacted Allen looking for a publisher for a few pieces of my own. I had sold ClickZ almost two years prior. It was time to get back to work.
“Hi Allen!” I wrote, blithely unaware of our short history together. “I’m not sure if you know me, but I’m a co-founder of ClickZ blah blah blah….”
He remembered me, all right.
But Allen is, after all, a gentleman as well as a scholar.
He graciously accepted my work—having undergone enough therapy to realize that forgiveness is the cornerstone of our humanity.
So large is his capacity for forgiveness, in fact, that he took me on full time this past fall. And best of all—he rarely, if ever, mentions the “incident.”
Until next time,
Ann Handley
ann@marketingprofs.com
MarketingProfs.com
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