Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #382207 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 156 pages

From the Publisher

Get massive exposure for your business, no special computer skills needed.

-- Quit wasting money on traditional advertising and marketing campaigns.

-- Blog to connect with customers and generate word of mouth.

-- Boost your visibility with Google; use MySpace for viral marketing.

-- Ignite word of mouth with Web social networks

No matter what kind of business you have, its success depends on two things: It must serve a need, and you must find customers. Most new businesses fail simply because the right people never heard about them. And this is the paradox for entrepreneurs: People aren't paying attention to traditional marketing and advertising anymore. But free advertising is alive and well.

Whatever you want to call it --- buzz, word of mouth, peer-to-peer or viral marketing -- you can't just manufacture it. You must earn it -- by engaging your target market.

Fortunately, there is a very straightforward, ethical way of gaining this free exposure: by participating on social networks. These social media sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 networks, allow members to create profiles of themselves (or their business) with the objective of meeting like-minded friends and partners who share the same passions and goals.

The individuals participating on these networks might be searching for anything -- a mentor, a ride to work, a date for Saturday night, recommendations for a movie, a new job, or perhaps they want to meet someone who's an expert in their hobby. For business owners who learn to use them, social networks can provide valuable free exposure to a worldwide pool of new customers and fans. These social networks have turned traditional marketing on its head. No longer must a business owner scrape together a huge pile of cash for a marketing campaign, then pray that it works. Hundreds of thousands of businesses, large and small, are leveraging social networks to lure new customers, often at virtually no cost. And unlike most traditional advertising, social networking can pay dividends for years to come because it forges a strong link between you and consumers, enabling your biggest fans to become evangelists for your business.

Internet social networks allow entrepreneurs to build their business one customer at a time. It's the same as having a "street team" pounding the pavement for you. Just as your street team might pass out fliers about a show or new product, your MySpace friends can forward the same type of information using electronic messages to a much larger audience.

When you're successful, your loyal customers begin spreading the word for you, generating true word of mouth. Entrepreneurs can no longer depend on interruption-based ads, such as commercials and junk mail, which force consumers to stop what they're doing and pay attention. But with social networking, you can influence these consumers precisely at the point where they're engaged.

In the old days, with postal direct mail or telephone cold-calling, your chance of getting a response from someone who didn't know you was about 2 percent -- and that's if you had a big marketing budget and were doing everything right. But today, the social-networking skills described in this book can result in response rates of 80 percent or more.

What are you waiting for? Put these revolutionary ideas to work today!

Customer Reviews

What works for promoting a book will usually work for promoting a business!

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. Thus it only gets a 4 star rating from me. Maybe I feel this way because I've read the author's other book entitled Plug Your Book and this book comes off being very similar? Maybe it was because it was 142 pages and has a sales price of almost $20? Or maybe it was because I have read other books that cover much of the same material and they go into more depth?

The book is comprised of the following 14 chapters:

1. Introduction
2. MySpace Buzz
3. Building Your Web Site
4. Blogging for Business
5. Blog Tours
6. Multimedia
7. Tag - You're It!
8. The Social Jungle
9. Social Media, Social Search
10. Syndicating Your Content
11. Revenue from Your Site
12. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
13. Power Tools
14. Ethics of Online Marketing

I found Chapter 2 to be the best in the book. I can see how a rock band or an author can promote themselves at MySpace. In fact, they do successfully. But I'm not yet convinced that MySpace is really conducive to marketing a small business. It would have been nice if the book had clearly explained at least a few success stories regarding small businesses marketing on MySpace. By reading the book I am left thinking it is just a hope to successfully market a small business using that social network.

I liked Chapter 3 and found it to be a good introduction to putting together a Web site. I recommend reading The Web Savvy Writer (ISBN: 0977830403) if you are interested in a more in depth coverage on the subject. I liked Chapter 4 and also found it to be a good introduction to blogging for business. For more on the subject I recommend reading Ted Demopoulos' books (ISBN: 1419584359 and ISBN: 1419536451). And I liked chapters 7 and 8, but for a more in depth coverage I recommend reading Sell Your Book on Amazon (ISBN: 1432701967).

The "Recommended Reading" list at the end of this tome included some interesting books. I would have liked to have seen Marketing to the Social Web (ISBN: 0470124172) and Marketing in the New Media (ISBN: 1551807319) included as well, but they weren't. As you can see from my review that this book covers a lot of ground in just a few pages. I highly recommend it as a lead-in to many other books. 4 stars!

Internet marketing ideas
I learned a lot about on-line marketing with this book. He talks a lot about blogging, which we're just considering taking the leap into. He gives really good advice, like:
* Ask a question or pose a challenge in the first sentence
* Don't preach, blogging is a conversation
* Tell the truth (my favorite)
* Read lots of other blogs
* Don't be boring, a good blog takes sides
* Break news, be authentic, tell stories
On the YouTube front, he told great and inspiring stories of how businesses got great advertising. Chipotle ran a contest asking college students to make a 30-second commercial about the restaurant and post it on YouTube for a grand prize of $10,000. One video alone had 7.7 million views! That's worth $346,000 in on-line advertising. There is definitely some similar marketing plan in my future. Wendy's placed humorous videos, and one episode alone got 600,000 views. What great ideas!

Then of course he discusses writing product reviews right here on Amazon, that then somehow promote your company, book or product. He gives the do's and don'ts, which are very important. If you want to be a player in the Amazon review world, you have to play by their rules. He also recommends that you type your reviews in a word processing program, which I'm doing right now, so you don't have typos.

He talks about fine-tuning your recommendations at Amazon.com/yourstore. I couldn't believe I didn't know about that. You can say "not interested" in something and even exclude items that you own from the "use to make recommendations" list. For instance if you bought a book on fungus for the biologist next door, but personally have no interest in the subject.

He introduced me to del.icio.us, which is a website to manage your bookmarks. Granted, Google lets bookmark and you can log onto your Google account from anywhere, but this sounds more sophisticated. I've looked at it a little bit, but it looks like it is worth some study, or messing around with at least.

This is a quick read, and it inspired me with some great ideas for my business. It was well written and entertaining too. I dog-eared nine pages, which is one of the way I judge how good a book is. Those are pages I intend to go back and read either soon, or often.

If you are interested in marketing on the internet, I would read this book.

Tenna Merchent (nick name), author of He's Not Autistic, But...

Basic info quickly growing outdated
This is a helpful book for navigating the waves of social networking. It's a quick read, with useful links and helpful tactics for the non-geek to leverage the web in marketing their business.

Unfortunately, any book of this sort quickly becomes outdated - social technologies ebb and flow that quickly. A *huge* portion of the book is dedicated to MySpace, for example. One tiny paragraph is devoted to Facebook. As I am a FB user and don't bother with MySpace, that means several of this book's chapters are useless for me.

LinkedIn, Flickr, uTube and all other big networking sites also rate a tiny blurb, no more. Twitter isn't even mentioned! This is a 2007 book and already out of date.

Useful chapters include setting up your website, starting to blog, and hooking your brand into the blogosphere. A few pages cover developing your blog content over the long haul. Using Technorati, Digg and Del.icio.us is touched upon.

I found the passage on building a guest column interesting. The viral video/podcasting chapter has decent, albeit bare bones, basics. I also appreciated the nuggets on using Amazon, analyzing traffic stats and monitizing your site.

Overall, anyone already familiar with the basics of MySpace, tagging, developing a blog, using Amazon's review system, setting up RSS and so on won't learn much from this slim volume. On the other hand, this book offers an easy introduction to web 2.0 marketing that social network newbies won't find intimidating.