Best Marketing Books

Seriously?

Does that kool-aid taste good?

:rolleyes: :p

Here is one of the best I purchased in 2011:
http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...l-tactics.html

"How To Win Friends and Influence People" was written 80 years ago, but you can still apply the lessons taught to your goal of marketing your business today... If you are willing to take off your horse blinders...

Christine Clayfield's "From Newbie to Millionaire"

I agree with this. I think they're enormously underrated.

I think people are often keen to read something they can buy online and/or read on their computers, and for "marketing advice" this can be quite a big mistake.

Those "For Dummies" books tend to be spectacularly well written, well edited and professionally published, and the quantity of information in them, and its reliability, are second-to-none.

I really recommend avoiding most online information and dealing only with the newest editions of standard textbooks published by mainstream, orthodox publishers.

There's a very specific, very compelling reason for this being likely to be beneficial.

Such textbooks have an enormous investment made in them by the publishers, before they're even printed. For this reason, they're obliged to be commissioned only from widely recognised, highly accredited, well qualified experts who are known and trusted, and their output is also peer-reviewed at every stage of its production.

Online information, by comparison, just isn't subject to any realistic, meaningful "quality control" at all and can be devastatingly unreliable. A lot of it is just incentivised opinion from people selling things. Call me a skepchick, but over the last three years I've gradually and increasingly been realising that the generally prevalent views of SEO expressed online, especially by its practitioners (who always have a direct or indirect financial interest in whatever they're alleging) is little better than a collection of "urban myths of internet marketing".

Bear in mind that in a field of endeavour in which, out of all those "trying it", comparatively few people become truly successful, the "general consensus of opinion" is always likely to be fairly deeply flawed and erroneous.

Reading a few "established textbooks" really does open up a whole different world.

The I part is changing rapidly.

The M part hasn't changed for well-nigh a century.

Talk to any decent copywriter, and ask if the AIDA method is a good way to write advertising copy on the internet. They'll nod enthusiastically and say "yeah, great method, works real well."

The AIDA method was invented in 1898.

No, I didn't mix up the numbers. The method dates back to the 19th century. And it's been a well-known system since 1925.

In fact, very little has changed in actual marketing since the great depression. We just keep finding new ways to explain the same old things, and we slap new words on it, and invent new acronyms, and pretend it's a new and unique thing we just discovered instead of the same damn thing it's always been.

So the two big names you should be reading are Philip Kotler and N. Gregory Mankiw.