I often find myself giving reading recommendations to business owners, managers, and future entrepreneurs. I also find myself reading a lot of business books. So with the “Blogpreneur” series well underway, i thought i’d try to combine a little affiliate marketing with actually providing a good and solid piece of helpful advice.

The books listed here are books i feel should be on every business man or woman’s bookshelf. They are solid business books which have both taught and inspired me in some way.
Reading has always been my greatest source of information as well as inspiration.

_______________________________________________

Marketing Management - Philip Kotler

Mr. Kotler is often heralded as the father or modern marketing. For a very good reason. This book was handed to me by my first boss back in 1990. It was this book that made me choose to study marketing, and this book that made me want to know everything I could about it. It is a bit of a brick, normally used as a textbook in colleges and universities. which might make many back away from it in a normal bookstore.
But there are no two ways about it. Unless you plan to hire outside marketing consultants and firms to do it for you. This is the first book you should buy. It works as a reference, as inspiration when you need to think in new ways. And it serves as my anchor when I start feeling out of ideas.

It is one of the books i would strongly suggest you buy. Even though it will be available in most libraries.

_______________________________________________

Disclaimer: I do make a percentage of sales generated through the ad listed here. So from a personal perspective, i would naturally like to see sales being generated from it.
However, The reading suggestions in this article are meant for Business men and women as a resource. So my suggestion is to get the book any way you can, at the best price you can. Or simply borrow it at the local library.

I received an email today from a man, (the disclaimer at the bottom of the email clearly states that I was not allowed to discuss the content by the way) So, I won’t mention either his name or the company. I will however take my chances and tell you what his point was. Let’s just call him Mr. T. Rex

He sells mass email lists, and was fairly upset at what I said about direct marketing approaches in the “Extinction of Dinosaur Marketers ” Series.

I quote…

"If my services make more money than it costs, where do you get off claiming that it’s a bad idea! I sell exceptionally well targeted lists, with superior quality prospects that are handpicked for every customer, We have a higher conversion rate on our lists than our competition. Who the (expletive deleted) are you to say that we’re dinosaurs?” You’re nothing but a…
(I’m cutting it here because I want to keep this blog at least PG-13)

—

Well Mr. Rex, it’s easy… It’s the other conversion rate I’m really interested in. You see, I consider potential customers as being on a fence; you have to pay equal attention to how many you push down the other side as you do to the ones that jump down your side. The ones that don’t buy aren’t completely unaffected; they might be turned away too.

What I want to hear about is – How many of the ones that didn’t buy did you turn off in the process?
I’d be better inclined to like it if the list wasn’t targeted at all. Then at least you wouldn’t be turning away your exact target segment by giving them a negative connotation to your company.

If you convert X%, but give as many a bad taste, you just lost out in the long run. Your target segment isn’t going to grow fast enough for you to pick a marketing approach which potentially damages future sales.

Now tell me how drying up your potential customer pool is a risk worth taking?

I do however thank Mr. Rex for taking the time out to email me his thoughts; it’s always interesting to see what the other side of the coin looks like.

Can You Do ONE PERCENT Better?

Slow and steady wins the race, but this is a little mental trick to achieve that faster than you think.

It’s the one percent rule. It works because compounding that 1% makes it incredibly powerful. The one percent mindset breaks down those major goals into very manageable concepts.

Each time you do something, do it with the intention of making it one percent better.

-        Writing a post, make it one percent better than your best post

-        Make it one percent better Keyword targeted

-        Increase your subscriptions with one percent

-        Make your comments on other blogs 1% better, giving you 1% more visitors

-        Make 1% better comments in forums

-        Participate 1% more in Social Media

So how effective is this?
Compounding daily over a year. 1% turns into 3854%

Applied on several levels, that compounding will impact every other level as well, resulting in some pretty serious numbers.

Let’s do the math on this

Start with your best day. On this day let’s assume you made a great post that got you:

200 total hits
2 new RSS subscribers
1 Trackback link

If you work every day on being one percent better, you will have 7,540 NEW readers on your post this time next year. That’s over 7000 NEW readers in that one day one year from today.

Total unique visitors in that one year… hold on. 740,000+

Say that you convert +1% of your new readers into RSS subscriptions every day. Which means that your subscriptions go up 1% (Win some-Lose some)
(My conversion rate is 3.4% so this is actually aiming low.)

That’s a total of 7584 new subscribers in a year.

You will have amassed about 3600 links in that year to your blog.

Now apply that to the value of your blog in terms of:

Pricing for advertising.
Number of clicks you are getting on your ads,
Total value of your blog

And you will see that in a year, your blog could be earning a decent income.

Is This Really Possible?

Well you are reading the proof. This blog has been online now exactly 85 days, and the numbers I am seeing are proving the theory. On average, my stats are up 1.1% per day. Yesterday was the first day my Alexa ranking went under 100,000 (62,215) to be exact. Yes it’s a spike, the average fluctuates. But the average increase holds true.

I’ve had horrific days too, when i couldn’t figure out what the…. happened. It’s all part of the daily grind of running a business

I am convinced that the determined, focused, and driven can make a living doing this. Use the tips and tricks I’ve given in the previous Blogpreneur Posts, and you should be able to make a very decent living without doubt. Just remember that it won’t be tomorrow.

You’ll have great days, and not so great ones. But the sooner you pick your start date, and plot the one percent rule on a chart, the sooner you will be able to focus on what really matters.  - Steady improvement.

Go out there and get your 1% today