Content Marketing Today

A New Edition of the Timeless Book, Presenting to Win, Explores the Content Marketing Component of In-Person Persuasion.

Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don't know how to tell a story."  Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly.

Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose--whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

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Dan Roam in “The Back of the Napkin’ makes a convincing case for a simpler and better approach to communicating based on visual thinking.

There's a reason that school rooms and conference rooms have whiteboards.  We all tend to learn better when we combine what we hear with what we see.  That's why presentations can be more powerful when they integrate appropriate visual imagery. 

That was probably what the creators of PowerPoint had in mind rather than the bevy of bullet point, text-heavy monster presentations it has unleashed upon the world.

There is a better way and it’s all about visual thinking. Dan Rowe makes a powerful case for building on basic visual imagery as the best way to share information, solve problems, and sell ideas.

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Terrific new book from Paul Gillin takes the mystery out of using online conversations and communities to connect with your customers.

Nothing is more rewarding than to read a book that is at once valuable, timely, and engaging. Secrets of Social Media Marketing is all that and more.  Paul has a genius for making the complex simple enough to understand without oversimplifying.

Is there a need for this book?  You bet!

"There has been more change in the media world in the last five years than in the previous 500."--Peter Koran, President, Media & Advertising, IAC

Understanding social media marketing is so difficult because it seems to be so different.  For decades, most of the rules of communicating with customers stayed the same.  You figured out who you were going to sell to.  You did your best to create a product or service that would have value for that target audience.  And then you blasted out your marketing message in print, on billboards, on radio, and since the 1950s on TV.

Now, and in the future, much of those old methods go right out the virtual window. Happily, Paul's book teaches you exactly how to put social media marketing to work by telling you what to do and precisely how to do it.

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A vital recommendation from a useful new book, The Contrarian Effect!

This new book from Michael Port and Elizabeth Marshall delivers plenty of great advice about why and how to abandon old-fashioned sales approaches that just don't work in the age of the empowered customer.

Too many salespeople and organizations are still stuck trying to push products down the throats of their customers.  In The Contrarian Effect, Michael and Elizabeth argue for a completely different approach.  As they stress:

Sales professionals must find a way to build relationships and to be there when customers are ready to buy--a totally different world view and way of interacting with potential customers.  Something that won't be possible if you insist on selling to them and use the usual approach to reach and communicate with them.

Their approach is completely in sync with the fundamentals of content marketing which stress the importance of an in-depth understanding of your customers and their needs. Only after you have developed that understanding should you attempt to encourage them to buy from you. Otherwise, you risk becoming everyone's vision of the worst possible used-car salesman.

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New Book Co-authored by David Meerman Scott Reinforces Content Marketing Principles

Too many companies develop products based on their own inward looking approach.  According to the new book "Tuned In," that's exactly backwards.

They offer as a delightfully disastrous example: The introduction of the Susan B. Anthony dollar in1979. Between the misguided efforts of the US Mint and vending machine lobbyists, the government managed to introduce a product nobody wanted.  In fact, as the authors point out, extensive research had showed that such a coin would be a colossal failure.  Why the failure?  Simple.  Nobody wanted a dollar coin, particularly one that would look almost exactly like a quarter.

To succeed with product development, it is essential to take the opposite approach.  Determine what your customers want and provide a product or service so compelling that your customers will sell it for you. Of course, this approach is at the very heart of successful content marketing best practices.

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Sales Streak Past 1000 Copies. Online Marketing Guru Recommends Our Book.

One thousand copies pales in comparison to any of the Harry Potter books.

But, put into context, it suggests solid acceptance of Get Content. Get Customers. among business book buyers.  Here's what our book and every new book is up against in attempting to penetrate a very tough, competitive market(numbers from bookstatistics.com):

• In 1947, there were 357 publishers; in 2004 85,000 publishers
• 2.8 million books in print in 2006
• 291,920 books published in the U.S. in 2006
• average book sells 500 copies in U.S.
• 30% of books had print runs of less than 100
• only 20% of books sold more than 100 copies
• only 10% of books sold more than 1000

Thanks to so many of you and to the support of marketing experts like Shama Hyder, we have been able to beat the odds by exceeding the sales of 90% of all books published in the U.S.

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Stephanie Diamond lays bare mysteries of online marketing for small business executives.

Hyperbole?  Maybe.  But, this is a terrific book.

Marketing is probably the biggest challenge for small business owners and executives.  We typically spend so much time running the business day to day that establishing and maintaining a marketing focus just doesn't happen.  The accelerating pace of Internet marketing change makes it all that much more challenging. 

Happily, Stephanie Diamond has written that rare book which both forces us to think in new and different ways about marketing issues--and simultaneously provides a detailed roadmap so that we can put those thoughts into action. Once you have finished the book, you will be ready to develop and deploy a successful Web marketing strategy. 

Her new book, Web Marketing for Small Businesses, is a much-needed addition to the literature of online marketing.  This book enables us first to grasp complex concepts and then to put them into practice with easy to follow steps.  Even solopreneurs will find significant value in Stephanie's book.  I know that I have already begun to implement several of the strategies about which she writes so knowledgeably.

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A salesperson is a salesperson is a salesperson. Not so.

Because selling and sales professionals are fundamental to your in person content marketing strategy, you must develop just the right team for your company and your market.  However obvious this might seem, here's why so many companies get it all wrong.

Identifying great sales people isn’t as simple as you might think. They don’t all look alike, think alike or act alike. One category of salesperson would die rather than get friends together to sell them Tupperware. Another breed thinks that the purpose of having a lot of friends is so that you can have lots of Tupperware parties.

Difficult or not, selecting the right sales candidate for the right sales situation is fundamental to building a successful company.

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Our British content marketing cousin highlights key lessons from great new book.

According to a new book by Gerry McGovern, content in and of itself is not king. It's got to be customer-centric first and foremost.

In a most useful review on the Relevant and Valued blog, Pete Shemilt draws the following conclusion , "time spent on developing quality, impactful content is a worthwhile investment. The analogy he uses is that we should treat content on the Web as 'a hidden asset, it's gold', not as 'coal - a low-grade, low-cost commodity best published in bulk.'  Put simply: Killer not Filler!"

Or, in other words, creating great content may not be easy, but it is absolutely essential.  Why? Because it's worth its weight in gold. 

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Content marketing represents an upcoming tsunami that you must learn to surf. Our eBook, Get Content.GetCustomers. teaches you how with to-the-point, put-it-to-work content. We tell you why you need to do it, give best practice examples, and give you a blueprint to follow. Best of all, it's FREE!. Read More