Books have the power to change lives. We live in a time when books are more affordable and accessible. Yet, fewer entrepreneurs read books, using the excuse of a lack of time. If you can’t find time to read, you as an entrepreneur will not grow, which will have an effect on your business.
If you study any successful entrepreneur, you’ll see one of the keys to their success is that they educate themselves through books. You can get books these days for as little as .99 cents. Many are even free through Amazon’s KDP Select program. There’s no reason not to have a Kindle full of books that can educate you and teach you strategies to grow your business.
Here are six books that can help you create a business and life you love. This list is a good start. It’s up to you to research books that will help you and your business where you are in your journey. These books are changing lives and helping entrepreneurs grow their business.
1. Just Blow it Up: Firepower for Living an Unlimited Life.
Dixie Gillaspie is an author, coach, speaker and fire starter. She is also a contributor here at Entrepreneur. Her mission and this book are all about breaking through the barriers that typically hold entrepreneurs back from growth in their business and life. Your mindset is one of the most important parts of your business because what you think affects the action you take. Just Blow it Uphelps you identify mindset traps and gives you a practical strategy to beat them. This is the definitive guide to climbing over those mental walls.
2. MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom.
Tony Robbins is a pioneer in the personal development space, but his book on finances is like a graduate course in college. A novice in finance could read this book and walk away an expert. Tony takes complicated financial strategies and distills them down to the average reader’s level.
Money is not everything in life, but it is important, especially in the business. There are many entrepreneurs who are great at making income, but are clueless as to how to make their money work for them through investing. You started your business to create freedom, Tony’s book can help you take that freedom to a level you didn’t think was possible through the right investment strategies.
3. 48 Days to the Work You Love.
If you are a frequent Entrepreneur reader, Dan Miller’s book will speak to you, especially if you’re stuck in a day job. What comes through the most in this book is how unique and genuinely an entrepreneur is Dan Miller. Dan is an entrepreneur who refuses to accept what society and the media have conditioned us to believe about our dreams and entrepreneurship. He lays out an actionable plan to transition out of a day job into a business and life you love. Read the book with caution because you will walk away changed. I read this book in hours. I couldn't out it down.
4. Business in Blue Jeans.
Susan Baroncini-Moe has written the playbook for creating a business that’s everything you’ve wanted it to be. Susan starts off dealing with the mindset traps and moves to the strategies that will help your business see explosive growth. She teaches you how to build a business you love on your terms. Entrepreneurship has changed. Today, you can run a multi-million dollar business from anywhere in the world. Susan teaches you how. I read this book on an eight-hour bus ride from London to Paris, I couldn't sleep because the book had me speechless.
You know this list wouldn’t be complete without a Seth Godin book. Seth has a way with words and knows how to cut through the fluff. The Dip is a book about knowing when to quit or move on. The book deals with mindset struggles and offers a plan to overcome them. It’s a short read that should be on every entrepreneur's book list.
6. The Fire Path.
Kate Erickson wrote this book about leading podcaster John Lee Dumas. John and Kate have built the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast to a six-figure a month business. The book lays out a practical plan you can use to grow a business using the untapped medium of podcasting.
Make time every day and week to read an excellent book. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs read a book a week. Knowledge is power and the key to growth. Add these books to your list; they can help you create a business and life you love.
Not every digital marketing campaign is automatically an online marketing effort.
According to TNMedia, online marketing is “…any tool, strategy or method of getting the company name out to the public. The advertisements can take many different forms and some strategies focus on subtle messages rather than clear-cut advertisements.”
Want the drop dead simple version of it?
Online marketing is any effort to spread the word about your company, which uses the internet to reach people.
Basically anything you do online to get more eyeballs on you and grab people’s attention, which should hopefully, at some point, buy from you.
There are 7 major sub-categories of online marketing I want to cover in this guide.
Next to SEO, there’s search engine marketing (SEM), which is basically the paid version of SEO.
Marketers pay for displaying ads together with Google search results and hope to drive traffic, or rather interested people (=leads) to their product landing pages.
Then there’s content marketing, where marketers try to create valuable media and content and distribute those to potential future customers. This is the good guy version of online marketing, where you mostly try to guilt people into buying.
Of course you already know social media marketing, where you use one or several social media channels to engage with customers, build relationships and then send them to your products and services.
Pay per click advertising (or PPC) is similar to search engine marketing, but not limited to Google and its competitors. Most social networks let you create ads that integrate naturally into their feeds, allowing you to pay for clicks to your website.
Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing, where you share profits with fellow marketers in exchange for promoting each other’s products.
Lastly, there’s email marketing, which is already considered old school, but still one of the most effective channels. Once your customers have given you permission to contact them, you can email them at any time, providing both value, and asking them to buy when the time is right.
You can already guess how big online marketing really is, as you know how huge of a space each of these categories is, taken on its own.
I mean just think about how many social media platforms you can name, off the top of your head.
I want to give you a good grip on all of these categories, just like in our beginner’s guide, yet don’t drown you in the vast amounts of information out there.
That’s why, in each category, I’ll give you one example of someone who absolutely crushes it in their niche, along with some great points to get started.
Ready? Set. Go!
SEO – search engine optimization
It goes without saying that I think Quick Sprout is one of the best sites when it comes to SEO (we’re kind of a big deal, I think).
But instead of spending an entire category bragging, I want to point you to someone who is a true SEO ninja and has worked for us at Quick Sprout for quite some time.
Not only because he has all the SEO skills you need up his sleeve, but also because he is super underrated.
Brian Dean aka Backlinko might be flying under the radar, but when you start googling around about learning SEO, you’re bound to bump into him.
He outranks huge sites like Wikipedia, Forbes and Copyblogger, and completely dominates the SEO space with his super long case studies, providing actionable step-by-step instructions for upping your SEO game.
(Backlinko ranks 1 AND 2 for “how to get backlinks”)
What’s great about his blog is that instead of just rounding up SEO news like Search Engine Land and others, he actually shows you how to implement good SEO techniques that work.
As I outlined in one of the previous guides of this series, SEO is the process of optimizing your online content, so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Brian is one of the best sources on the web to learn how to do it.
Go through the entire Backlinko blog. You’ll only find about 30 posts over 2.5 years.
If Brian’s SEO didn’t work, then he would never have been able to grow Backlinko to 100,000+ monthly readers, 100,000 email subscribers and such a massive SEO brand with only 30 blog posts.
The following 3 blog posts are the best ones to get started:
Search engine marketing is the paid cousin of SEO.
Instead of optimizing your content and promoting it a lot, in order to eventually show up as a top result for organic searches (which can often take a few months to happen, even if you do it right), you can pay your way to the top.
So while it is a great strategy, it only works out if you can immediately recoup your advertising costs.
Companies easily blow tens of thousands of dollars on Google Adwords campaigns, failing to make sure they get their money’s worth.
To win with SEM, you have to offer a paid product or service.
When you’re still in the phase of producing free content to build an audience, don’t waste your time with SEM, you’ll run out of money faster than you can spell S-E-M.
Thankfully, avoiding the mistake of paying for worthless clicks is not as hard as you might think.
By setting up conversion goals inside of your campaign you can track exactly who made a purchase from your ads and you’ll know exactly how much money you spent and how much you made at any time.
Their ROI (return on investment), is often way higher than any stock or real estate investment could be, creating 5x, 10x, and even 20x the ad spend in conversions.
A great source to get started with Google Adwords, whether you’re an established business or a solo entrepreneur sitting on his couch, is Jerry Banfield.
The reason he was able to scale up his sales so much, is Google Adwords.
Prior to his solopreneur career, Jerry ran a one-man ad agency, helping businesses with their SEM. Once he had a few courses to sell, he went on to transfer his SEM skills to his own business.
Look at the kind of results he creates:
That’s an ROI of 4700% and that’s how powerful Google Adwords can be.
Even better, Jerry teaches everything he knows, and most of it for free. The by far best place to start learning Google Adwords is his free course on Youtube.
It walks you through everything you need to know for setting up your first campaign from scratch and is over 3 hours long.
This video alone is more than enough to get started, and once you’re ready to kick it up a notch, you can just get his Udemy course for over 9 hours of videos, detailed tutorials and guides.
Pro tip: If you buy the course, go through Jerry’s website for a coupon that lets you buy the course for $25, instead of $300.
Content marketing
Jon Morrow is a master content crafter. After getting annoyed by how great content often suffers from little traffic and exposure, he set out to help people change that.
The first step to doing that is knowing your stuff, and boy, did Jon do his homework. He’s built his blog to a six-figure income.
Monthly, that is.
He makes more in a month than most people in a year, so it’s fair to assume he’s good at all kinds of online marketing.
He did all of it, just with the power of his voice. Jon is paralyzed from the neck down.
When he decided to make marketing a key focus of his blog, he knew sharing the lessons he learned when building his blog and former businesses would attract a lot of readers.
But what would get him even more fans and potential customers, is teaching people how to implement the techniques he used to growth hack his companies to these huge revenues in such a short time.
Similar to Backlinko he often breaks down a marketing tactic step by step, with screenshots, results and detailed how-to’s.
Super specific instructions like this are rare in any industry, and if you can take people by the hand from A to B, that’s when you’ll build a loyal following.
What’s more, Jon often brings on guests to share their best tactics in the same manner, so you can learn about other ways of online marketing as well, likebuilding relationships, Google Analytics, or email marketing.
One way to learn what it takes to create awesome content is to just look at Jon’s writing.
Take this intro for example.
Jon coins an entirely new term that he introduces the reader to. He alienates the audience by talking about “them”, even though every reader knows he or she is addressed personally.
Then he explains his terms and compares a common blogger’s problem to a sickness. Anyone would want to know how to cure it! He’s created a huge curiosity gap and the reader immediately gets drawn in.
Another way to learn from him is by straight up reading his content about, well, creating content. 3 good articles to start with are:
Content comes in many more forms than writing, and if you want to know more about other ways of creating content, take a look at my content marketing guide.
This topic deserves a whole guide on its own, but if you want to be successful with social media (and you’ll HAVE to, in the long run), your best bet of a one stop shop is Gary Vaynerchuk.
All in all, around 2 million people follow his every move, and if you watch him closely as well, you can learn the art of social media from him.
One of the biggest takeaways from Gary is that content follows context.
He says “content is king, but context is god”, meaning if you don’t respect the context of each individual platform, you’re bound to lose.
Example: I could have posted this blog post as a Facebook status update, but would it have made any sense? No. No one consumes long form content on Facebook, that’s what blogs and Youtube are for.
Twitter’s video platform Vine has gotten immensely popular. Lots of people completely failed in building a big following on it, because they were just putting out the wrong content.
If you only have 6 seconds of your viewer’s attention, the feeling you try to excite in them better be strong.
Only 2 kinds of accounts are able to pull that off consistently: Musicians and comedians.
Go through the list of the top Viners and you’ll see that 99% of them are comedians making short, funny videos.
So instead of seeing social media as a distribution channel where you push out the content you created on one platform to all the others, try to tell stories that match the context of each platform.
Since Gary is also a speaker, you can learn a ton about social media by watching his talks on Youtube.
But Gary’s not the only social media wizard out there, so here are a few other resources to help you learn how to kick ass on various platforms:
Sounds similar to SEM, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. But while SEM is only one type of PPC advertising (and a very special one), there are many platforms that offer you showing ads to their audience with PPC.
But by far the most popular platform for PPC advertising is Google AdWords and Facebook.
On Facebook, the way it works is that you create an ad, which looks just like a Facebook status update.
Then you can pick a specific audience, for example women in Austin, Texas, between the ages of 32 and 45, who like Jon Bon Jovi (yes, it’s that specific).
Lastly, you set a budget and how much you’re willing to pay per click.
Your ad will then be served to your audience, either in their Facebook news feed on a desktop computer, or their mobile phone.
You can also place ads in the sidebar.
When people click on your ad, they’ll be redirected to your page, which can be part of your Facebook fan page, or any URL you define.
This way you can get people to buy your product, read your content, or, as in this example, sign up for a free webinar:
You can’t spell affiliate marketing without Pat Flynn. Actually you can, but you can’t learn it without him.
When Pat created Smart Passive Income in 2008, he was just starting to get familiar with selling informational products online. His first product, Green Exam Academy, a course he created to help people pass the LEEDs exam for architects sold well.
He wanted to learn more about the concept of passive income, where you earn money without actively working for it (after an insane amount of work upfront of course).
Let’s just say he managed to learn quite a bit, given his most recent income report:
Affiliate marketing is his single biggest source of income.
But what is affiliate marketing really?
Imagine you know a great pizza place. You know the owner, Luigi, and you go there all the time.
Naturally, you tell your friends about it.
When your friend Tim goes to the pizza place, he mentions your name and buys 4 pizzas for his friends.
The next time you come back Luigi says: “Dude, your friend bought 4 pizzas because of you! That’s the biggest order I had all week! Thanks man, here’s $5 bucks for referring him!”
Ka-ching!
You’ve just made your first affiliate marketing sale.
Except that it would never happen in real life like this, especially because a pizza place who’s biggest order in a week is 4 pizzas won’t be around for very long.
You know where it happens all the time? Online.
Amazon’s a prime example.
When you sign up for their affiliate program, you can generate a special link for every single product page they have.
You can then put that link on your blog for example, or send it to friends who you want to recommend that product to, and if they click your link and buy it, you’ll get a small commission from Amazon for referring that customer.
Over the last 7 years, Pat has built the best resource online about affiliate marketing. Some great starting points are:
Do you know that feeling when you keep complaining all day long, until you see your best friend and she immediately tells you: Shut up. Stop complaining and do this instead!
Lots of articles online show you “how to write better emails” or “how to pitch anything”, but in order to be able to send those emails, you first need the list of people to send them to.
That’s what email marketing is all about. Directly communicating with your audience and customers.
Online marketing is the real deal. Of course guys like Chandler are the exception, but thanks to the power of the internet, everyone can become financially independent now.
No boss.
No 9 to 5.
No fear of losing your job.
But that’s all easier said than done. If you do anything right, it’s hard.
Online marketing is no different. To get ahead, you need to get started.
