Cashflow Copywriting and Marketing

If you want your business to grow, then here’s a list of books you should read.

I love reading books about marketing and growing business. I have book shelves stuffed with books.

I’m always buying books, I read them with a Orange highlighter and a notepad because Nothing more powerful then taking an idea my business and my clients.

I thought I’d compile a list of books to help businesses survive and profit from these turbulent times.

You see you have 2 options in business
1. Sit around doing nothing
2. Seize the opportunities

Money doesn’t disappear it just moves in a different directions.

These books will help stimulate new and grow you business

Selling

• Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling – Michael Port

Book Yourself Solid is a complete instructional guide for starting and growing a successful service business. It gives you simple, yet effective techniques for creating relentless demand and endless leads. It includes more than 200 proven marketing strategies for attracting new clients, earning more referrals, and building profitable, long-lasting professional relationships. If you want to take your service business to the next level, start here and Book Yourself Solid.

• Spin Selling – Neil Rackham

The most important concept here is that you, as a sales rep. are not there when the real decisions get made. You must arm your prospects with the tools to represent your company well in your absence. Rackham turns the conventional sales knowledge upside-down and he does so very convincingly. He divides the sale into 4 phases; The Preliminaries, Investigating, Demonstrating Capability and Obtaining Commitment. He lays great emphasis in The Investigation phase, and it is in this phase that the SPIN Model comes into action.

Marketing

• Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers – Seth Godin

Seth Godin turns Marketing on its head, old style marketing is an interruption and it’s failing. He’s promoting building long term relation because they give you permission to share your information with them.

• Think Two Products Ahead: Secrets the Big Advertising Agencies Don’t Want You to Know and How to Use Them for Bigger Profits – Ben Mack

Ben’s commonsense guide lets you develop your brand with the same techniques and technologies as the big players—but without all the cost
The book makes a very powerful point, your brand is not your logo or your colors or your tag lines. Your brand is actually your customers associations and attachments they have with the experience you provide them

• The Psychology Influence of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini

The best book ever on what is increasingly becoming the science of persuasion. Whether you’re a mere consumer or someone weaving the web of persuasion to urge others to buy or vote for your product, this is an essential book for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing.
He introduces you to six principles of ethical persuasion: reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment/consistency. A chapter is devoted to each and you quickly see why Cialdini looks at influence as a science. Each principle is backed by social scientific testing and restesting.

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! – Al Ries & Jack Trout

The premise behind this book is that in order for marketing strategies to work, they must be in tune with some quintessential force in the marketplace. Just as the laws of physics define the workings of the universe, so do successful marketing programs conform to the “22 Laws.” Each law is presented with illustrations of how it works based on actual companies and their marketing strategies. 22 capsules of business wisdom, or “laws” of common sense marketing with some brilliant examples from the real world to prove them

• Guerrilla Marketing, Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business – JayConrad Levinson

When Guerrilla Marketing was first published in 1983, Jay Levinson revolutionized marketing strategies for the small-business owner with his take-no-prisoners approach to finding clients. Based on hundreds of solid ideas that really work, Levinson’s philosophy has given birth to a new way of learning about market share and how to gain it. In this completely updated and expanded fourth edition, Levinson offers a new arsenal of weaponry for small-business success. Guerrilla Marketing teach you how to eliminate your competition by creating opportunities for collaboration and how to make it easy for people to do business with you. Guerrilla Marketing based on outthinking the competition than rather out spending them.

Internet Marketing

• Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes – Perry Marshall & Bryan Todd

Never before in the history of advertising has it been possible to spend five bucks, write a couple of ads and get instant access to more than 100 million people in 10 minutes. But that’s exactly what Google AdWords does. It’s an awesome concept-but you can lose a bundle if you don’t know how it works.

• Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World – Matthew fraser, Soumitra Dutta

The rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo is changing the way we see ourselves, how we interact with each other, how we work and how we do business on a daily basis. Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom explores the powerful forces driving the social networking revolution, the impact of these profound changes, and the far reaching consequences of social networking.
The book looks at social networking sites and Web 2.0 platforms in general and their impact on corporate and institutional structures.

Thinking & Strategy

• Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement – Anthony Robbins

Anthony Robbins teaches positive thinking but goes beyond that to positive doing. That is what personal power is all about, it is the ability to ake action and get the results you want.
There are many strategies in this book, many of them from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) a science that can change your life, habits, fears, attitude, beliefs etc so quickly (in minutes!).

• Think & Grow Rich – Napolen Hills

Anything your mind can conceive and believe you can achieve. That is the philosophy of Napoleon Hill, author of the world’s #1 motivational book, Think and Grow Rich. Inspired by the lessons he learned while a protégé of Andrew Carnegie. Hill was well ahead of his time. This book has a chapter dedicated to some of today’s most important issues – Specialized Knowledge, Decision Making, Imagination and Organized Planning (in which he deals with Leadership). He also has principles for Teamwork, Creative Vision, Health,& Master minds groups.

• A Whack On the Side of the Head: How to Unlock Your Mind for Innovation – Roger von Oech

This book identifies ten “locks” which limit (if not preclude) creative thinking. Whack is invaluable to executives &, self-employed people looking to generate and then nourish fresh ideas and new perspectives.

• The Mind Map Book – Tony & Barry Buzan

Have you ever wanted to improve your memory, creativity, concentration, communicative ability, thinking skills, learning skills, general intelligence and quickness of Mind? The Mind map has been called “the Swiss Army Knife for the brain” is the groundbreaking notetaking technique.

Copywriting

• Tested Advertising Methods – John Caples

If you want simple, brass tacks, powerful advertising advice, then Caples scientific advertising makes sure you are writing ads that sell and not waste money. one?” Then he’ll tell you, and tell you WHY. He talks about scientific advertising to make sure you are writing ads that sell and not waste money.

• Ogilvy on Advertising David Ogilvy

“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information…” The entire premise of Ogilvy on Advertising boils down to one simple statement (coined by Claude Hopkins nearly 80 years ago in his book Scientific Advertising): “Advertising is salesmanship.”

• Scientific Advertising – Claude C Hopkins

Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising techniques, believed that “Advertising is salesmanship,” and as such it should be measurable and justify the results that it produced. In Scientific Advertising, he explains precisely how to do that, and the principles he discovered and documented are as true today as when they were first written. This business classic covers mail-order marketing, headlines, psychology, strategy, budgeting, and more advanced subjects like negative advertising and how to test an advertising campaign. Whatever advertising medium you use, from print to the Internet, the fundamental principles of Scientific Advertising are universal and timeless

Building Business

• The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies – Chet Holmes

Reading Chet Holmes’s book can turn your business into a high-performing, massively profitable, superior money-making force in whatever field or market you compete in. . . . It’s essential reading for anyone craving business greatness and prosperity. (Jay Abraham, author of Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got)
The book is divided into twelve chapters or steps which if you implement all the steps will totally transform your organization. Chet stresses the importance of strategic thinking as opposed to the reactive style of most managers.

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement – Eliyahu M Goldratt

In this intriguing, readable business novel, which illustrates state-of-the-art economic theory, Alex Rogo is a UniCo plant manager whose factory and marriage are failing. To revitalize the plant, he follows, an old acquaintance, Jonah, who introduces him to the Theory of Constrains (TOC).

• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – Michael E Gerber

The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Then, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business — from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective. Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.

• Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not! – Robert Kiyosaki

Anyone stuck in the rat-race of living paycheck to paycheck, enslaved by the house mortgage and bills, will appreciate this breath of fresh air. Learn about the methods that have created more than a few millionaires. Kiyosaki learned that income alone does not create wealth as he learned from his “Poor Dad.” Seeking financial freedom, Kiyosaki learned from his “Rich Dad” the keys to wealth.

• The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less – Richard Kock

In The 80/20 Principle, Koch proffers that 20 percent of what companies and individuals do generates over 80 percent of their positive results (a theory that he attributes to Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist around the turn of the 20th century). Koch proposes that by identifying the 20 percent of the activities that generate 80 percent of the results and increasing the effort put into those 20-percent activities you can dramatically improve results.

If you like to add to the list & or share how these books made a different, then comment below.

Persuasive Online Copywriting Writing Techniques - Part6