Note: The following was published today in my free weekly e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com, now in its 9th year. Join us -- always free.

The last time I wrote about Permission Marketing (from the book by Seth Godin, right) I described the "permission tree" and urged you to audit all levels of permission so you could make use of them.

Now I'm going to tell you how to apply permission to the highest levels of personal transactions, the selling of homes and cars.

Permission Marketing is already heavily used in the home-buying business, which is all about relationships. Agents give small trinkets to raw prospects, and work the neighborhood hoping to create relationships. The search is always for someone who knows a seller before they become one. The buy side is mostly handled through branding and TV ads, which seem to be aimed at sellers but actually push the message that "we do deals," which is something buyers want as well.

Permission came to the car industry mainly through the Internet. I got a taste of it recently, a survey page that offered to tell me what my old clunker was worth. Once I completed the form I was inundated with e-mails (plus a few phone calls), most of which eventually went into my "spam" folder.

Why was this? It was because the wrong people were contacting me. I'd sought information on something I wanted to sell. The people who got my information, and used my information, treated me like a buyer.

In both cars and real estate, permission starts at a level far below that of the transaction. While Seth Godin's book http://www.permission.com treated "transaction permission" as a low-value good, here it is the highest value. That's why real estate agents give out calendars and flyers to raw suspects. The car survey page, too, was aimed at creating suspects.

What are the holders of this Contact Permission doing wrong? Both the car dealers and real estate agents were expecting too much of their suspects. They were not giving enough to turn these people into prospects, thus missing the nature of the relationship and the chance to make a sale.

The potential value of a prospect, as opposed to a suspect, is enough to make a bigger investment worthwhile. But the funnel of suspects is so wide, and the number of prospects that turn into sales so small, that most just give up. Add to this the fact that many car buyers are spending "just" a few thousand dollars and you can see the scope of the problem.

But there is something these people can give, even to suspects. Honest information.

If the car dealer came to me wanting to see the car I had to sell, or if he could get me to a dealer or mechanic who could accurately value it (not just deliver the Blue Book number) I would have been ready to do business. I still am, on that basis. But I can't buy until I sell. Help me sell. Give me information that leads to my selling, and I'll remember you when it's time to buy.

What form would this take? It would take some knowledge of the local market, a set of contacts (not just your dealership, but neighborhood contacts) who can, either free or for a price, deliver honesty. In other words, give me a referral, an e-mail listing these people, and ask the customer to follow up.

Honest information can go a long way in the real estate game, too. What if you sent an e-mail newsletter to those suspects who gave you their e-mail address? And what if, in that e-mail, you gave them transaction records on every sale in their zip code? It's easy to get, even easy to automate. Your trinkets, then, should have your subscribe address, and should solicit the customers' e-mail address. Don't just put a phone number down and your picture. Offer a no-risk way to develop a relationship.

In order to climb the Permission Tree, from suspect to prospect to transaction, you must give away relevant information. In these businesses the suspects are sellers, and even if you're looking for buyers you still must treat the names you get on their level. In other words, you have to become a publisher, an opt-in e-mail publisher.

Thus we have another level of permission, and another level of payment. You turn a suspect into a prospect through Reading Permission, and what you give them for that permission is a valuable editorial product.

How do you turn reading permission into something more valuable, which I'll call Prospect Permission? This is where it gets personal.

Once you have an editorial product, the value of your Reading Permission scales. On a per-reader basis, it goes down. Meanwhile, the value of that permission to your reader goes up. This is the magic of publishing.

The fact is that every person who reads a newsletter (like this one) has a personal relationship with the publisher, out of their sight. So when they do write you (and every issue encourages them to write you, with a personal e-mail address), it's vital that you write back, that you answer their question, and that you follow up by telephone (ask for their phone number in your response e-mail if you haven't got it already) to make sure the question is answered.

Now, because of the nature of your editorial content, and the responses that business-oriented content delivers, you do in fact have a prospect on the phone. Not only that but you have a qualified prospect, one whose respect you have already earned.

This is how local Web content becomes a reality.