Staying on top of your education should be a top priority for every entrepreneur. I like to stay reading to aid in my personal growth. The following are five books I’ve personally found to be useful and I would highly recommend for every entrepreneur who looks to launch a new product or service or to market an existing one. (these include affiliate links)
Growth Hacker Marketing
This book contains several actionable items that you can immediate include in your product launch and marketing strategies. The book itself is a fairly easy read and maintains a good pace. Thanks to the internet and the prevalence of social media, traditional advertising techniques are no longer the most effective means. This book goes through strategies that have been used by companies such as dropbox and hotmail to achieve explosive growth.
Launch
Like other books in this list–Launch compares marketing your product to a conversation with the customer and emphasizes that a conversation is bi-directional. This book can be a bit long at parts, but it contains a lot of practical knowledge about the stages of launching your product, including gathering questions/concerns from leads and keeping the dialogue going even after the product has launched.
Cashvertising
There was a ridiculous amount of print-specific information for a book that I’ve heard so highly recommended in online circles. However, I would still recommend it for online marketers. It breaks down effective ad formats, the proper use of headings, font choices, and a myriad of other things that I often overlooked when working on copy. I’d recommend skipping all the parts about bullets and headers at the very least.
The Conversion Code
This is probably the most ‘salesy’ book in this list, but it makes several very good points following the theme of marketing is a conversation. This particular book goes as far as the talk about calling leads as soon as possible after capturing their information. The strategies in this book aren’t as ‘scalable’ or ‘automatable’ as the strategies mentioned in Growth Hacker, but there’s still a wealth of information in this book about converting leads.
How to Write Copy That Sells
This book is a wealth of information and makes a great companion with Cashvertising. I plan on keeping this in my personal library as a reference manual when I’m writing any copy. Headlines, Bullet Points, … It’s all covered in this book. In particular, the author goes to great detail to introduce the concept of ‘risk reversals’ and offering guarantees to help close the lead.