Rok: Do you have any suggestions on how to best build your readership, in addition to search engine marketing?

John: Yes, one word: syndication. Get your feed syndicated as much as possible.

Remember, building a list in the sense that email publishers use that expression is not important with direct-to-desktop publishing as it is with email publishing. You are not pushing your newsletter down people's throats. You are pulling them to read it. This is all part of the shift in attitude that I talk about in my series Email Marketing As Fundamentalism as well as in the first article in my Direct-to-Desktop Publishing Primer entitled Attitude Adjustment.

Until you really understand that direct-to-desktop publishing requires a whole different attitude toward marketing and publishing, you will not really understand much of what I have said in this interview. You cannot apply the same preconceptions and assumptions you use for email marketing. That will only lead to misnterpretation and misunderstanding, as it has with you as well as, at east, the one reader of your ezine who posted that comment you sent me. I can only hope he has read the rest of the interview as well as the links to my articles.

I do want to say that making that attitude adjustment is very hard for a lot of email publishers. They are so convinced that email marketing and publishing are the way to go; they so strongly believe that marketing means shoving your stuff into people's faces, they refuse to consider any alternative. They are like religious fundamentalists, whose faith convinces them they and they alone have hold of the truth and that the rest of us are misguided and dangerous heretics. They cannot take off their blinders and look at something "objectively." As far as I am concerned, those people are lost souls and trying to convert them through logic or reason is a waste of time. They will need their own "blinding light on the road to Damascus" for them to remove their blindness.

I no longer argue the issue with them. I only pity them for their blindness.