I’ve had a copy of Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, on my shelf for over a year now and had just recently gotten around to reading it. I picked it up once, read 10 pages, put it down, and “more important” books came along.

Once you get past the first few chapters, which read like a Google Website Optimizer infomercial, Testing is an important book on not just the necessity to test, but the how-to and the what. It’s the latter part that makes Testing such a great resource.

Obviously the authors can’t tell you everything that you need to test, there’s just too much for that, but they do provide some great examples along with questions and ideas for you to start thinking in the right direction.

You don’t have to be a testing expert for Testing to make sense. Aside from a few math-geek pages the book is remarkably easy to read, understand and get yourself into implementation territory.

Cunningly Clever Marketing
Andrew Wood

I was actually pretty impressed with this book. More so than I would have thought. You can read my full review here.

The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth During Tough Economic Times
Jay Abraham

I don’t have much on this one. I read it early in the quarter and nothing stuck. I guess I better start writing up my synopsis immediately after reading!

Ogilvy on Advertising
David Ogilvy

I enjoyed this a lot. Not much here pertained to SEO, though I did get a blog post or two out of it. Regardless of the angle (advertising) there is a lot of information that could easily be transferred over to marketing and even SEO.

Every now and then I get requests to review books. I was recently asked if I would review a book by Andrew Wood titled Cunningly Clever Marketing. When I received the book what struck me first is that this was obviously a self-published book. The cover wasn’t much to look at and the book itself was about twice as heavy as it needed to be since each page is the glossy type typically used for picture books.

But you can’t always judge a book by it’s cover, and Cunningly Clever is no different.

There are quite a few typos throughout the book, but that’s to be expected of most self-published books. What I liked most is the brevity of each chapter. The book contains 145 chapters with the longs being three or four pages. Most chapters are a little over a page and a half. While this may seem like overkill, it makes for a very easy read, and even easier to digest.

Most of the information in this book can be found by reading dozens of other business marketing books. But I think that’s just the point. Why read dozens when you can read one, putting all this information at your fingertips, where you can easily re-read, re-reference and re-find when you need.

This year PubCon went really crazy with sessions, running a keynote and 4 sessions each day. And, to cram in even more information, there were six tracks to chose from! Doing the math, that’s 31 topics to choose from in one day. Truly something for everyone. With so much going on, it wasn’t possible to live blog or even create a wrap up at the end of the day. Thus I am pulling my wrap up together for the entire week in one post.

And then since 15 summaries is too much for anyone to deal with, I’m just going to give you the takeaways from my favorite sessions.

PPC Engine Vendor Panel

If you’ve ever been to any conference, you’ve at one time or another sat in on a vendor panel. And typically, I think the feeling is that if you’ve been to one, you’ve been to them all and there’s no point in attending another one. Well, with PPC it’s always nice to get an update on what might be new in each. For example last year I was excited to hear first hand (before any blogs posted about it) how MSN adCenter were releasing their keyword tool to integrate with Excel (07). Cool stuff.

This year I got excited to learn some stats from the Ask.com rep Dustin Kwan. He emphasized the importance of spreading your presence across a variety of vendors. He mentioned how Ask has a larger percent of the search traffic over MSN, saying that 2/3 of searchers don’t use MSN, and of those, 1/2 of them don’t use Google. Interesting point, and something to consider for my clients who are looking for more presence in the search world.

Yahoo Search Marketing rep Patrizio Spagnoletto told us how Yahoo have fine tuned their geo-targeting down to the zip code, which having that ability is pretty cool.

AdWords rep Frederick Vallayes mentioned something new in the Geo Reports, that you can find where clicks are coming from. Important information to have, helps you fine tune your geo targeting. Why pay for advertising and clicks in regions that don’t convert as well? Or with this information, create a geo-targeted campaign and spend more money in the regions that convert well.

Not much of a takeaway from MSN adCenter rep Doug (last name??) beyond his focus on improving ROI using 3 metrics of Market Change/Technology/Knowledge. He did recommend the following @adCenterBlog on twitter and staying current with adCenterCommunity.com

Navigating the Complex World of PPC Engines

The big take away here is Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance, she’s just totally awesome every time I hear her speak. She gave us a big list of copy “secrets that sell” … excellent take aways, easy to follow, easy to implement.

The big bullets that I grabbed (although I did get her entire list) are:

• Know what differentiates your ad
• Provide incentive to click
• Talk about benefits
• Use psychology – add humor and get their attention
• Use DKI – when it works
• A/B test your ads
• Pre-qualify clicks with ad text to eliminate those unwanted clicks

Top-Secret Tools of the Trade

This session was great – I have a list of tools to check out. Some of which I have seen and used, but there are others that I’ve not so I’m interested in looking into them further. I’ve recently found analytics to be FUN to play with. I want to check out Caphyon and DupeCop

Fun Stuff

Had some time to do fun stuff in Vegas too, including walking blisters into the soles of my feet … Spent a bunch of money, did the roller coaster at NY NY, the rides on the Stratosphere, and saw the Cirque du Soleil, KÀ. Even taught a friend how to lose money gambling. Ye ha!

That wraps up the wrap up … until next year…

• The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!, Al Ries & Jack Trout
• The Appeal, John Grisham
• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex, John Gray
• The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less, Mark Joyner
• Marketing and Advertising Using Google: Targeting Your Advertising to the Right Audience (PDF), Google
• The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Brian Tracy
• Talent Is Never Enough: Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent, John Maxwell
• The Day I Died, Steve Sjogren
• Shadow of Power: A Paul Madriani Novel (Paul Madriani Novels), Steve Martini
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey
• The 5 Paths to Persuasion: The Art of Selling Your Message, Robert Miller and Gary Williams

I’ve never claimed to be a programmer but working in SEO means that I’m involved in creating or editing hundreds of pages over the course of a year. Understanding how CSS works, and being able to implement basic to more advanced CSS strategies, has become essential over the past few years. Until now I’ve only had a rudimentary knowledge of CSS. The CSS Anthology has helped me grow my knowledge significantly on the topic.

I’ll admit that I didn’t follow the coding examples line by line, but that’s the beauty of this book. You don’t have to be a CSS programmer to be able to follow it. The great benefit of this book to the non-programmer like me, is simply knowing what kind of styling tricks can be accomplished via CSS. It’s easy to search for CSS tricks once you know what can be done, but until you do, then searching can be a shot in the dark. That’s what makes CSS Anthology such a good reference.

At 400 pages, it’s actually a very quick read unless you study all the CSS code examples provided. If you’re like me, you burn right past them which leaves you with probably about 150 pages of actual reading. But it’s all very valuable material. I can say that I have a much firmer grasp on what can be done with CSS and as I look to implement some of these tricks on the sites I work on I’ll frequently be referring back to the book.

The women have severe cohesiveness issues, thanks largely due to Omorosa. On the other hand, the guys, who work very well together, had some pre-task fireworks themselves. Which brings me to…

Business Lesson One: Save the animosity for the opposing team, not your own

Some personalities just seem to have a hard time working together. But you can’t let personality clashes get in the way of team performance. Not everybody can be a leader, and sometimes you’ve got to know when to step off, step back, and put your personal opinions aside.

Piers Morgan and Stephen Baldwin are very different. They have different styles of leadership and their own way of doing things. These two clash.

But at the same time they have (so far) been able to put that behind them in order to get things done. It was actually funny to see them laughing at themselves later in the episode. They know they clash, but they don’t let that get in the way of victory.

Even opposing personalities can work together, and in business, you’ve got to make differences work for you rather than against you. If you’re going to have animosity, save it for the other team. Learn to put differences aside with your own teammates so that you can press on to achieve the goals laid out before you.

Business Lesson Two: If you can’t compete, get off the field

Some competitors are not meant for certain fields. Just because someone succeeds in one area doesn’t mean they’ll automatically succeed in another. This is especially important when bringing in new people to your team.

In the world of business, many people think that just because they are strong and have shown victory in one area that they can easily transfer that over into another. Some people can do that, but most of the time, people can’t. Ever see Trump dabble in technology? He doesn’t because that’s an area he doesn’t know. Trump tries to stick to doing things where he has a much higher chance of success.

Jennie Finch is a gold medal softball player. She’s tough on the field, and she is used to asserting herself to bring her team to victory. That’s her field. The Apprentice is not. All her wins on the softball field wasn’t enough to bring her victory in a different arena. And she seemed to recognize that a bit.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is essential to success. If you find yourself in an area of weakness and you realize you just don’t have what it takes, be smart and get off the field. Nobody likes losing and it doesn’t make sense to continue in an area where victory is unlikely, especially when you can get back to your own area and dominate.

Conclusion

I don’t think Vincent Pastore turned out to be a particularly effective leader. I’d hate to see good people get fired off the girls’ team just because the guys’ team has some particularly effective leaders.

After dabbling with the stock market for a couple of years and finding both moderate success and spectacular failure, O’Neil’s book “The Successful Investor” pretty much confirmed what I already knew. I was doing this all wrong. That’s the depressing part. But the good part is that O’Neil teaches you how to do stock investing right.

“The Successful Investor” outlines five steps that every stock investor needs to know. Complete with stock charts and visual illustrations, O’Neil provides a very easy to understand step-by-step instruction for wise investing. Of course as the cliche goes… it’s easier said than done.

While O’Neil teaches you how to read stock charts, he makes it look much easier than it is to the non-professional investor. I’m certain that with practice–and O’Neil makes this point in the book–one gets better and better at it. But even while going through the five steps, knowing how and where to get the information you need before you invest is extremely time consuming. I’m certain it would be much easier if we all knew what stocks to watch, but that’s up to each investor overall.

I definitely would recommend this book to anyone investing in the market. Even if you can’t immediacy put all of the steps to use you’ll learn a great deal about the market and you’ll have a much better idea of how and when to invest in what than most people do now.

• How To Make the No-Follow A Blessing and Not a Curse: Advanced Internal SEO
• 5 More Free Tools To Improve Search Engine Optimization
• Four Reasons To Avoid Using Dates In URLs

Link Building

• Link Building Tips
• Link Building Ideas, Teach a Man to Fish and He’ll Bring You… Links
• What’s Your Link Building Marketing Mix? – Part 2

Social Media

• 5 Steps to Become a Better Social Media Marketer
• 31 Days to Becoming a Better Blogger
• Promoting Your Media

I didn’t know what to expect going into The Eye’s Have It. I know Kevin Lee’s reputation in the SEM industry, which is good, as well as his thoughts on the SEO industry (which can be way off base) so I’m sure those things colored my perception before I even began to read. But I have to say that whatever you know or think of Lee, this book is well worth reading.

The book takes you through a lot of the history of marketing, but not as a “here is how things used to be done” but more as a way of using the past to explain the future of marketing. Lee and Baldwin did a fantastic job researching the days of marketing past and exploring that under the light of the new age of digital marketing.

Upon closing the back cover you’ll feel breathless with the wealth of information covered as well as the ignition of new thoughts and ideas for creating forward thinking marketing campaigns. I’ve probably learned more from this book about marketing than any book I’ve read last year. But the trick now is to take this information and to translate it into new results for the new advertising age we are in.

I think that by now everyone pretty much agrees that words are an important part of your website and your online marketing campaign. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, sometimes just a few words can provide the right mental picture your audience needs in order to make that final buying decision.

For many business owners, writing can be a daunting task. Sure we know our products and services inside and out and putting what we know into words is easy enough, but that’s about as far as it gets.

Is that enough to sell? Sure.

Could more be done to sell better? You bet!

Continue reading at Search Engine Guide…

Seth Godin who has written 11 books to date including Purple Cow as well as being an entrepreneur and highly respected speaker has another great book for us to read, Meatball Sundae. I truly enjoyed yet again his getting to the point writing merged with real-life business examples. Godin doesn’t focus on the negative instead he illustrates through words what a company did and what they could have done better and on the flip side what they did and what he thought was amazing about it. He also includes many websites that should be looked over as examples or used in your new marketing strategy. Godin gets into old marketing and new marketing how they differ and why old marketing is not the future or the present. He touches on, The Long Tail theory coined by Chris Anderson which is also one of SEOmoz’s must read books. Godin explains why direct communication with your customers is more important then ever and how one person can effect your business by using direct communication. It’s up to you to make it a positive comment or a negative one.

Quote from Meatball Sundae:

“If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it’s this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful then ideas delivered at an individual.”

This book is written for the busy bee it has an executive summary and gets to the point in only 232 pages.

Seth’s Blog is another good resource to look over and see what point he’s making today or even in the past. I signed up for it about a month ago and have found it to be refreshingly informative and useful. He also has free ebooks which touch on subjects such as website design, blogs and the new web.

In my opinion Godin’s success thus far has come by doing exactly as he preaches and not being knowledge greedy. He focuses on the success of others and doesn’t hold back knowledge because of insecurities; which you’ll find in the business world a lot. People who are so focused on keeping all the best knowledge to themselves in fear of their jobs, let it go. Once you build others up you’ll find they are thankful and want to help you succeed as well. Try it, you’ll be surprised how much more of an asset to your company you’ll become.

Wiep Knol put together a fantastic document on internal and external linking values. Developed in the same format as Rand’s Search Engine Ranking Factors, Wiep’s Link Values Factors puts together some of the greatest minds in link building, presents them with a series of factors and asks them to rate each according to how much weight it carries.

As is usually the case, not everyone agrees, which is what makes this document fun. It’s very eye opening in that some of the top minds disagree so completely on what is or isn’t a valuable link. It only goes to show that there is still much to be proven in the science of link building. But you have to admire anybody who can definitely answer any of these questions at all. A lot of time and testing has to go into knowing many of these answers, and you know that even if in disagreement, these guys are well educated in the realm of links.

But the experts are more often in agreement than disagreement which makes this an extremely valuable document for learning and understanding the good and the bad of link getting. Of course, don’t confuse this with a how-to document, it’s not. You won’t learn any link building strategies or gain any insight in the process of getting good quality links. But what you will learn is what makes a quality link and what does not.

So if you ever want to know what a person like me reads, here you go. This list incorporates all my business and personal reading. The links will either go to my reviews of the books which I have already posted here on the blog or directly to the Amazon product page.

1. How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter
2. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell
3. Quantum Business, Bobbi DePorter with Mike Hernacki
4. The Winning Attitude: Your Pathway to Personal Success, John C. Maxwell
5. The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, John Grisham
6. The 7 Best Things Happy Couples Do…plus one, John and Linda Freil
7. True North: Discovering Your Authentic Leadership, Bill George
8. Developing the Leaders Around You, John C. Maxwell
9. Viral Copy: Trading Words For Traffic, Brian Clark (30-page printout)
10. Which Sells Best: A quick Start Guide to Testing for Retailers, Bryan Eisenberg & Anthony Garcia (45-page printout)
11. Knock Knock, Seth Godin (41-page printout)
12. How to Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy, Karon Thackston (34-page printout)
13. 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees Every Day – With Little or No Money, Dianna Podmoroff
14. Next, Michael Crichton
15. Becoming a Person of Influence: How to Positively Impact the Lives of Others, John C. Maxwell & Jim Dornan
16. No B.S. Business Success: The No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Tough and Spirited Guide, Dan Kennedy
17. A Mind for Pool: How to Master the Mental Game, Philip B. Capelle
18. Persuasion Architecture: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing, Future Now, Inc. (60-page printout)
19. Coaching Your Kids to Be Leaders: The Keys to Unlocking Their Potential, Pat Williams and John Wooden
20. Search Engine Ranking Factors V2, SEOmoz (43-page printed web page)
21. The Professional’s Guide to Link Building, SEOmoz (40-page printout)
22. Deception Point, Dan Brown
23. The Conversion Expert’s Workbook, FutureNow
24. Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business , Jay Conrad Levinson
25. The Professional’s Guide to Keyword Research, SEOmoz (70 page printout)
26. The New Art of War, Tactics, and Power, Rodney Ohebsion
27. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
28. Save the Sale!, Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg (32 page printout)
29. The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search Friendly Website, SEOmoz (35 page printout)
30. Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines, National Cancer Institute (73 page printout)
31. A Business Case for Usability, E-Consultancy (18-page printout)
32. Online Lead Generation (B2C) 2007, E-Consultancy (32-page printout)
33. Blog Profits Blueprint, Yaro Starak (55-page printout)
34. People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.), Howard Zinn
35. The Usability Kit, Gerry Gaffney and Daniel Szuc (350 page binder)
36. Leadership, Rudolph Giuliani
37. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, Orson Scott Card
38. Arrogance: Rescuing America From The Media Elite, Bernard Goldberg
39. The Cluetrain Manifesto, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
40. Reframe Your Life: Transforming Your Pain into Purpose, Stephen Arterburn
41. Breaking the Idols of Your Heart: How to Navigate the Temptations of Life, Dan B. Allender & Tremper Longman III
42. Facing Your Giants: The God Who Made a Miracle Out of David Stands Ready to Make One Out of You, Max Lucado
43. Think Biblically!: Recovering a Christian Worldview, John MacArthur
44. The Power of Simple Prayer: How to Talk with God about Everything, Joyce Meyer
45. Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists, Shirley Kaiser
46. The Perfect Post: Advanced Writing Skills for Pro Bloggers, Bill Hilton (50-page printout)
47. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell
48. S.H.A.P.E.: Finding and Fulfilling Your Unique Purpose for Life, Erik Rees
49. Skin, Ted Dekker
50. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
51. Social Media Daily, Michelle MacPhearson (26-page printout)
52. Professional Search Engine Optimization w/PHP, Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie
53. The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class, Keith Cameron Smith
54. Holy Discontent: Fueling the Fire That Ignites Personal Vision, Bill Hybels
55. Teaching Sells: Forget everything you know about making money online… and start making some, Brian Clark (22-page download)
56. Social Media Optimization Strategies, SEOmoz (55-page download)
57. Angels & Demons, Dan Brown
58. Do It Wrong Quickly, Mike Moran
59. Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing Lessons From the Cast of “The Show About Nothing”, Bill Gammel (14-page download)
60. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
61. Online Retail 2006: User Experience Benchmarks, E-Consultancy (85-page download)
62. Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve, Bernard Goldberg
63. Search Engine Marketing Kit, Dan Thies & Dave Davies
64. Personality Plus, Florence Littauer
65. Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web, SEOmoz (46-page printout)
66. The Shining, Stephen King

It’s quite the long list so I think this year I’ll start posting these reading lists monthly. If any of the links above are broken, just let me know so I can get it fixed. Happy reading in 2008!

Anyway, on with the show. I got a chance to read SEOmoz’s Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web document. Yes, you need a subscription to read it. The document does a great job of explaining the broad strokes of link bait, starting with the audience. They outline who they are, where they are, and how you reach them, and why you want to do this in the first place.

The document takes you through a variety of options for linkbait concepts with a number of illustrations, examples and ideas along with. They also address the ever-important protocol for putting together a successful linkbait campaign, covering everything from domains to server load issues. Finally, they touch on measuring your link bait success to ensure that your hard work can be measured in some form or another.

Viral Marketing and Linkbait prints out to just under 50 pages and is worth taking the time to read, especially for anyone struggling in the world of link baiting. I think that if there was one drawback of this document is that it assumes that you already have the social media profiles in place to leverage a successful linkbait campaign. That is one thing that we’ve found to be a near requirement, though there are always exceptions.

After having read all of the SEOmoz premium content I have a few simple requests. 1) Create a cover page and a table of contents, the latter being of most importance. 2) Add page numbers. Some of us like to print things out rather than read on the screen and page numbers help keep the document organized and make pieces more easily bookmarked for future reference.

Years ago, and a few times since, I took a personality test that was unbelievably accurate at describing me and how I act, react and respond to life situations. For the past ten years, I’ve been looking for that test and finally found what I was looking for with Florence Littauer’s book Personality Plus.

Littauer classifies the four primary personality types: Popular Sanguine, Perfect Melancholy, Powerful Choleric and Peaceful Phlegmatic. Most every person fits into one of these personality categories, while some (like me) are near equal parts of two of the personality types (bet you can’t guess which two!).

Personality Plus starts off with a quick quiz that will allow you to determine your primary personality. Then the book begins to go through each of the personality types, outlining the strengths and weaknesses and the positives and negatives of each.

This isn’t just about understanding your own personality but about the personality traits of others. Littauer teaches how to recognize the different personality types in different people and talks about each personality and how they interact with the others. She explains how your personality might be more sensitive to other types when conflict arises.

The book provides a fascinating study of the human personalities and is an essential read for any office environment where there is a collection of different personality types. It’s also a great read for parents to better understand their kids, though Littauer does have versions of this book targeted specifically for parents (Personality Plus for Parents: Understanding What Makes Your Child Tick) and couples (Personality Plus for Couples: Understanding Yourself and the One You Love).

Designed to be the go-to manual for all things SEM related, the SEM Kit successfully delivers. The kit, which includes a CD loaded with documents, covers search engines, SEO basics, advanced SEO, PPC, and link building; giving the reader a well-rounded knowledge base for developing successful SEO and SEM strategies. The authors have even included a chapter on running an SEM firm, which can be particularly insightful at understanding the various strategies and options available to anyone running, or thinking of running an SEO business. Normally I’m not one much for interviews, but I did find the interviews chapter to be particularly worthy of a read (I’ve copied the pages and passed them around the office.)

There wasn’t a chapter in the kit that I didn’t find useful or engaging. Though the dual authorship created some minor confusion when referring to things in the first person, I often wasn’t sure if it was Dan or Dave speaking at that particular point. This is the only major flaw in the kit, they need to clean up the author speak in order that when referring to a particular author we know which author is speaking. But other than that, the SEM kit is a fantastic read and great office resource that we’ll keep referring back to for a long while.

Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings

Amy N. Langville is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Carl D. Meyer is the Professor of Mathematics at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra. Langville and Meyer have other documents about page rank and search engines such as, Deeper Inside PageRank, The Use of Linear Algebra by Web Search Engines, Updating PageRank with Iterative Aggregation, etc.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for employers to give their link marketers right out of the shoot. I would give them the option to read it once they’ve had some experience and become truly interested in how page rank works. The first 4 chapters are a good read as a business owner trying to get a general understanding of pagerank without getting too deep into the algorithms.

This 85 page download first takes you through the mind of the customer, how they make their purchase decisions and then provides example after example of both good and bad implementation of shopper usability issues. More than any other book or PDF I’ve read this year, I found myself taking a considerable amount of notes, both for me, our team and for updates on our SEM processes.

One of the things that I most enjoyed was that it confirmed something that I had read in Mike Moran’s Do It Wrong Quickly regarding the search/buy process. It’s great when you read something new to you and it quickly gets confirmed from other sources.

Even though Online Retail is almost two years old, the information contained within is timeless. Lots of fantastic insights were gained that can be put to use immediately. I would consider this to be one of my top 10 most important reads of 2007. Anyone who owns an e-commerce website or runs PPC campaign should find it useful.

In fact Seinfeld was probably the most important pop-culture show of all time, if one can attach the word importance to pop-culture. Not only did the show make fun of current pop culture idiosyncrasies, but it brought out into the open many of the hidden things that many of us didn’t realize that others did or thought right along with us. While Seinfeld made us laugh at these pop culture references it also created many more pop culture references that we still use today.

It’s with that understanding that you have to read Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 marketing lessons from the cast of “the show about nothing”. These seven lessons are important for every business to know and understand. Lessons that, unlearned, made our nation laugh for nine seasons.

Using quotes from the takeaway episodes and a marketing lessons in his own words, Gammel gives us Seinfeldian lessons on:

1. Company policies and signs
2. Brands and expectations
3. Using comparisons
4. Exclusivity
5. Naming your product
6. Loyalty programs
7. Competition myopia

Seinfeld on Marketing is a free download and only 14 pages. And just like the show, you’ll laugh at the obviousness of the marketing lessons that Gammel draws out of the episodes.

Blink is a book about the human brain. While it helps the reader better understand how the human brain works, don’t expect to be able to use that understanding to your advantage. In fact, while the book provides a fascinating discovery of how the human brain “thin slices” both people and events, the main takeaway from this is that thin slicing is either accurate or it’s not.

Gladwell points out some cases where thin slicing based on limited information is just as accurate (or more accurate) as making a decision on piles of research. In other cases, thin slicing causes us to have wrong impressions about a person and therefore causing us to make wrong decisions. Even still, there are the instances where thin slicing completely fails and everything goes sour.

The one thing I did take away, is that the human brain is not always capable of allowing us to verbally explain the things we do or think. Unless you’re particularly skilled in a certain area, once you try to explain why you initially think this or that, the reasoning begins to break down and often fails entirely. This can then cause us to come to conclusions that are contrary to what we really believe. Strange, yeah, I know.

That’s what makes Blink fascinating. The human brain is so complex that it often doesn’t even work in the ways we would think. But it can be trained. Immerse yourself into something and your brain develops the capability of knowing why you like or dislike certain things or even to read things in high-stress situations that the normal person would not.

As a business owner I didn’t find Blink to be as useful as The Tipping Point, also from Gladwell, but the author does have a way of bringing oddities to light and presents them in a fascinating way.