Below is an Alphabetized list of a wide variety of popular business books. They mainly concern marketing your business or thriving on social media. Some of these books are a couple of years old, but still contain relevant information that can be slightly adjusted for today. Most are new. They are available for checkout to Chamber Members only. Each member is allowed to check out only one book at a time to allow as many people as possible to benefit from the Lending Library. Stop by the Chamber to check these books out for a month, or call and see if your title is available at 731-784-1842.
Marketing 3-4-5: The Business Owner’s Guide to Effective Local Marketing in 15-Minutes or Less
Effective marketing in just 10-15 minutes? Yep, seriously, this book will show you how without any experience… creativity is not required.
“I don’t have time… I’m not a techie… I don’t know where to start…“
Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming, and it doesn’t have to be expensive, but it must be done. When marketing is done well, it will transform your business.
Marketing 3-4-5™ starts with the 3 reasons you do marketing, the 4 reasons people choose to work with you, and the 5 ways they find you. This marketing plan approach you to:
- Understand the difference between advertising and marketing
- Avoid common and costly mistakes
- Utilize prompt-based templates to engage people with authentic content
- Tap into the power of your local connections to grow your business and support your community
While you may not become a marketing superstar or marketing ninja, armed with your two unfair advantages, authenticity and relationships, you and your community will #TakeBackLocal. Take advantage of content marketing for your business or organization.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd Paperback – May 5, 2018
To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn’t get done.
In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It’s literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it, you’ll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero.
Whether you’re just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth.
In this groundbreaking new book you’ll discover:
• How to get new customers, clients or patients and how to make more profit from existing ones.
• Why “big business” style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses.
• How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money.
• A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan.
• How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice.
• How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing.
• How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.
365 Days of Social Posts for Small Businesses: The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses Paperback – June 25, 2021
The vast majority of small businesses have insufficient content strategies to fully leverage social media to their advantage.
In order to thrive as a small business, it’s crucial to build a stand out brand across social media. If you are a small business owner and constantly wondering “what should I post on social media?” You are facing the tough world of social media that’s an absolute must in the competitive business industry. Owning a small business is one job and constantly thinking of creative and engaging content to post on social media is an entirely different job.
This completely comprehensive guide includes:
- A year’s worth of creative social media ideas specifically tailored to small business owners.
- Strategic explanations that dive into why these specific pieces of content are beneficial.
- Brand building techniques built into our unique content ideas that will help you establish a strong online presence as a small business.
Niche, Please!: How to Narrow Your Focus and Grow Your Small Business with Social Media Paperback – July 16, 2021
TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. These words are enough to strike fear in the heart of any established business owner over thirty-five. But there’s good news for entrepreneurs overwhelmed by social trends in digital media: you don’t have to be an expert in every platform, change your business model, or hire a marketing intern.
But this doesn’t mean your work is done.
You’ve already conquered the enormous challenge of building a successful company or small business. Now, it’s time to find your niche and own it. In Niche, Please!, Skyler Irvine shows you how to adapt your marketing strategy, meaningfully connect with your customers, and focus on the platform that drives results. Technology may have changed, but your story hasn’t. This book will show you how to build a lasting brand that survives downturns, capitalizes on opportunity, and thrives throughout change.
This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are Paperback – July 4, 2017
In the spirit of Gretchen Rubin’s megaseller The Happiness Project and Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss, a journalist embarks on a project to discover what it takes to love where you live
The average restless American will move 11.7 times in a lifetime. For Melody Warnick, it was move #6, from Austin, Texas, to Blacksburg, Virginia, that threatened to unhinge her. In the lonely aftermath of unpacking, she wondered: Aren’t we supposed to put down roots at some point? How does the place we live become the place we want to stay? This time, she had an epiphany. Rather than hold her breath and hope this new town would be her family’s perfect fit, she would figure out how to fall in love with it—no matter what.
How we come to feel at home in our towns and cities is what Warnick sets out to discover in This Is Where You Belong. She dives into the body of research around place attachment—the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities and increases our physical and emotional well-being—then travels to towns across America to see it in action. Inspired by a growing movement of placemaking, she examines what its practitioners are doing to create likeable locales. She also speaks with frequent movers and loyal stayers around the country to learn what draws highly mobile Americans to a new city, and what makes us stay. The best ideas she imports to her adopted hometown of Blacksburg for a series of Love Where You Live experiments designed to make her feel more locally connected. Dining with her neighbors. Shopping Small Business Saturday. Marching in the town Christmas parade.
Can these efforts make a halfhearted resident happier? Will Blacksburg be the place she finally stays? What Warnick learns will inspire you to embrace your own community—and perhaps discover that the place where you live right now . . . is home.
Contagious: Why Things Catch On Paperback – May 1, 2016
What makes things popular? If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?
Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He’s studied why New York Times articles make the paper’s own Most E-mailed list, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children.
In Contagious, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheesesteak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the most boring products there is: a blender.
Contagious provides specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread—for designing messages, advertisements, and content that people will share. Whether you’re a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.
This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See Hardcover – Illustrated, November 13, 2018
A game-changing approach to marketing, sales, and advertising.
Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.
Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation.
Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. Their tactics rely on empathy, connection, and emotional labor instead of attention-stealing ads and spammy email funnels.
No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it. Seth employs his signature blend of insight, observation, and memorable examples to teach you:
* How to build trust and permission with your target market.
* The art of positioning–deciding not only who it’s for, but who it’s not for.
* Why the best way to achieve your goals is to help others become who they want to be.
* Why the old approaches to advertising and branding no longer work.
* The surprising role of tension in any decision to buy (or not).
* How marketing is at its core about the stories we tell ourselves about our social status.
You can do work that matters for people who care. This book shows you the way.
13 Ways to Kill Your Community 2nd Edition Paperback – November 8, 2016
13 Ways to Kill Your Community is lively, full of personality, conversational, breezy, succinct, and fun. One can imagine readers seeking out information on boosting their local community sighing dutifully as they seek out material and then being relieved and delighted when what they find turns out to be as entertaining as it is informative. The information provided is sometimes startling and often positively revelatory. The anecdotes and examples are delivered with wit and a little bit of a dishy factor. But underneath all the fun is a clear breadth of experience, and a no-nonsense, practical approach to community building, which can be easily grasped. 13 Ways to Kill Your Community offers practical, implementable steps that can be taken to bring a moribund community back to life. This book delivers what it promises, and it does so with wit and warmth….
80 plus ideas to market your business.: A quick win, no-nonsense guide to marketing a small business. Paperback – August 2, 2021
Welcome to 80 plus ways to market your business. In this short marketing book, you will find many ways to help market your business. The key to this book, like most things in life, is to do. ‘Action’ will make every marketing idea presented in this book come to life. This book covers ideas for online, offline, in person, face to face, via email, social media, with video, images and more. So grab your copy and get marketing.
Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business Paperback – January 14, 2020
What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that.
Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business. Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis.
Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth.
In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.