A Year Reading Seth Godin

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I say a year, but really it’s only 9 months, but I’ve still got a few books to read and I’ve only got 3 months to go (plus I’ll be reading the new Discworld shortly after Christmas – whether someone buys me it or not *hint hint*).

Anyways, I can’t believe how much I have learned – despite my previous knowledge of Internet marketing techniques and my business degree. Seth takes a concept, pulls it apart and analyses it and then puts it back together the way it should work. From coming up with great ideas, to spreading the word about your business to fixing your site so it is more user friendly – he really can apply himself to anything.

For those of you who don’t know Seth Godin, he is the founder of Squidoo and he was previously in charge of marketing at Yahoo (not sure what his title was, but he was at the top). I think all his books have been Amazon bestsellers, and he’s sold millions of books.

Anyways, if you’ve not read Seth Godin, or if you perhaps have and weren’t impressed, I’d like to recommend the books I think are worth reading:

To be honest though, some of the ones I didn’t find so useful, may actually be very useful for you, so it might be worth getting them all!

By the way, all those links to Amazon are affililate links, so if you do buy them I will get commission :) But really, you won’t regret it!

Anyways, if you would like to watch a video of Seth, try this one (I’ve only watched part of it, but it was pretty interesting)

Review of Net Words, written by Nick Usbourne

Posted by David Whitehouse

This book was the second book I have read on copywriting. The first book (which I got half way through) was more for offline print advertising – where as this book is specifically for online.

I must say I found this book difficult to get into and a long hard read. The book is written by a copywriter – but unfortunately they lack the ability to write text in a way that makes it easy for you to learn. With that said I did come away with an overall understanding of how I should write for the web – although there weren’t many explicit rules, it was one of those books where you either “get it” or you don’t (similar to some of Seth Godin’s books). Personally I feel that a good author should be able to take their knowledge and explain it simply – Nick doesn’t seem to be able to do that (like many copywriters). Which is a shame.

On the whole though – this book is definitely worth reading, and towards the end Nick does give some more useful, specific advice. I’ve also come to understand that the best way to learn how to copywrite is through split testing – which is what I plan to do from now on.

Overall I give it a 7/10.

If you are interested in buying a book on copywriting, then I would recommend this book:

A Review of All Marketers Are Liars

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve just finished reading All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. Well, I say “finished reading” but I should actually say “prematurely abandoned”.

I was reasonably satisfied with Permission Marketing, it had some reasonable advice, if not a bit waffly, but this book just had nothing useful to say.

It was boring, tedious and “just a waste of my ever more valuable time” as Seth would put it.

Can anyone recommend an author that perhaps can give me something more useful than “tell stories”?

Review of Permission Marketing

Posted by David Whitehouse

So I’ve just finished reading Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, after hearing his name mentioned so much over the past few months I decided I best read one of his books. Permission Marketing was really the book that seemed to make him – the first successful one.

I must say I thought the book was interesting, it talked about how most marketeers are interruption marketeers, whereas he was suggested that they should become permission marketeers. It had a few interesting ideas and some practical tips too, but on the whole the book did go on more than it had to in order to get the point across. Here is how I understood it:

If you do an advert and expect to sell to someone just from one advert then you get bad results, if instead you use the advert to begin a relationship with someone then you can teach them over time about your product, getting more and more trust, until one day you have permission to buy things on behalf of your customer. Amazon seems to be the best example he refers to.

In Internet marketing terms that means attracting people to your site, with the sole aim of getting them to subscribe to your email list/blog. Then over time teaching them and building their trust and then eventually selling to them.

It is also a bit of an old read now, this was before Google AdWords became popular and the big player seems to be Yahoo at the time. I would recommend reading it though as the principles still apply.

On the whole I’d give it 7.5/10. If you want to order the book, you can use the link below to take you to Amazon: