In a cocktail lounge in Norway: "Ladies are requested not to have children at bar."

At a Hong Kong dry cleaner: "Drop your trousers here for best results."

In a Nairobi restaurant: "Customers who find our waitress rude ought to see manager."

Bloopers are such a hoot - until, that is, your business promotions wind up saying something you never intended and YOU become a laughing stock.

Here's how to prevent those little slips of keyboard from generating giggles instead of conversions:

If you subscribe to any marketing ezines, you become familiar with their names soon enough. Terry Dean, Yanik Silver, John Colanzi, Jim Edwards, Lee Benson, Dave Balch, Marlon Sanders, Jan Tallent- Dandridge and Jim Turner, to name a few. And a there's a whole slew of up-and-comers on horizon, men and women who have studied masters and are trying to follow in their footsteps--or create paths of their own.

I can see some of you out there, wrinkling your noses as you read this. Internet marketers? Aren't they a bunch of hype-driven shysters whose sole reason for existence is tricking unsuspecting Web surfers into giving them their credit card information?

Well, no. Not good ones, at least.

What are they, then?

1. First and foremost, they're writers. Every one of them. They write books, articles and reports by dozens. They develop e- courses and publish ezines. Internet marketers don't talk about writing, or dream about it, or hope to do it someday. They *write* prolifically, and best of them are darned good at it. And they're not starving writers either, living in unheated garrets and subsisting on stale bread. These writers make money. Some of them make plenty of it.

2. They're entrepreneurs. You might even call them pioneers. They took one look at text-based Internet, saw its potential, seized its opportunities and built mini-empires on it. They boldly published ebooks long before rest of us thought of electronic publishing as a viable outlet for our work. Success didn't happen to them overnight, but they believed in medium and, more importantly, in themselves and what they had to say.