2006 was undoubtedly online publishing's breakout season. 2007 promises to be even bigger for the industry, but not necessarily for each individual publisher. In an attractive market, new competitors are constantly, well, attracted. But like yourself, they're probably taking a break next week. So go and enjoy your holidays, and spend some time thinking about how you'll approach 2007 differently from 2006 in order to stay a step or two ahead.

If you sell media, you are a good storyteller. You have to be--because so much of what you communicate to buyers contains both interpretations and generalizations you create about the audience your property delivers.

If you were asked to describe the first memory that comes up from grade school, what would it be? Does your memory of grade school have a chalkboard in the picture? A blackboard, as it is often called even when green, and the chalk used to write on it, is a common thread for all of us. It's how we all learned to learn.

This column is the first of a three-part series we're calling "Three simple steps publishers must take to succeed selling online." I wanted to name it "the three steps most publishers have failed to take seriously" but that would be negative--which is how I feel when I speak to salespeople whose struggles can be directly traced to the missteps of their own company.

As a longtime "Law and Order" fan, I greatly appreciate the fact that reruns of my favorite show (and its subsequent spin-offs) are shown on cable almost every hour of every day. There's something reassuring about the fact that, should one wake in the middle of the night, Sam Waterston and Jerry Orbach are but a click away, making New York (and, of course, the world) a safer place for all of us. This resonates with me, for, as a champion of user rights, I see myself as a sort of purveyor of Web justice, fighting to ensure that the …

Over the past 12 months I have heard executives from NBC, Fox, ABC and CBS speaking at events about their online media strategies, and they have all struck a similar pose: Content is king. It's not unlikely that big media companies espouse this position, in unison: what they all do have, in spades, is content. What's unlikely is that it's finally true.

A student posed this question during a recent seminar I conducted. We had spent the day covering the range of ingredients needed to cook up an online ad deal. As we wrapped up, he asked, "So after I sell a deal, now what happens?"

Marketers take notice: If you're looking for active online investors, some of them might be working on their cars. How do we know this? The Online Publishers Association (OPA) just completed a detailed analysis of the demographics and purchasing activity of Web users, creating a new guide for understanding and quantifying the best online advertising environments.

Here's the clay you need to sculpt a big deal--the larger-than-average ad deal in which media salespeople position their brand and its multiple platforms to creatively meet the communication agenda of an advertiser.

Relying on a third party to deliver lists of leads is frustrating. The situation becomes even worse when paying a third party to identify the Web traffic they're driving to your site. Two options present themselves: one, pay a premium for all (or some) named leads in addition to raw unidentified traffic, or two, concentrate on cost effectively driving as much traffic as possible to tailored landing pages that will qualify those click-throughs at low or no cost.