I have a friend who has been going through a rough patch these last few months. Nothing financial, nothing tragic, just a general and overriding feeling of not being the happy type of guy he once was. Fortunately, by sharing this change with a few close friends, he found himself referred to an elderly, grey-haired guy at a beachside residence just out of Auckland.

For some reason, this would seem to be the month for prospects to contact Permission seeking help in managing their Google AdWords account. In nearly all cases they have arrived after having had someone manage it before and do a less than perfect job. So much so that they are quite motivated to make a change.

Before I started Permission I was the general manager of a smallsoft ware company whose website was in desperate need of some search engine optimization. We were nowhere to be seen in any of the results we should have been.

This month it has been a pleasure to deliver some very pleasant surprises to a rather sizable cluster of clients new to Permission. Each of them ran their business in a very similar way. This I found out as they answered the questions included in our online marketing opportunity review survey.

Some of my greatest lessons are usually prefaced with a spectacular piece of personal failure. For instance, there was the time I installed some untested software in a mission critical application (yes, it failed beyond my wildest nightmares).

Sometimes there is a short way to achieve a great result. For instance, you may not need a website packed with pages of content and landing pages hanging off every navigation bar.

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Martin, the very tanned ski instructor, told us before we went up that when we got off the top of the T-Bar and looked down, we would be wondering why he had brought us up this far. He was not wrong. It seemed impossibly steep for us intermediate/beginner-level skiers. My wife, Claire, just couldn't bring herself to look down, glancing across to the edges of the run instead. Madeleine, my eldest at 13, who I had bribed to even get onto the T-Bar, was very quiet. Which left Annabel, at 10, who was looking up at me with a very angry scowl on her face.

Another twelve months of email marketing lie ahead but should you carry on in January just as you ended in December?

The start of a New Year is a great time to take stock of the last 12 months of email marketing statistics to determine what trends, if any, signify the need for an email marketing strategy review.

To start this process I suggest you tabulate the key email messaging statistics for last year’s campaigns including invalids, bounces, opens, clicks and unsubscribes.

I'll try not to start this article off with a rant, but it will be hard. Anyway, once I'm over this part I can ensure you this is followed with some solid, practical and rational discussion.