EAN: 9780977240623
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Should I buy the Plug Your Business! Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and podcasts and other Web 2.0 social networks?
Internet marketing ideas
I learned a lot about on-line marketing with this book. He talks a lot about blogging, which we're just considering taking the leap into. He gives really good advice, like:
* Ask a question or pose a challenge in the first sentence
* Don't preach, blogging is a conversation
* Tell the truth (my favorite)
* Read lots of other blogs
* Don't be boring, a good blog takes sides
* Break news, be authentic, tell stories
On the YouTube front, he told great and inspiring stories of how businesses got great advertising. Chipotle ran a contest asking college students to make a 30-second commercial about the restaurant and post it on YouTube for a grand prize of $10,000. One video alone had 7.7 million views! That's worth $346,000 in on-line advertising. There is definitely some similar marketing plan in my future. Wendy's placed humorous videos, and one episode alone got 600,000 views. What great ideas!
Then of course he discusses writing product reviews right here on Amazon, that then somehow promote your company, book or product. He gives the do's and don'ts, which are very important. If you want to be a player in the Amazon review world, you have to play by their rules. He also recommends that you type your reviews in a word processing program, which I'm doing right now, so you don't have typos.
He talks about fine-tuning your recommendations at Amazon.com/yourstore. I couldn't believe I didn't know about that. You can say "not interested" in something and even exclude items that you own from the "use to make recommendations" list. For instance if you bought a book on fungus for the biologist next door, but personally have no interest in the subject.
He introduced me to del.icio.us, which is a website to manage your bookmarks. Granted, Google lets bookmark and you can log onto your Google account from anywhere, but this sounds more sophisticated. I've looked at it a little bit, but it looks like it is worth some study, or messing around with at least.
This is a quick read, and it inspired me with some great ideas for my business. It was well written and entertaining too. I dog-eared nine pages, which is one of the way I judge how good a book is. Those are pages I intend to go back and read either soon, or often.
If you are interested in marketing on the internet, I would read this book.
Tenna Merchent (nick name), author of He's Not Autistic, But...
A Very Useful Book for the Small Business Owner!
From my perspective as a small business owner, this new book by Steve Weber has a lot to recommend it. To begin with, Steve's background is in journalism and it shows through in the clarity of his writing and in his ability to zero in on key points. (His blogs on online bookselling and Internet marketing are also especially interesting and readable for this reason.) As an example, he likens marketing "widgets" for social networking sites to the time-honored marketing method of handing out bumper stickers. Although I consider myself pretty technology-savvy, I still find the proliferation of Web 2.0 sites confusing in the extreme. MySpace and YouTube are only two of the best-known ones, and each successful venture immediately spawns a bevy of competitors trying to move into that space too. In this book Steve sorts through a lot of free or inexpensive options for generating the Internet equivalent of word of mouth advertising. He highlights the most promising ones and suggests ways to take full and effective advantage of them. This book called my attention to several interesting websites I'd overlooked, including Digg, a news site, and Gather, a social-networking site. One particularly interesting section to me was the one on the "Google sandbox effect," which I hadn't been aware of. Evidently Google search results deliberately downplay references to domain names with one-year registration periods because they've disproportionately become the province of spammers. The solution is to extend domain names for a longer term instead of renewing them every year, something I immediately tried after reading about this. Steve gives examples of businesses that have succeeded in capitalizing on Web 2.0 opportunities and points out that not everything that's hyped works. I found the example of Walmart's Hub website, which he describes as "one of the most spectacular social-networking flops" particularly interesting. Steve very sensibly suggests keeping a record of when you start trying something new in terms of marketing your product on the Internet and then checking periodically to see if that technique has made any difference or not. Bottom line: Lots of useful, stimulating ideas in a concise, well-organized, and readable form.
Fistfuls of free internet marketing how-to
The great thing about Steve Weber's new book 'Plug Your Business' is that it's chuck full of practical ideas on how to maximise your internet marketing for free.
He organises the suggestions from the most effective, simplest and quickest at the beginning to the more unusual and more difficult later on. As you gain more confidence using his on-line marketing ideas, you can proceed to some of the less familiar ones - refining and tweaking as you progress.
MySpace is where he suggests you begin and he provides plenty of tips and hand-holding to get you started promoting your business on-line without spending a dime. In fact, throughout his book, he strongly advises against
throwing money at internet promotion as a way of cutting corners.
Do-it-yourself may involve a steep learning curve,if this is your first exposure to internet marketing, but if you keep this book beside you as your main reference guide, help is always at hand.
Steve Weber says that no one should expect over-night success, but if you keep plugging away, within a few months you should expect to see good results.
And remember Bill Gates' comment: 'There are only two kinds of businesses - on-line ones and out of business ones.'
Terry Oliver
[...]
What a great tool for any web 2.0 Marketing Strategy!!!!
This book is a must read for any business owner or person interested in Web 2.0 and how to leverage the "Free" side of internet marketing in the social platform. A quick read stuffed with helpful tips, Steve has delivered a useful manual in an easy to implement strategy with sound-bites for anyone looking to grow their presence on the net. I found his suggestions on the value of blogging to be incredibly informative and made a world of difference in how I look at the blog for my own consulting practice! Thank you Steve for the great resource and tool!!!
Very worthwhile information
Steve Weber's "Plug Your Business" is so full of good ideas that I flagged almost every page. His explanations are well-written and easy to follow, and I've already started implementing some of his suggestions.
There is so much insider information in this book that can help almost anyone who wants to do internet commerce. Particularly interesting to me was the information on increasing search engine interest in one's website by doing the simplest things, such as registering your website's URL for several years instead of one year.
-- Phyllis Zimbler Miller, author of "Mrs. Lieutenant" and co-author of "Seasons for Celebration"
