Web Marketing That Works – Book Review

As many of you already know, because I keep Tweeting and posting about it, I have been a big fan of the great free content that Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins give away on their website at BlueWire Media, so when I was given the opportunity to grab a pre-launch copy of their new book, “Web Marketing That Works”, I jumped on it! So here is the long-awaited review of the book, and ebook.

Summary

If you are at all serious about marketing your small business on the web, you need to get hold of this book now, it will be the best $30 or so you will ever spend on your business marketing and promoting. You can pick up the softcover version from Wiley Books online, the ebook version from Amazon, or if you are lucky enough to live in a town which still has an actual bookstore, ask them to get in a copy for you, the ISBN is 9780730309277, you won’t regret it!

Full Review

The book is available in both softcover and Kindle ebook versions, the version that I bought and am reviewing here is the softcover one, but I understand that the content is identical, the only difference is in the format and pricing. The book is 15 x 23 cm, which is the best format for softcover books in my opinion, easy enough to carry around with you, but still large enough to read comfortably. It is no coincidence that the book that I co-wrote last year, “Social Media Marketing”, was also released in the same size.

“Web Marketing That Works” is 230 pages long, plus another 34 pages of intro, acknowledgements, etc, and has already brought in some testimonials from a veritable Who’s Who of online marketing. The book tells the story of BlueWire Media, from its inception in 2005 until today, when the BlueWire Media blog, and Adam’s regular column in StartupSmart are both permanent fixtures in the list of Top 20 Australian Blogs, so what you are getting here is not theory written by someone who hasn’t actually done any real marketing, you are getting solid information from two average Australian small business owners, written for average small business owners.

The style is typical Aussie, casual but professional at the same time, and they are not afraid to poke fun of each other, or reveal some of their epic failures as well as the successes. Like the time that they posted an innocent enough question on their Facebook page: “What was the last movie that you watched?”, and one fan went into graphic detail about the porno movie that he had just watched. Or their first email newsletter when they sent out around 700 emails to their list, all starting with ‘Dear Adam’!

So what you are getting is a simple roadmap for web marketing that works, laid out for you one step at a time, covering everything from how it all works and fits together, to a marketing strategy covering building your own website, content creation and blogging, video, audio and graphics publishing, email marketing, marketing metrics, getting your website found by the search engines and fans, through to detailed explanations of the various social media platforms and how to best approach each one from a marketing point of view.

Bonus

As you can see from the cover shot above, one of the bonuses included in with the book is not one or two, but thirty-three business and marketing templates, so you are not only reading how to take each new step, they have templates available to actually show you what to do next. Most of them are simple fill-in-the-blanks forms, so there is no excuse for missing a step. Some of these templates you may already have seen, because they are some of the templates that I have been Tweeting and posting about in the last year or so, but now you will have all of them available in one handy zip file, ready to follow along with each chapter of the book. Just unzip the file, print out the pdf files and fill them in. The only way it could get any easier is if Toby or Adam came around and filled in the forms for you, but they would probably want too much money for that!  🙂

So, as I said in the summary above, this is a must-buy if you are at all serious about marketing your business online, and if you are not, then you should be because web marketing is the way of the future, and “Web Marketing That Works” is the best book I have read so far for small business owners to get their head around the topic. Go get it now.

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Terry Chadban

Been marketing online since 1985 and still learning every day! Love travelling, seeing new places, trying new food and meeting new people.

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