Archive for the ‘Marketing Book Reviews’ Category

Hey, you're new. We like you already! You obviously have great taste! If you like what you read here you'll probably want to subscribe to our RSS feed (or the audio RSS feed). Stick around and be sure to speak up and post a comment or two!

The Eyes Have It: How to Market in an Age of Divergent Consumers, Media Chaos and Advertising Anarchy
Authors: Kevin Lee with Steve Baldwin
Hardcover: 189 pages
Cost: $16.47
Published: October, 2007

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.

Click here to keep learning

Audio feed

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…

There is a new book out by Seth Godin that gets to the why of New Marketing and explains the 14 trends that go with it. He encourages you to wisely dive in and embrace it. What are you waiting for?

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:

Click here to keep learning

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.

Click here to keep learning

Last year I made it a New Years Resolution goal to read a book a week. I’ve actually had that goal for the past several years now but it wasn’t until this year that I started documenting all my reading so I’d actually know if I hit my mark. I did.

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!

This is the last of my book reviews for the year. I had a pile of completed books that I hadn’t had a chance to write up my reviews of them until this week. Hence the all-review-all-the-time thing we got going on here at EMP this week. Next week I’ll be publishing a complete list of all the books and documents (not counting blogs) that I’ve read in 2007. That’ll be a treat for all you readers out there.

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.

Click here to keep learning

Personality Plus: How to Understand Others by Understanding Yourself
Author: Florence Littauer
Paperback: 208 pages
Cost: $10.93
Published: 1983

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.

Click here to keep learning

Upon first glance, The Search Engine Marketing Kit, authored by Dan Thies and Dave Davies, appears to be a more daunting read than it really is. The material stands about three inches thick complete with 4-inch three-ring binder. The thickness is deceptive in that the pages are printed only on one side. But running at over 350 pages, the SEM kit is no slouch in dishing out the info.

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.)

Click here to keep learning

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

Authors Amy N. Langville & Carl D. Meyer did a fabulous job with this book. Their writing allows you to actually visualize something that is extremely mathematical and complex, not an easy thing to do. It also incorporates illustrations that go along with the text and algorithms to make it easy to understand. This book gets into the nitty gritty of page rank from crawling and indexing methods to the algorithms used to figure out page rank. Now I will admit that the the algorithms were a bit confusing for myself but if you just read through the mathematics of it this book it is still very informative. The book caters to two very different audiences from one angle it covers the curious science reader and the technical side of page rank. For those of you mathematicians it covers your intellectual interests allowing you to explore mathematically how exactly everything fits together.

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.

Click here to keep learning

I haven’t much enjoyed my subscription to e-consultancy thus far. Most of the documents I’ve reviewed were not quite what I was expecting or useless (at least to me). The Online Retail 2006 guide is a clear exception. (To be fair, I’ve only read a small handful of the documents available, and I do plan on reading more.) Unfortunately I can’t find a link to this document on their website, which means my glowing review will lead to disappointment for anyone trying to find it. They do also offer a 2007 Checkout Special but I haven’t looked at it to see if it’s an updated version of the 2006.

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.

Click here to keep learning