When Seth Godin takes the stage, you may need a few minutes to figure out what he's all about. Wearing a long-cut black jacket, his shaved pate gleaming in the limelight, Godin is at once a performance artist and a high priest of Internet marketing.

As video images flash across large screens surrounding him, Godin preaches the gospel of permission marketing. In brief, his philosophy is that the more people are bombarded with unsolicited marketing messages, the less effective those messages become. With permission marketing, by contrast, prospects are offered an incentive -- such as entry in a sweepstakes -- in exchange for agreeing to receive promotional email, for example.

On the screen, Godin illustrates a related concept, viral marketing, with a photo of people lined up outside a famous soup shop. "Al, the soup guy, created his virus long before he was cruelly parodied on 'Seinfeld' as the Soup Nazi," Godin relates. Godin's message to his audience is that a catchy idea -– in this case, an only-in-New York public spectacle in which a chef heaps abuse upon his masochistic patrons -- spreads itself like a virus.

Offstage, Godin brushes off attempts to categorize him and his work. What is his business? "I don't really have a business. I call myself a change agent." So does that make him a consultant? "I don't do consulting. Once people pay you to solve a problem, they expect you to solve it –- and that rarely works." Godin says that he does like to meet with thoughtful, motivated people and leave behind enough conceptual landmines to force them to change their business for the better.

Before Godin decided to go entirely solo, he founded and ran a pair of successful businesses: Seth Godin Productions, from 1986 to 1998; and Yoyodyne Entertainment, from 1990 to 1998. Seth Godin Productions was a book-packaging firm that produced about 125 books, some of them best-sellers.

At Yoyodine, his team invented the concept of permission marketing, Godin says. Even when he had a staff of dozens at Yoyodine, the organization had a quirky culture. "Our office was one big room," he says. In order to keep people fresh, "Every 90 days everyone had to move their desks." Yoyodine also had a couple of unusual rules in its virtual employee handbook: no bacon on the premises, and no clogs.

But in the end, Yoyodine was taken very seriously by the Internet industry. Yahoo bought the firm in 1998, and Godin served as a vice president of direct marketing for the Web portal for a time. Godin went on to write Permission Marketing, a New York Times best-seller, and Unleashing the Ideavirus.

In the spirit of the last book, Godin wanted to give away Ideavirus as a free e-book while also selling it as a $40 hardcover volume. But Simon & Schuster, his previous publisher, balked at this unconventional business proposition. "The book publishing industry is fundamentally broken," he says. In typical form, Godin took matters into his own hands and published Ideavirus online himself, through Do You Zoom Inc Meanwhile, he managed to rack up a profit by quickly selling 26,000 copies of the hardcover version.

In part, book authoring is a rainmaking activity for Godin. "The writing brings me the attention that gets me the speaking engagements," he says. "Once people like my ideas, they want the souvenir edition, which is me giving a speech." At $30,000 a pop, his marketing pep talks create an enviable revenue stream. Godin pays 25 percent of his fees to Greater Talent Network of New York City, a speakers bureau, and says that he puts much of the rest toward anonymous donations.

But speech-making didn't always come easily to Godin. "For a really long time, I wanted to be a professional speaker. I probably made 3,000 speeches before I got paid." For a while, he even paid public relations firms to find him speaking engagements. But he just kept stumbling along, picking up the trade by recognizing his errors. "The cost of not failing is high indeed, because you spend a lot of time not learning anything."

One last question for Godin: Why the shaved head? "It's a branding maneuver," he says. We should have guessed.