Written by Joe Pulizzi

10 amazing content marketing books that will help persuade your boss (CXO) to give you more budget for content marketing in your company….

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

I consider this David Meerman Scott book mandatory reading for all marketers.  This best seller, now published in over 25 languages, clearly states the case for why we need to think about marketing differently. A big part of that…the creation of valuable, relevant and compelling content that positions you as the expert in your industry.

Get Content Get Customers

Yes, forgive me…this is my book written with my co-author Newt Barrett.  This was the first book that really talked about the content marketing industry as we know it today and how to actually handle the changing rules (as DM Scott describes above).  The first half of the book tells you the why of content marketing…the second half is chock full of online, print and integrated case studies.

Content Rules

Where Get Content Get Customers leaves off, Content Rules ramps it up a notch, with clear instruction and motivation on everything from content strategy to newsletter creation to blogs and social media…with some amazing case studies along the way.  Really like the practical tips in this book, like how to develop a publishing schedule and ideas on “reimagining” your content across different platforms.

And, it couldn’t have been written by two better people: Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sell

This incredible resource from Ardath Albee is one I recommend to marketers very focused on the B2B industry.  Ardath details the complex sales cycle that most B2B marketing executives deal with and the important the role that content serves in each of those stages.  Do you have a long sales cycle with multiple client touch points? If so, this book can’t lose.

Managing Content Marketing

Sorry, guilty as charged…mine again.  This time, Robert Rose leads the charge.  Simply put, if you are a marketer trying to actually develop a content marketing practice within your organization, this book will help you with the structure and process.  This is not a book for the beginner, but for the believer that wants to take the next step.
Via blog.junta42.com

Get content. Get customers.,has now sold more than 10,000 copies in its hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions.

Even though Joe Pulizzi and I wrote and updated it in the early stages of the content marketing revolution, our book’s vital lessons and detailed case studies are just as valid and valuable today. The range of organizations that we analyzed extended from huge multibillion dollar public companies to midsize companies with a few hundred employees and even to very small single owner organizations.

If you haven’t yet read Get Content Get Customers, we know that you will want to run out and buy the book because it is chock-full of content marketing knowledge that you can put to work immediately.

But, just to wet your content marketing whistle, here are the top 10 takeaways we gleaned from some brilliant content marketing practitioners. These represent the themes that we recognized again and again as we examined how organizations are putting content marketing to work.

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.

2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges they face, you cannot hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.

3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may provide a complete or partial replacement of traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive than doing things the old-fashioned way.

4. Print magazines can be a powerful weapon within your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out with precision to your customers with carefully targeted messaging that is totally under your control.

5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.

6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team who understand how to produce great content and who live and die by the success of your content marketing program.

7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.

8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn their loyalty and trust.

9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning a prospect or visitor into a customer. You must then make it easy for them to buy.

10. Most of the best practices from the larger companies we profiled can be emulated in whole or in part even by very small organizations. It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

These lessons are fairly simple to express but much harder to put into practice. That’s why we know you will want to buy the book.

Get the paperback edition for overnight delivery. Perfectly priced at $13.74!

Or get the Kindle edition for instant gratification. Only $9.71 with the Amazon discount!!

Via Scoop.it – Content Marketing Now

Sally Hogshead’s video explains the 9 second rule. Grab them fast or lose them. Keynote speaker Sally Hogshead is the author of FASCINATE, teaching audiences how to persuade and captivate in a world with a 9 second attention span.

Listen to Sally and You’ll Begin to Understand Why You Need to Buy Her Book: Fascinate.

More on this fun, fabulous, and yes, fascinating read:

Why are you captivated by some people but not by others? Why do you recall some brands yet forget the rest? In a distracted, overcrowded world, how do certain leaders, friends, and family members convince you to change your behavior? Fascination: the most powerful way to influence decision making. It’s more persuasive than marketing, advertising, or any other form of communication. And it all starts with seven universal triggers: Passion, Mystique, Prestige, Power, Rebellion, Alarm, and Trust.

Fascination plays a role in every type of decision making, from the brands you choose to the songs you remember, from the person you marry to the employees you hire. And by activating the right triggers, you can make anything become fascinating.

To explore and explain fascination’s irresistible influence, Sally Hogshead looks beyond marketing, delving into behavioral and social studies, historical precedents, neurobiology and evolutionary anthropology, as well as conducting in-depth interviews and a national study of a thousand consumers, to emerge with deeply rooted patterns for why, and how, we become captivated.

Hogshead reveals why the Salem witch trials began with the same fixations as those in Sex and the City. How Olympic athletes are subject to obsessions similar to those of fetishists. How a 1636 frenzy over Dutch tulip bulbs perfectly mirrors the 2006 real estate bubble. And why a billion-dollar “Just Say No” program actually increases drug use among teens, by activating the same “forbidden fruit” syndrome as a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re already using the seven triggers. The question is, are you using the right triggers, in the right way, to get your desired result? This book will show you.

Via www.youtube.com

It’s all about Newsjacking:  The Science of Latching onto a Hot News Story in Near Real-Time, and Making It All about You.

David Meerman Scott is once again the thought leader in helping us get more news coverage than we ever thought possible, whether we are Solopreneur or billion-dollar multinational.

His new book, perfectly titled, Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, teaches us how to make as much news as the biggest newsmakers in our individual arenas.

David opens his book with the example of Rick Perry’s surprise announcement of his run for the presidency simultaneous with the Iowa straw polls. He became the top news story and eclipsed coverage of any of the other candidates who had worked so hard to do well in Iowa. It was a perfect Newsjacking that took full advantage of our 24 hour a day news cycle and the never-ending demand for hot news stories.  Iowa was suddenly boring. Rick Perry was suddenly hot.

David teaches all of us how to become successful Newsjackers whatever our organization’s size or situation.

A number of current realities make Newsjacking possible and powerful:

• We live in a real-time news world with thousands of global news outlets from traditional newspapers to niche bloggers with real-time Twitter feeds helping to accelerate the pace of news transmission.
• At the same time, reporters are stretched to the limit, thanks to cutbacks in staffing that are exacerbated by the demands of their bosses to report right now about hot stories.
• This means that reporters are desperate to crank out great, timely stories with the least possible effort.
• The Newsjacking opportunity comes at what David refers to as the second paragraph of a typical news story. The second paragraph goes beyond the basic news details and gives meaning and color to the story. This is where a local firefighting brigade saved the bacon of reporters in the UK by turning a thin story about Kate Winslet and her rescue of Richard Branson’s mother into a fun and fascinating story. The typical second paragraph of stories to follow offered wonderful publicity to those local firefighters. More on this later.
• It is now relatively easy to track news in real time thanks to  RSS feeds and Twitter streams that are targeted to your business, your industry or your area of expertise. Thus, 24 hours a day, you have the opportunity to spot a story that is right for Newsjacking. You can be the first to jump on it and to move that story in your direction.

Here’s how Kate Winslet came to the rescue, not only of that fortunate elderly woman, but of the UK press corps. The local fire brigade immediately sensed an opportunity for worldwide publicity by connecting their organization to the famous actress. So, in a story posted on their website, they offered her the chance to train with them:

The brigade, which has over 300 women firefighters, is inviting Kate to learn how crews deal with fires and also how people can prevent fires from happening in the first place. On the proposed visit, Kate would visit the brigades training center, meet trainees and experience the role of a modern firefighter. This would include operational duties such as trying out firefighter breathing apparatus and climbing a ladder pitched against the tower block.

For a brief time, this made the fire brigade as famous as Kate Winslet. But, most importantly, it allows them to get out the message about the importance of fire safety.

Saving the best–or possibly the worst–for last, it turns out that Larry Flynt is an expert Newsjacker. He pounces on the news of the moment with incredible speed. Thus, when Congressman Anthony Wiener found himself out of a job for reasons that might seem appropriate in a Larry Flynt kind of way, the infamous publisher of Hustler offered Wiener a job. That job offer grabbed more than a day’s worth of news for Larry Flynt and his publishing empire. It made for an irresistible second paragraph for news stories in print, online, and on TV.

You don’t have to be big to be good at Newsjacking. But you have to be fast, smart, sensible, and creative. David tells you exactly how.

I’m just hoping that this blog post may achieve a bit of Newsjacking itself, what with the mention of newsmakers Kate Winslet, Rick Perry, and Larry Flynt.

Be sure to go to Amazon.com and get a copy of David’s new book, which, incidentally is available only in a digital version. It’s short, to the point, practical, and as always, entertaining.

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.

Presenting to Win overflows with practical advice on how to engage an audience by telling your story with a focus on what’s important to them. You become an "audience advocate," showing concern for your listeners’ needs that puts them at the heart of your presentation. By following Jerry’s detailed roadmap, we can learn how to tell stories that move and motivate listeners by keeping them engaged, from a compelling start to a big finish.

Jerry’s first career was as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter. His friendship with venture capitalist Ben Rosen led him to his second career as a presentation guru. In 1988, he launched a business that taught high-tech executives to move from feature-laden, techno-speak dissertations to engaging, listener-centric presentations. Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft and Intel are among his clients.

Jerry offers plenty of real-world anecdotes, how-tos and helpful graphics that convey ways to grab and keep your audience’s attention. His "opening gambit" concept typifies his own story-telling approach in the book: He offers a rationale, supports it with multiple success stories and describes a broad range of gambits.

An opening gambit must pull the audience out from a possible state of disinterest or suspicion about you and your presentation. Posing questions to an audience is one of seven strategies discussed, and Jerry cites an experience by Scott Cook as an example. In 1993, Cook, founder of Intuit (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks), faced a jaded audience of investment bankers. Rather than launch into a feature-packed discussion of a new product, he asked two questions: How many of you balance your own checkbooks? How many enjoy doing it?

After a round of chuckles, he continued, "You’re not alone. Millions of people around the world hate balancing their checkbooks. We at Intuit have developed an easy-to-use, inexpensive home-finance tool, Quicken." With this "aha" moment, Cook was off and running.

Equally insightful chapters on presentation essentials provide a level of detail and clarity that leaves nothing to chance. Jerry demonstrates that even those of us who aren’t presentation naturals can present to win.

Learning what he recommends requires significant effort because his approach contains a broad range of interrelated elements that can vary, depending on purpose, topic and audience. You’ll need to devote time and effort to perfecting his method, but as leaders of Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Intuit and Yahoo! have learned, your effort will be well worth it.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.com. You can also get the Kindle edition.

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.

Although the pictures that he suggests we draw are as basic as can be, his concepts are pretty sophisticated.  Why?  It is almost always hard to make things easy.  For example, this is true of software, which may be incredibly complex behind the scenes.  But, for the developers, the real challenge is making that software easy to use for unsophisticated customers.

So it is with Dan’s approach in "The Back of the Napkin".  Basic drawings are just the beginning.   Visual images are part of a very sophisticated approach to presenting information persuasively.  You will learn to share information or sell ideas with visual representations that will be easy to explain and easy to grasp. The hard part comes in deciding exactly how best to represent what visual images you will show and how you’ll show them.

Thus, learning to use his methodology will require some effort.  but, it will be time well spent because communicating both verbally and visually using Dan’s approach really works.

To give you an idea of what Dan has in store for you, here are the primary concepts to grasp:

• He says that there are six ways of seeing things.  This applies literally to a scene we might observe outdoors or virtually to a problem or challenge we might want to describe. As we think about the ideas we need to convey, these are the vital questions to ask and answer about the visual elements to be shown:
• Who or what?
• How many?
• Where?
• When? 
• How?
• Why?
• It’s essential to decide on the kind of visual message we want to present before we worry about the actual image.  He creates an acronym called,SQVID as a mnemonic to organize these concepts. For example if our topic involved an apple pie we would want to decide between the vision of a completed pie vs. the execution of actually creating the pie. That’s  the ‘V’ in SQVID. Here are all of the visual variations:
• Simple versus elaborate
• Quality versus quantity
• Vision versus execution
• Individual attributes versus comparison
• Delta (or change) versus status quo

In the spirit of visual presentation, here is his core conceptual construct the way Dan envisions it as a Swiss Army knife metaphor:

Here’s a more elaborate diagram that lays out Dan’s complete set of elements you will need to evaluate and employ when you create your visual thinking-based presentation:

Read Dan’s book so that you can become a better visual thinker–and so that you can do a dramatically better job of presenting and persuading every audience from large to small. 

If I haven’t convinced you, be sure to visit his extraordinarily visual and persuasive website: The Back of the Napkin.

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.

It’s all about relationships extended online.

There is an important connection with the past which cuts through a lot of the confusion that surrounds social media marketing.

In his introduction, Paul notes that social media is really about relationships extended online.  That’s not so new. The desire to form communities of shared interests goes back to the guilds of the Middle Ages.  But, here’s the hard part: Figuring out how to make effective use of the staggering variety of ever-changing social media trends, venues, and technologies.

As Paul indicates:

Marketers aren’t stupid or reactionary.  They recognize that the world is quickly changing around them.  They are trying to change as well, but a variety of internal and external factors make it difficult to do that very quickly.  They’re scared and nervous, but that’s okay.  No one is an expert on all these new trends and no one knows where it’s all going.  Marketers need to start learning and experimenting because the only sin in social media right now is inaction.

Plenty of practical and easy to apply information

To give you an idea of Paul’s approach to bringing social media mysteries down to earth, here is a quick look at his blogging appropriateness quiz. Most content marketing types, myself included, will urge virtually every business to get a blog going.  But, with a helpful little six question–and 5 minute–scorecard, he helps business executives figure out whether they should bother blogging at all.

Here are the highlights(minus Paul’s explanations of each question):

Is  blogging right for your business?

• Do you want to do it?
• Do you have a topic in mind?
• Are you passionate about the topic?
• Are you knowledgeable about the topic?
• Do you communicate well?
• Do you have a thick skin?

You apply varying point levels to your yes or no answers.  A high score means, “go for it.”  A low score means “don’t bother.”  He has just saved you hours of meetings and deadly powerpoint presentations.

The ‘cut-to-the-chase’ blogging appropriateness quiz is a tiny sample of the wealth of useful, compelling, and understandable coverage of every conceivable element of social media marketing–and how to deploy those that are appropriate for your organization.

You need to begin deploying social media marketing.  This is the book that will put you on the right track.

There may be a better book on social media marketing.  But if there is, I haven’t found it. 

Go to Amazon.com right now and buy it: Secrets of Social Media Marketing

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.

Collaborative sales and marketing: combine forces with colleagues to maximize your impact.

I found one of their sales and marketing recommendations particularly powerful: Collaborate with noncompetitive business colleagues who share a common target audience in order to dramatically increase your collective impact on an audience larger than you ever could have reached on your own.

In fact, Elizabeth has built a business which exemplifies how well collaboration can work when applied to the Web. Her company, AuthorTeleseminars.com, reinvents the old-fashioned idea of author book tours by moving them to the Internet.  She capitalizes on the trend that sees fewer authors running around from bookstore to bookstore, speaking to small audiences, spending lots of money, and rarely selling many books.  Instead, she creates a virtual book tours which partner an author with other author experts who share a common target market.  All participants benefit from promotion to a larger set of prospects by combining contact lists and outreach efforts.

This kind of collaboration can be applied to any target market and is particularly powerful on the web where outbound direct marketing is incredibly cheap and the potential audience size enormous.

Run out and buy a copy of The Contrarian Effect. You’ll find plenty of great ideas that you can put to work right away to reinvent the way you sell and market yourself, your company, your products, and your services.

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.

As the authors say:

“You shouldn’t have to wave your arms around and shout at people to convince them to pay attention to your product and service.  The tuned in, market-driven company understands market problems and builds products that resonate; these practices drive both sales and customer satisfaction.”

Here’s their diagram of the simple, six step process you need to follow to create just such products and services:

Coincidentally, NextBus, which we write about separately today because of their Google success, has done exactly what Meerman Scott & co. recommend. They created a solution to a nagging customer problem. 

Frustrated bus riders desperate for a solution to wasted time

Transit riders have been frustrated for decades because there was no way to know exactly when the “next bus” was coming. NextBus solved the problem by providing real-time information that told riders where ever they were and whenever they needed the information, exactly when the NextBus would arrive.  Not only was this a solution for transit riders, it was a solution for transit management because it made both for happy passengers and for much more efficient operations.  Best of all the company chose exactly the right name, “NextBus” because it described perfectly the core of the benefit that their service provided.  The result was what the book describes as a “resonator”.  That is: a product or service that sells itself.

Tuned In can teach your organization how to replicate the kind of success enjoyed by NextBus or FedEx or Nike.  The book is loaded with examples that illustrate how the process they recommend works in practice.  And, it doesn’t apply just to large organizations but to entrepreneurial startups as well.

Unless all of your products and services are resonating with your customers, you need to buy this book.  Click here to do just that.

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.

Online Marketing Guru–and Content Marketing Aficionado–Shama Hyder Give Us a Major Plug

Frankly, I’m not sure this endorsement of GCGC could have been any better if we had written it ourselves.  It is especially meaningful because Shama is so good at what she does with After The Launch as we have written in our article: When You Are the Brand, Content Marketing is Crucial.

Here’s what Shama had to say:

Get Content, Get Customers! by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett. You know how I am a big fan of VALUABLE content rather than loud marketing? Yea, these guys get it. Not only do they get it, but they show you how to do it. They show how any business (large or small) can use the concept of content marketing to attract qualified clients. This isn’t a book of theory. It’s jam packed with case studies and statistics. Content sells! They show you how. The best marketing education 20 bucks ever bought anyone!

Be sure to read her entire article, 10k Worth of Knowledge for Roughly 40 Bucks in which she recommends another superb book, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave Evans.  I know I just bought it on her recommendation.

Join the Content Marketing Crusade!

Content marketing works.  We teach you how to put it to work for your organization in ways that will pay off on the bottom-line in these tough times.

You can follow Shama’s very sound advice simply by

clicking here to buy Get Content Get Customers or if you’d like to download a FREE excerpt, go to www.GetContentGetCustomers.com.

Thanks to everyone for helping us get this far.