When you read Twitter Power’s follow figures in screen shots used they look to be late 2008. By using them you can see how massively the followers have grown for the people Joel quotes.

However, I digress…

The book is subtitled “How To Dominate Your Market One Tweet At A Time.” It’s an ambitious plan, however I think that Joel has pulled it off.

Twitter Power Makes It Seem Easy

The book doesn’t rely on all the new tools that arrive, become fashionable then sink without trace. Instead in concentrates on the fundamental “how-tos” to successfully incorporate Twitter into your social media strategy and provides step by step instructions in its use, and notes how to avoid abuse.

It goes into the details you need to succeed in Twitter.for example Joel gives you ways of creating your own Twitter background – a key part of getting followed.

7 Killer Strategies For More Followers

Joel gives 7 ways of getting people to follow you. Although as Joel points out building a list of followers doesn’t happen overnight no matter what you do!

The easiest one to implement immediately is to add your Twitter name to your signature.

7 Tweet Types For Everyone To Use

Twitter Power breaks down the Tweets that Joel suggests you use into

1. Classic “this is what I’m doing” Tweets
2. Opinion Tweets
3. Mission Accomplished Tweets
4. Entertainment Tweets
5. Question Tweets
6. Picture Tweets
7. Tweet Sequences

Stuffed With Useful Powerful Content

The whole of Twitter Power is very useful for advanced Tweeters and new Tweeters alike. Joel shows how to use Twitter for customer support, to build your brand to find experts, how to track Tweets, using Twitter auto responders and much, much more that has the marketer in me salivating!

Crucially Joel also gives a highly experienced legal eagle a chapter to explain the niceties and dangers to be aware of when using Twitter. Look out for assumed contracts is all I’ll say on that subject!

In addition Joel has his business partner Ken Burge write a chapter on how you can extend Twitter to make it even more useful for your business and gives URLs to code you can use too.

One thing is very clear. That is that Twitter can help you get your message out in a way that doesn’t intrude in the same way that mass advertising does.

In conclusion if you’ve any thoughts of getting into Twitter for your business you must buy Twitter Power. In fact click here and get it now, remember whilst you’re thinking others are taking action!

Six Disciplines of Excellence is not just a book to read, place carefully in your bookshelf and forget.

Gary Harpst has written it into a tool that any business can use to successfully grow bigger, more profitable and more consistent.

The book’s title sounds a little like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and the author acknowledges that books help. He also acknowledges the book’s debt to others such as Michael Gerber and Peter Senge and I would say also to Edwards Deming the quality guru too. This book is all about showing you what a well run company looks like when it has the right processes in place to communicate with its staff, its customers, its suppliers and shareholders.

The Six Disciplines

The disciplines are as follows:

1. Decide What’s Important
2. Set Goals That Lead
3. Align Systems
4. Work The Plan
5. Innovate Purposefully
6. Step Back

One interesting point that’s made early in the book is:

“…growing businesses eventually outgrow the very skills that made them successful in the first place. And that it happens so slowly, most business leaders don’t realize until they’re in deep trouble.”

And as the author explains this book is aimed at SME’s and 20% of it is principals and 80% is practical implementation, including forms and worked examples. Even better the whole Six Disciplines method has been designed with the Internet at the front of his brain.

What The Book Provides

The author explains how you can tell a well led and a poorly led and failing organization. And he doesn’t just tell you what they look like he also goes into what to look for within the company. For example he talks about people not being engaged in a failing project or business.

And while the headline disciplines seem self-evident the author goes into detail on exactly how to create processes that will lead your business from wherever it is now to where you want it to be in the future. And not only does he explain how to create the processes he gives many, if not all, the processes required to help your business step up a gear through using better processes.

Decide What’s Important

The first discipline is “Decide What’s Important.” Harpst recognizes that many businesses will need to renew their mission, so he gives a process that helps do that. More than that he observes that the best people don’t join company’s with mission statements but companies that are on a mission. In this first discipline he demonstrates processes to work out an organization’s values, its strategic position and its “Vital Few Objectives.”

And finally he provides a process to eliminate the projects, products and services that don’t align with the organization’s refreshed new position.

Set Goals That Lead

Harpst shows the processes to produce “goals that lead”, the targets they aim for and the measurements to use to check they’ve on the right road and for when they achieve their goals.

Goals are probably the one thing that everyone in business professes to know all about. After all we all know the “SMART” approach to goals. With that in mind Harpst explains how to engage the team to want to achieve the goals.

Align Systems

In this Internet and high tech world we often hear of the need to align systems whenever a company takes over another one. Yet this chapter deals with aligning policies, procedures and people as well as the technology. And here as with the rest of the book you’re given the appropriate process to help you achieve aligned systems.

Work The Plan

Working the plan becomes a natural consequence of the other disciplines. And it’s all about each person having their own plan which they and their supervisors monitor. At first glance such a detailed level of planning looks very time consuming. In practice once it’s set-up they’re an invaluable tool.

Innovate Purposefully

This chapter gives ways of creating new products, new services and better ways of achieving tasks. Again it goes further by noting that you must recognise contributions and champion ideas to get them through.

Step Back

Harpst explains the importance of competition, company, external and individual reviews to enable the company to move forward whilst taking advantage of improvements or advances in any area.

My Recommendation

Any smallish company of between one and a hundred people will definitely benefit from buying, studying and applying the Six Disciplines found in this book. Gary Harpst has taken strands of so many different methods for improving business and cooked them up to produce a recipe for building a better small business. If you’re a small company this book can get you well down the path to a better and more profitable company and improve your own personal growth.

So go buy it from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA) or Amazon (Canada) and strike while the iron’s hot!

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Scott Fox has written a useful book for the Internet marketing newbie. If you know about the Internet, affiliates, pay per click, search engine optimisation and email newsletters you’re more advanced and would be served better reading Dave Taylor’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google

There is a lot of material both on and off-line in Internet Riches for the aspiring
Internet marketer. Having said that Fox’s book is designed to help you learn what many have spent months,even years discovering from the Internet, ebooks and “normal” books.

Internet Riches splits easily into 6 parts:

1. The Unlimited Opportunity of The Internet
2. Developing Your Own e-Business Model
3. Building Your Internet Millionaire e-Business
4. Internet Marketing Secrets For Your e-Business
5. Legal Issues and Admin
6. Graduation – Starting Your Own Dream Business

At the beginning of the book Fox explains the currently almost unlimited potential of the Internet and he introduces three types of Internet-created millionaires:

1. The Efficiency Millionaire
2. The Product Millionaire
3. The Niche Millionaire

Usefully he gives examples of each type so they can be looked up on the Internet.

Efficiency millionaires are those that have made life easier for lots of people. Think of Yahoo and Google, eBay, Amazon & YouTube.

The Product millionaire provides cheaper products, or greater ranges of products and is able to simply dominate the market for their products. Think of Amazon again and Walmart.com

Finally the Niche millionaire is one that sells to a tightly defined niche. Think of weddingfavors.com or bathboats.com

Dotted strategically throughout the book are little “bits” called Internet Millionaire secrets where Fox explains an example in more detail, or gives an aside or explains how to achieve something on the Internet.

The book continues through the next 4 parts explaining in quite a bit of helpful detail how to create and set-up your own internet business.

This is started with the identification of the best business model specifically for you using the ICICLE method. It leads into buying a domain name and web host service and continues into building a web site with shopping carts.

Fox explains about eBay, giving some of its pluses and minuses. A plus is you get sell cheaply. A minus your brand is swallowed up by the eBay selling machine.

He explains about using Craigslist to find people to do research ,or almost anything else for you.

Arriving at part 4 of the book Fox explains about the importance of search engine optimisation and how email newsletters are vital to your selling efforts.

He explains how pay per click advertising works and also how you can use this with affiliate marketing.
One part of Fox’s book that will appeal to newbies are his appendices. They include some service providers on the internet, how to research on the Internet and also a great glossary of terms.

The other star attraction of the book is that Fox uses a web site to keep the content up to date.

The book does give the grounding for newbies to begin to use the Internet to make money. Will it truly provide them with Internet riches? If they just rely on this book the answer is a simple no.

However, if they use the book as intended it can act as starting blocks in the Internet Millionaire marathon to get you going on raising cash the Internet way.

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As Wheeler says ” the underlying philosophy of this book: that single sentences can be so constructed as to make a majority of people buy.”

When you read it you can certainly see exactly what he means. He goes from selling any and all of:

• vacuum cleaners
• clothe pegs
• restaurant desserts
• Getting a job
• Oil

You’ll have to forgive me as it’s difficult to be even handed about this when Wheeler has written such a practical, useful and profit inducing book for almost any business owner.

This book along with those by Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy and others really set the approach to marketing and sales.

The reason? As Wheeler says human psychology never changes.

Remember the phrase “Sell the sizzle not the steak?” that comes from the title of Wheelers first chapter – “Don’t Sell The Steak – Sell the Sizzle!”

This is the first of 5 Wheelerpoints. Each one building on the first to produce near unstoppable sales approaches.

The other 5 Wheelerpoints are

1. Don’t Sell the Steak – Sell the Sizzle!
2. “Don’t Write – Telegraph.”
3. “Say It with Flowers.”
4. Don’t Ask If – Ask Which?
5. Watch Your Bark!

Wheeler also notes a number of modern phrases that have completely outlived their usefulness in selling situations. Do you think everyone knows them? Given the sales people who ring me I suspect not…

And as he says the “Tested Sentences That Sell” are not canned sales pitches. They’re planned and are made up of several components that work together to get the sale.

This book is written with the businessperson in mind. It helps you construct “Tested Sentences That Sell” by giving you lots of worked examples.

This is a book that repays getting and reading and re-reading.

I did find things I already knew in the book but they were more than compensated by the useful things I discovered, such as “say it with flowers”. I also found the reasons why certain things work and why others just completely fail miserably now. Using the principles clearly laid out you could confidently construct your own “Tested Sentences That Sell” and start converting more prospects. Although it’s an old book you can still buy it now at Tested Sentences That Sell.

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We shop for everything online.

We’re able to weigh up the opinions of the hundreds of people who review products. And remember it isn’t a job but just for fun or to warn people off!

I write reviews for Blogcritics. And I was so pleased with an Archos personal video recorder that I reviewed that I posted an Archos review article on this site too.

I’m sure you find Christmas difficult when you’re buying a business friend a present. I do too. I usually end up giving the gift of knowledge through books or CDs.

And as I love to let people know what I think are goodies I set-up an Amazon Astore.

The reason?

Because I wanted somewhere where I can recommend the books I think can make a big difference in any business persons life. And not have to keep thinking about which books are the best!

Plus although I may tell someone about one particular book – my favourite at the moment is Duncan Bannatyne’s autobiography.

Update: I like many before me keep mistakenly referring to Duncan as “Duncan Ballantyne” – which is plain wrong. It should be Duncan Bannatyne so my apologies for that. I’ve also just completed a Power Packed Business Growth review of Duncan’s book: Anyone Can Do It: The Autobiography

People can also check out the other 9 or 10 books I recommend too.

Obviously Astore’s can make you a little bit of money (and I stress the little because it’s pence) but they’re worth setting up so you can recommend books to your friends. And they can check whether they’d like one for Christmas too…

In reality Astores can sell anything on Amazon. But my purpose is to purely tell people about exciting, intriguing, strategic and useful business books. I may extend it to business related DVDs or CDs in the New Year, it depends on whether people are finding it useful.

You can check out my Astore by clicking on the button in any post. If you’ve a blog I recommend you get your own Astore – it’s not hard to set-up but it really is useful.

Right, I’m off to try and unblock my toilet! Urgh…

I’ve been looking forward to this milestone so I could do a review of where we are.

Marketing Knows No Country Boundaries!

You my loyal reader have changed your reading habits. You may be interested to discover that you have been joined by other regular readers from places like Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, New Zealand, Spain, UK and across the United States from California to Chicago to New York and right up to Canada.

You’re Reading More Posts (Thanks)

When I started you probably read the equivalent of 1.5 postings. Now that has escalated so that everyone who comes to the blog reads roughly 3.5 posts per visit.

The Blog You’re Reading Has Changed

I’ve found that I really enjoy tinkering with the guts of a blog to get it to do stuff that maybe people thought it couldn’t do.

I’ve added in several different aspects: e-commerce testing, using pictures, using labels and tags and using Blogger Beta.

Does E-commerce Work With Blogs?

Because I believe most businesses benefit from a regular blog I’m seeing whether e-commerce works on it too. So I’ve set-up several different ways of generating revenue to test results. over time I’ve either had, or still have:

• An Amazon Store button at the beginning of each post. Clicking on it opens the Amazon site showing my recommended books
• A full width Amazon banner under the Blog title and description
• A full width Google Adsense banner under the Blog title and description
• A Paypal button to buy my book “How To Leap Ahead Of Your Competitors”
• An Amazon Store button at the end of each post
• Specific Amazon recommendations for reviewed books

These do generate a trickle of income. But what they’ve allowed me to do is to explore the different areas of e-commerce and see that can be easily handled by a blog.

Which Is The Best Blog Client I’ve Used?

I’ve used the following clients over the course of writing the blog:

• Anconia RocketPost Basic
• Blogger
• Blogger Beta
• Elicit
• Microsoft Live Writer
• Qumana
• WordPress
• Zoundry

There’s no doubt at all in my mind that the best client I’ve used is Elicit. It’s great because you can do several posts and publish on different dates very easily and to several different blogs too.

That said I use Microsoft Live Writer to do all my writing now because…

1) It’s free

2) It’s very easy to use

3) It has powerful features

It’s only real downfall is the cumbersome way it handles tagging and there is no post scheduling. So I use RocketPost to generate tags to insert into posts and put up with manually posting each post.

Why Label Or Tag?

While I love the sound of my quill pen scratching out power packed business growth thoughts I also like the idea of others being able to find what I’ve written.

So I started using tagging quite early in my blogging life to allow people to find me. And now with Blogger Beta I use labels to categorise posts within the blog itself. Just so you’ve more opportunity to find stuff you’re particularly interested in on my blog.

The Coolest Guy On The Planet

As you’ve probably noticed I’m interested in Search Engine Optimization and I’ve been trying to see whether this blog can help me get to the top pages in the search engine for the phrase “the coolest guy on the planet”.

In reality just the blog itself won’t achieve that but it has given me a good position in the search results – my top result for the coolest guy … was at 26. Having checked again I’m now in 40th position. So I may do a few of the other things outside the blog to boost that result score a bit.

My Blogging Conclusions

I really enjoy writing this blog, and the others I have running too.

Do I still think that other companies should be blogging? Absolutely vital.

Wal-Mart does and you’ve got to believe that switched on companies who are highly cost concious wouldn’t be doing it unless it helped their bottom line in some identifiable way.

Is it making me wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice? No…but hey! There’s time yet isn’t there?

Wikipedia: Blog Review, Blogger Beta, Blog Client, Microsoft Live Writer, Elicit, RocketPost, Zoundry, Google Adsense, Amazon AStore
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Dave Taylor’s book The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Growing Your Business with Google has a very clever title.

If you checked the searches made for the keyword “Google” on the 2nd October 2006 you’d have found 17,651,063 searches. That compares to 4,503,871 for the keyword “Yahoo”.

As Dave Taylor says in this book it’s all about visibility on the web. As he points out “companies with high visibility invariably are more successful…”.

Using Google as a keyword in his book title makes him several times more visible on searches compared to people searching with Yahoo as a keyword.

Dave doesn’t assume a level of knowledge with his book and starts every reader off with the basics. Firstly he challenges the reader to check their current Internet strategy.

Then he moves on to offer the reasons why you shouldn’t be trying to get more and more traffic. Instead you should be aiming to get more and more customers.

He points out there are some businesses that, contrary to popular thought, are just not cut out for the Internet.

Throughout this thoughtful book Dave encourages you to take action and even has a section called “The Least You Need to Know” where he highlights the key messages and actions you need to take from a chapter.

True to his word Dave talks about all the different aspects of Google, including Google Labs, Froogle and Blogger.

Helpfully he explains exactly how to conduct a useful basic search for something using Google. Then he goes into the slightly more complex multiple term searching and the notation you can use for quite specific searches.

And of course these approaches work equally as well with other search engines.

Part way through the book he asks “What’s Your Core Business”. A question that has stopped many an entrepreneur in their tracks. He then helps you understand that an Internet business, or a business that is online and offline require the same approach. That is asking who your customers are and the need to focus on core values, knowing your competitors and setting measurable goals.

Afterwards he dives into ways of getting good content for your web site, checking your competitors web sites, how to use Google Alerts and using forums, blogs and bulletin boards to educate yourself on your own business and your competitors.

The book advises on ways of building a better, more visible site by explaining the key elements of a web site, using the Internet to “stretch” your marketing dollars and discussing a few of the secrets of the online masters.

He also explains the “dark side” of the search engine optimisation methods or the “black hat” techniques that would get you banned from Google if they were discovered. And some high profile names were discovered and banned for using these techniques.

And of course he explains about how to advertise your wares with Google Adwords and how to make money from other companies adverts using Google Adsense.

Overall this is a well-written book that provides enough information for business newbies to get started on the right track. It also helps those people who have a web site but are currently leaving money on the table because they’re not as visible as they should be.

Internet marketing aces will know most of what Dave describes but they too would benefit from reading it because you can bet that just like me they’ll still learn a thing or two.

We’re now on the last two predictions in David Ogilvy’s fascinating book “Ogilvy on Advertising”.

You can see my take on his other predictions here:

• Ogilvy’s Predicted Advertising Changes
• Ogilvy’s Advertising Crystal Ball Part II
• Ogilvy’s Advertising Crystal Ball Part III

Now let’s look at those last two predictions…

Direct Response Advertising No
Longer A Separate Speciality

 Ogilvy was convinced that the agencies would see the benefits of direct response advertising and sweep up all the specialist agencies into the generalist agencies.

Just looking at the adverts generated by most agencies shows exactly how far this has happened…

Not much!

Direct response is still not really used by the big agencies. After all it’s probably not as pretty as the glossy ads they want to produce to show off to their mates in the industry.

TV Commercials To Be Produced
At A More Sensible Cost

Some TV adverts do have reasonable costs. However, shooting adverts in exotic locations where products and services don’t warrant them still happens.

It’s not just the cost that’s the issue it’s are they cost effective. That is do the adverts make more money than the cost?

If you enjoyed “Rich Dad, Poor Dad“ or The Millionaire Maker you should check out Felix Dennis’s “How To Get Rich”.

The author certainly knows what he’s talking about. Read the almost universal 5 star reviews on Amazon and check out an extract The Times serialised with the provocative title “If you want to be rich, first stop being so frightened“.

There are no end of books on “how to become a millionaire” but if you look at Felix Dennis’s definition of The Wealthy you can see that few can actually talk from experience:

This list shows the total assets for each category of person:

• The comfortable poor – £1m-£2m
• The comfortably off – £2m-£5m
• The comfortably wealthy -£5m-£15m
• The lesser rich – £15m-£40m
• The comfortably rich – £40m-£75m
• The rich – £75m-£100m
• The seriously rich – £100m-£200m
• The truly rich – £200m-£400m
• The filthy rich – £400m-£999m
• The super rich – More than £999m

From the list it’s clear that the only people who should write “how to” books on becoming millionaires are the “truly rich” because, of course they’re truly rich.

PS Yesterday I posted about Chris Cardell’s Webinar and said that he’d made an apology.

What he also did was say that when he re-does the webinar he’s providing a Freephone number for us all.

Hurrah!

Well you live and learn.

I wanted to use the tags from post II of Ogilvy’s Crystal Ball so I opened that post (already live) in my desktop client (currently Microsoft’s Live Writer) . I deleted everything except the tags.

I created a new headline and new text.

Then I posted it…

Oh dear, Even though I’d used a different heading, on a different day the post had overwritten the original part II on the Internet and now even shows Part III as being posted on Friday.

So I searched for the original part II post in Google Cache copied it and it’s back – but now at a later date!