Archive for books
The Unknown History of American Business
Posted by: | CommentsWant to take a break from marketing?
Check out this book entitled:
Enterprising Americans: A Business History of the United States.
This book by John Chamberlain is a fascinating read.
If you want to download it free (completely legally), reply to this thread and I’ll show you how.
Email marketing and sneezers
Posted by: | CommentsIn his book, Purple Cow, Seth Godin discusses the concept of “sneezers”.
Huh?
“Sneezers” are “experts” who tell all of their friends and colleagues about a new product or service, and are perceived authorities in the area and are therefore influential.
The book is worth reading just for the discussion of “sneezers”.
What relevant does this have for your email marketing campaigns?
Everything.
In fact, email is the perfect medium to capitalize on the “sneezers” tendency to “spread” the virus. Email is so very simple to forward to any number of people, adding one’s own comments. And today, of course, almost everyone has email.
You can understand why the ease of forwarding makes gives email a nudge over paper-based communications in many applications. If you happen to hit a “sneezer” at just the right time, you can have influence far beyond your original prospect list.
These principles should not be restricted to business. I belonged to a service organization that insisted on mailing a monthly newsletter with news and training opportunities. I asked why email was not used, citing the lower cost, instant delivery, and ability to forward. I argued that the newsletter could be much more effective and we could save money at the same time. Predictibly, my concerns fell on deaf ears.
For the service organization to which I belonged, there was not much at stake. But my story illustrates how organizations can get trapped by inertia, doing things the same way they’ve always been done and not taking advantage of new opportunities.
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
Posted by: | CommentsIn the book entitled:
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
Seth Godin carefully explains his concept of getting customers to buy-in to receiving more communication from you. What I like about Godin’s approach is he realizes that business transactions are basically just a relationship between two people, at some level. Therefore, principles at work in personal relationships can also be applied to the business arena.
The books has been around for a while but is worth reading. I don’t know of any source that explains permission marketing better.
When building your email campaign or strategy, don’t get so bogged down with the technical details that you lose sight of the relationship aspect.
This book has had a profound impact on how I think about marketing, and I believe it will have the same impact on you.
The Millionaire Next Door
Posted by: | CommentsAlthough the famous book by Thomas Stanley and William Danko,The Millionaire Next Door
The way most people think about wealth is wrong, and that is why they are not wealthy. They don’t save, or not nearly enough; they don’t build equity; and they fail to live within their means. In all, the authors identified seven characteristics of the wealthy in the United States.
I would summarize all of these characteristics as: self-disciplined single-minded persistence in achieving long-term financial independence, by offering genuine value to customers and getting paid handsomely for it.
There are many lessons to be learned in this book, but you won’t learn them if you don’t read it!
Bottom line: success leaves traces, or tracks. If you have a goal, find others who have achieved what you want to achieve and study what they did to get there. You will find that method much more satisfying than reinventing the wheel.
Link to Amazon Reviews
Posted by: | CommentsI read a ton of books, and have decided to begin posting book reviews on Amazon.
You can read them here.
How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less
Posted by: | CommentsThe title of this post is the subtitle to Mark Joyner’s book, The Irresistible Offer.
Other writers such as Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert have discussed the same concepts, but Joyner has formulated them into a format easy to understand and implement.
Business is about service — it’s about providing something (a product or service) that your market values. It’s not about fulfiling the needs of the business (your ego, financial needs, whatever).
It doesn’t help anyone if you’re providing a service your market wants if it’s not communicated effectively to that market.
And that’s where this book really shines. It’s made a huge impact on my thinking.
No more FM radio: the long tail’s revenge!
Posted by: | CommentsAs promised, here is my notes on the book, The Long Tail.
Author Chris Anderson notes early in the book:
“iTunes killed the radio star.”
and
“Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches”.
These are powerful statements, and true, of course. The evidence is all around us. Not only iTunes, but Amazon and Netflix also.
In case it’s not clear, the “tail” referred to in the title is the right side of a distribution curve, where the Y axis represents popularity and the X axis represents demand.
Under the old paradigm, due to various constraints (shelf space, airtime, money) products which have low demand are not carried by mainstream retailers or entertainment providers (TV, radio, movie theaters). There are simply not enough resources to make them availalble.
Under the new paradigm, if you need more storage space, you just buy another warehouse (Netflix, Amazon) or server (iTunes).
Anderson points out that the roots of Long Tail predate the internet: Sears and Roebuck.
In Chapter 4, Anderson helpfully enumerates six themes of the Long Tail:
- There are far more niche products than hits.
- The cost of reaching these niches is falling dramatically.
- The right tools and tecniques offered by sellers can drive traffic further to the right of the Long Tail.
- When there’s a supply of niche goods available and customers can find them, the demand curve flattens.
- There are so many niches products available that collectively, they can rival the hits.
- Once all of this is in place, the natural shape of demand is revealed.
He summarizes thusly:
“A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.”
Wow.
There’s so much here, you may as well get the book yourself and read it.
The Long Tail
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve started reading the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. This book is dynamite and I’ll be sharing more with you soon.
Wanna be a Purple Cow?
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are having trouble getting your business to stand out from the others in your market, you really must read Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow.
Godin explains why it’s so important to make your business remarkable, and offers examples and some ideas on how to do it.
