Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy

Search has changed everything. Search has become woven into our everyday lives, and permeates offline as well as online activities.
Every business should have a search strategy. How a business appears online can impact consumer influence as much as if not more than offline advertising like TV commercials. A business's search strategy can have a dramatic impact on how consumers interact with that business.
But even more importantly, search engine activity provides amazingly useful data about customer behavior, needs, and motivations. Accessing search data is like conducting focus groups with millions of people for free. Search isn't just for marketers and techies. It can provide valuable insight on business strategy and product strategy.
Companies of all sizes – from startups to global enterprise level corporations, and even businesses without web sites – can benefit from understanding how consumers are searching for them and talking about them online, both as a powerful acquisition channel and a vast repository of market research.
In this non-technical book forexecutives, business owners, marketers, and product managers, search engine strategy guru Vanessa Fox-who created Google's portal for site owners, Googgle Webmaster Central -explains what every marketer or business owner needs to understand about how search rankings work, how to use search to better understand your customers and attract new ones, how to develop a comprehensive search strategy for your business, and how to build execution of this strategy into the businesses processes. This isn't another book about paid search for advertisers. This book focuses on organic listings – the unpaid results that receive 86% of searcher clicks.

• Written by search engine guru Vanessa Fox, formerly Google's search engine strategy spokesperson and creator of Google Webmaster Central
• Explains from a businessperson's perspective how to develop a successful search engine strategy
• Shows how to use the easily accessible data from search engines to increase qualified traffic, better understand customers, and strengthen customer relationships
• Reveals how smaller companies can leverage search engine marketing to achieve parity with larger brands

With this book in hand, every businessperson will have the knowledge and the tools to maximize the potential of search engine marketing to build a brand, draw new prospects, and generate sales.

Source: Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy

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YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day

A complete, task-based guide to developing, implementing, and tracking a video marketing strategy
Online video marketing is crucial in today's marketplace. This guide teaches you proven, practical guidelines for developing and implementing video marketing for your organization.
If you're a marketer, advertising professional, consultant, or small business owner, here's a relevant guide to understanding video marketing tactics, developing a strategy, implementing the campaign, and then measuring results. You'll find extensive coverage of keyword strategies and video optimization, distribution and promotion strategies to other sites and blogs, YouTube advertising opportunities, and crucial metrics and analysis.

• Written in the popular "Hour a Day" format, which breaks intimidating topics down to easily approachable tasks
• Covers previously undocumented optimization strategies, distribution techniques, community promotion tactics, and more
• Explores the crucial keyword development phase and best practices for creating and maintaining a presence on YouTube via brand channel development and customization
• Examines effective promotional tactics, how to optimize video for YouTube and search engine visibility, and metrics and analytics
• Includes case studies, additional resources, a glossary, information about creating and editing video, step-by-step guides, and valuable tutorials

YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day gives you the tools to give your clients or your organization a visible, vital marketing presence online.

Source: YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day

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Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business (The New Rules of Social Media)

The era of online video has arrived—now make it work for your business
In the last year, the world of online video exploded. Hollywood got into the game, professional actors and writers joined in, and independent producers looked to find their niche. Now, companies are wide awake to the opportunities for product and brand promotion as well as customer engagement. So how do you want to fit into the new online video universe?
The must-have guide, Get Seen by Steve Garfield, the “Paul Revere of video blogging,” offers a quick and complete toolkit to get you up to speed on the latest that online video and related media have to offer.
    • Examines success stories of how companies have used online video
    • Presents a series of plans and tools that businesses can follow as they expand onto the social web
    • Provides clear step by step directions on how to record, edit, and export videos, where to post them, how to build a community around their content, and what to do to increase views by making it go viral
If you're ready to take full advantage of online video's many benefits, Get Seen is the one resource you need.

Source: Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business (The New Rules of Social Media)

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Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media)

Stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in

Traditional "outbound" marketing methods like cold-calling, email blasts, advertising, and direct mail are increasingly less effective. People are getting better at blocking these interruptions out using Caller ID, spam protection, TiVo, etc. People are now increasingly turning to Google, social media, and blogs to find products and services. Inbound Marketing helps you take advantage of this change by showing you how to get found by customers online.

Inbound Marketing is a how-to guide to getting found via Google, the blogosphere, and social media sites.

    • Improve your rankings in Google to get more traffic
    • Build and promote a blog for your business
    • Grow and nurture a community in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
    • Measure what matters and do more of what works online

The rules of marketing have changed, and your business can benefit from this change. Inbound Marketing shows you how to get found by more prospects already looking for what you have to sell.

Source: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) 

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The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing

The Social Media Bible will show you how to build or transform your business into a social media—enabled enterprise where customers, employees, and prospects connect, collaborate, and champion your products, your services, and your way of doing business.

Using the systematic approach presented in this comprehensive guide, you'll learn how to:

• Increase your company and brand value by engaging people in new forms of communication, collaboration, education, and entertainment
• Determine which social media tactics you should be using with your customers and employees
• Evaluate and categorize the tools and applications that constitute the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem
• Make social media tools like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, blogging, podcasting, and hundreds of others a part of your business strategy
• Do a social media analysis inside your company to improve internal operations and outside your company to create and monetize relationships with customers and prospects
• Implement social media micro- and macrostrategies to give your business the competitive edge it needs to survive and thrive

Virtually every business can use social media to increase sales and profits, and The Social Media Bible will show you how. Part One introduces you to social media, and gives you a helpful framework, and presents practical and tactical tips for using some of these tools. Part Two introduces you to over 100 social media tools and applications in fifteen different categories, giving you a quick rundown of the features and functions of the tools that should become part of your social media strategy. Part Three offers mini exercises and assessments to help you conduct a social media audit of your company, your competition, and your customers, so you can craft the perfect strategy for your business.
If you want to grow your business, you have to stay connected to your stakeholders- whether you're a big corporation, a small business, or even a nonprofit. The Social Media Bible will show you how to harness the collective wisdom and viral value of your stakeholders and stay ahead of your competition.
www.TheSocialMediaBible.com
 
Source: The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

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Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain: Lessons from Warren Buffett's Top Business Leaders

A rare look at the successful executives behind Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway
Warren Buffett is a legend for his investment philosophy, but few are familiar with the leaders of his companies.
In Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain, Ronald Chan offers an inside look at the early careers of numerous executives and CEOs who have contributed to Berkshire's success. You'll learn about the early career decisions they made, what they gained from their first jobs, the skill sets they acquired, and how they became a part of the world's most dynamic conglomerate.

• Contains lessons that any executive or employee can use to improve their performance
• Based on exclusive interviews with top Berkshire Hathaway executives and CEOs, including David Sokol of MidAmerican Energy, Walter Scott Jr. of Level 3 Communications, Cathy Baron-Tamraz of Business Wire, Brad Kinstler of See's Candies, Marla Gottschalk of the Pampered Chef, Stanford Lipsey of the Buffalo News, and many more
• Offers a wide range of approaches to developing a successful business mindset

With Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain, you'll quickly discover how an exceptional group of managers have contributed to a culture of achievement and how their lessons can be applied to both your career and life.

Source:  Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain: Lessons from Warren Buffett's Top Business Leaders

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Buffett's Bites: The Essential Investor's Guide to Warren Buffett's Shareholder Letters

Investing strategies, market wisdom, and candid thoughts taken directly from Warren Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.

Even in today's precarious stock markets, Berkshire Hathaway’s record of wealth creation continues to set new standards for successful, intelligent investing. Get the most insightful, canny, and candid thoughts from Warren Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in Buffett's Bites. L. J. Rittenhouse, a leading authority on evaluating CEO performance, extracts the best, most useful and enlightening nuggets from Buffett's 2008, 2009, and 2010 letters, and combines them with practical take-aways that investors can immediately apply to improve their own portfolios.
Each "Bite" illuminates a different facet of Berkshire Hathaway’s unrivalled success. The advice and strategies are divided into three categories to help you apply Buffett’s wisdom: to today's markets; to learn what makes a business a trustworthy investment; and to value investing for the long haul. In a business climate where savvy investors have learned not to trust just any numbers, Buffett's Bites is solid nutrition for informed decision-making.

Source: Buffett's Bites: The Essential Investor's Guide to Warren Buffett's Shareholder Letters

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Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money

For years, Robert Kiyosaki has firmly believed that the best investment one can ever make is in taking the time to truly understand how one's finances work. Too many people are much more interested in the quick-hitting scheme, or trying to find a short-cut to real wealth. As Kiyosaki has preached over and over again, one has to truly under the process of how money works before one can start out on trying to escape the daily financial Rat Race.

Now, in this latest book in the popular Rich Dad Poor Dad series, Kiyosaki lays out his 5 key principles of Financial Intelligence for all to understand. In INCREASE YOUR FINANCIAL IQ, Kiyosaki provides real insights on these key steps to wealth:

o How to increase your money -- how to assess what you're really worth now, what your prospects are, and how to start mapping out your financial future.

o How to protect your money -- for better or for worse, taxes are a way of life. Kiyosaki shows you that "it's not what you make....it's what you keep."

o How to budget your money -- everybody wants to live large, but you have to learn how to live within your budget. Kiyosaki shows you how you can.

o How to leverage your money -- as you build your financial IQ, knowing how to put your money to work for you is a crucial step.

o How to improve your financial information -- Kiyosaki shows you how to accelerate your wealth as you learn more and more.

Source: Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money

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The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

Establishing a social media marketing strategy and creating effective Web content that is indexed by search engines is critical for any business. When people are looking for answers to problems, they go online first! People and organizations)that participate in social media (creating YouTube videos, participating on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, starting a blog and the like) become part of a vibrant online community and show that market that they are worthy of doing business with.
Unlike non-targeted, in-your-face, interruption-based advertising, social media is content that people actually want to see. How cool is that? Rather than forcing you to convince people to pay attention to your products and services by dreaming up messages and ad campaigns, search engines deliver interested buyers right to your company’s virtual doorstep. This is a marketer’s dream-come-true.
However, most marketers don’t know how to harness this exciting form of marketing. Their most common mistake is to spend way too much time talking about your company’s products and services and worrying too much about being “on message.” In addition, many companies are fearful of jumping into the social media waters because it seems scary to put yourself out there.

Top Seven Ways to Get the Most Out of Social Networking Sites:
1. Target a specific audience. Create a page that reaches an audience that is important to your organization. It is usually better to reach a small niche market than try to go large.
2. Be a thought leader. Provide valuable and interesting information that people want to check out. It is better to show your expertise in a market or at solving a buyer’s problems than to blather on about your product.
3. Create lots of links. Link to your own sites and blog, and those of others in your industry and network. Everybody loves links—it makes the Web what it is. You should certainly link to your own stuff from a social networking site (like your blog), but also link to other people’s sites and content in your own market.
4. Encourage people to contact you. Make it easy for people to reach you online, and be sure to follow up personally on your fan mail.
5. Participate. Create groups and participate in online discussions. Become an online leader and organizer.
6. Make it easy to find you. Tag your page and add your page into the subject directories. Encourage others to bookmark your page with del.icio.us and DIGG.
7. Experiment. These sites are great because you can try new things. If it isn’t working, tweak it. Or abandon the effort and try something new. There is no such thing as an expert in social networking—we’re all learning as we go!

Source: The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition

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Driven: Business Strategy, Human Actions, And The Creation Of Wealth

Authored by Dr. Mark L. Frigo and Joel Litman. DRIVEN: If we can better understand how the success or failure of a business is driven by its plans and actions, then we can greatly improve how we run our businesses and value companies. DRIVEN is about RETURN DRIVEN STRATEGY, a framework for business analysis and planning prioritization and the culmination of a ten-year research project studying and categorizing the root causes of thousands of businesses that have succeeded, failed, or remained in mediocrity. The underlying research covers up to 30 or more years of firm performance. DRIVEN includes explanations, diagnostics, and case studies. Chapters are ordered consistently with the Return Driven Strategy framework, making DRIVEN a valuable guide for ongoing reference as well as an interesting and enlightening read.

Source: Driven: Business Strategy, Human Actions, And The Creation Of Wealth

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The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

The leading email marketing firm shows you how to create high-impact, low-cost campaigns
Email marketing is an incredibly cost-effective way to establish and build relationships that drive business success. But, it can also be a challenge because the inbox is a hostile environment. Whether your email is noteworthy—or an annoying waste of your customer's time—depends on your ability to stick to stick the fundamentals of good marketing and authentic relationship building.
The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing presents best practices and relationship-building principles from America’s leading email marketing firm. With over 280,000 small business and non-profit clients, Constant Contact is constantly testing and learning what works and what doesn't, and it's all here. There's no other email guide on the market that provides this level of comprehensive, practical guidance. Whether you're starting your own small business or need to grow on a shoestring budget, this book will get you up to speed fast.
Learn about:

• Ten email pitfalls that will get your business into trouble
• Ten things your customers expect you to do
• The "soft" benefits of email marketing
• Using email in combination with other marketing efforts
• How four types of permissions can make or break your strategy
• Building an email list that is valuable and effective
• Creating valuable content
• Choosing an effective, professional email format
• Ensuring your emails are delivered, opened, and read

With The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing, you'll learn to avoid the common mistakes of email marketing, give your customers content they love, and combine an effective email marketing strategy with your traditional marketing efforts—giving you way more bang for your marketing buck.

Source: The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

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Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

Winning by Not Competing: A Fresh Approach to Strategy

Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future.

In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans": untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves-which the authors call "value innovation"- create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade.

Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

W. Chan Kim is the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. Renée Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Strategy and Management.

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

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The Accidental Entrepreneur: The 50 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Starting a Business

WHAT IS AN “accidental entrepreneur”? The answer is: a person who never expected to be self-employed or thought of herself or himself as an entrepreneur.

An accidental entrepreneur is not a born or natural entrepreneur, or even someone who is comfortable, at first, selling products or services. Accidental entrepreneurs don’t set out to be entrepreneurs; rather, they find themselves working on their own by chance or reluctant choice, and only gradually come to find that they enjoy it. At that point, they realize that they need to learn what they don’t already know—everything they can, in fact—in order to make their business a success.

Here are a few examples of accidental entrepreneurs:

• A communication specialist takes a retirement package, and a few months later she agrees to do a project for her former boss. The boss, enthused about the specialist’s work, recommends her to someone in another company. Soon she is working on projects for three companies. One day it dawns on her that she has a consulting business. This is fine with her. But so far this work came strictly through referrals. How can she market herself to other companies?
• An engineer has not been able to find work in the high-tech industry and needs money to pay his mortgage. He takes a substitute-teaching job at a ¬ local school and discovers that many of his students need tutoring in math. He starts an after-school tutoring program and discovers that he really enjoys working with students, especially those who are math-phobic. He ¬ realizes that he could build a business around this. But how?
• A therapist, counselor, or coach finds herself enjoying working one-on-one with clients and wants to build a private practice. She keeps her “day job” while slowly developing a referral base. At some point, she knows she wants to do this work full-time, but she doesn’t have enough clients to support herself to this degree. What steps does she need to take in order to accomplish this goal?
• A corporate refugee has a vision of living a quieter life, away from the city and the long commute. She manages to move with her husband to a small tourist town. However, this new area offers very few well-paying jobs. The couple realize that they need to make their living on their own, and decide to open a gift store, although neither of them has any retail ¬ experience. They decide to invest their savings in this store. What do they need to learn in order to make the store a moneymaker and to keep its doors open over time?

In all these cases, and many more like them, the decision to be an entrepreneur comes about gradually, as events change, priorities shift, and the need to make a living creates new needs and new possibilities. In almost every one of these cases, there’s a lot to consider before just jumping in, if the business is to get off the ground and keep on going.

Passion and motivation are the first considerations. Entrepreneurship is like running a marathon. You might run to lose weight, to get in shape, to prove you can do it, or for a cause. These are all good reasons. But do they have sticking power? Is your heart really in it? Before you take your first running step, it would help to ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” If your answer is, “Because I’m enthusiastic and passionate about it,” then you will have a good chance. When your heart is truly connected with your goal, then you are willing to train, to run, to move past your obstacles, to reach the finish line, and to celebrate your success—and then do it all over again! (The next time, however, you can learn from your mistakes and get to the finish line faster).

You may begin your entrepreneurial career by accident, but it’s important to make this move intentional as soon as possible. For only once it becomes intentional will you give your business the kind of care it needs, and make it possible for it to give back to you the kind of profit and enjoyment you hoped for in the first place.

Being an entrepreneur is far more creative than doing a job for someone else. Your business is a reflection of who you are and what you’re passionate about, as well as the unique expertise you have to offer the marketplace. If you are a sole proprietor—or, as I like to say, a “SoloPreneur”—you make all the decisions, you do most of the work, you solve the problems, you take the heat when things go wrong, and you bask in the glory when things go right. It’s exciting and scary, but you are doing what you love.

Source:  The Accidental Entrepreneur: The 50 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Starting a Business

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Financial Peace Revisited

Dave Ramsey knows what it's like to have it all. By age twenty-six, he had established a four-million-dollar real estate portfolio, only to lose it by age thirty. He has since rebuilt his financial life and, through his workshops and his New York Times business bestsellers Financial Peace and More than Enough, he has helped hundreds of thousands of people to understand the forces behind their financial distress and how to set things right-financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

In this new edition of Financial Peace, Ramsey has updated his tactics and philosophy to show even more readers:

* how to get out of debt and stay out
* the KISS rule of investing-"Keep It Simple, Stupid"
* how to use the principle of contentment to guide financial decision making
* how the flow of money can revolutionize relationships

With practical and easy to follow methods and personal anecdotes, Financial Peace is the road map to personal control, financial security, a new, vital family dynamic, and lifetime peace.

Source: Financial Peace Revisited

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Your Money: The Missing Manual

Keeping your financial house in order is more important than ever. But how do you deal with expenses, debt, taxes, and retirement without getting overwhelmed? This book points the way. It's filled with the kind of practical guidance and sound insights that makes J.D. Roth's GetRichSlowly.org a critically acclaimed source of personal-finance advice.
You won't find any get-rich-quick schemes here, just sensible advice for getting the most from your money. Even if you have perfect credit and no debt, you'll learn ways to make your rosy financial situation even better.

• Get the info you need to make sensible decisions on saving, spending, and investing
• Learn the best ways to set and achieve financial goals
• Set up a realistic budget framework and learn how to track expenses
• Discover proven methods to help you eliminate debt
• Understand how to use credit wisely
• Win big by making smart decisions on your home and other big-ticket items
• Learn how to get the most from your investments by avoiding rash decisions
• Decide how -- and how much -- to save for retirement 

Source: Your Money: The Missing Manual
 

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The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur

"Never started a company before? Struggling with little or no cash? Have no experience, no baseline to judge your progress against? Thank God! You've got a shot at making this work." So says Mike Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, a business book that is so uniquely useful, so raw and entertaining, it reads like the brainchild of Steve Jobs and Chris Rock.
The founder of three multimillion-dollar companies, including Obsidian Launch, a company that partners with first-time entrepreneurs to grow their concepts into industry leaders, Mike Michalowicz knows what it really takes to spin your great idea into pure gold.
Whether you're just starting out or have been at this for years, Mike's "get real" approach to business is a much-needed swift kick in the pants. In this book, you'll discover:
* Why a business plan is a total waste of your time.
* Why fulfilling your own needs is the first and last order of business.
* Which three sheets of paper you need to successfully launch, manage and grow your business.
* How to get started in business with little or no money.
* How to find and exploit resources that no one else knows about.
* How to stop procrastinating and take action NOW!

Source: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur

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Jump Start Your Marketing Brain: Scientific Advice and Practical Ideas

This is a powerful new approach to marketing that will multiply the impact of every dollar invested. Comprehensive research by Doug Hall details marketing initiatives that will deliver sustained success. What makes this book's teaching more reliable and reproducible than others is its foundation on hard data reflecting customer, industrial, and business-to-business marketing, not "guru opinions." After reading Jump Start Your Marketing Brain, readers will know how to more effectively and efficiently market and sell their brand, their services, their products, and even themselves!

Source: Jump Start Your Marketing Brain: Scientific Advice and Practical Ideas

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