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.

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’ve met. 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.
• Own your business. A few years before she left the Sun-Times for the Tribune, Eppie acquired the rights to the name "Ann Landers." Needless to say, that was an astute move.
• Don’t be afraid to listen. We had our share of columnists at the paper who would throw tantrums if you so much as questioned a comma, but Eppie wasn’t one of them. The first week I edited her column, I got a phone call. "Veeee-AY," she piped in that grating voice, "you are too easy on me. I want you to tell me when you think I’m off base."
• Treat your customers and your employees well. Eppie really did read all her letters (the ones asking for advice, that is; most mail was requests for booklets), and her readers counted on that. Eppie’s staff stayed with her for years, and two of her longtime employees took over the column when she died. She treated me well while I was her editor. Heck, she even came to my wedding. (Ironically, I was packing up my wedding albums as I prepared to move from Colorado back to the Chicago area, and chuckling at photos of my wedding guests jostling to pose with the famous columnist, when I heard that she had died.)
• Network. Eppie had an impressive list of people both famous and not who could advise her on issues ranging from AIDs to table manners—not to mention keep her attuned to gossip, office politics, and anything else that might affect her and her business. I was sometimes astounded at just how much she knew.

In short, she was an entrepreneur in the best sense. We could do worse than take a lesson from her.