Book picks similar to
The Content Advantage (Clout 2.0): The Science of Succeeding at Digital Business through Effective Content (Voices That Matter #2) by Colleen Jones
marketing
entrepreneurship
mkt-437-book-club
business
Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities
David Airey - 2009
But David Airey’s “Logo Design Love” is something different: it’s a guide for designers (and clients) who want to understand what this mysterious business is all about. Written in reader-friendly, concise language, with a minimum of designer jargon, Airey gives a surprisingly clear explanation of the process, using a wide assortment of real-life examples to support his points. Anyone involved in creating visual identities, or wanting to learn how to go about it, will find this book invaluable. - Tom Geismar, Chermayeff & GeismarIn Logo Design Love, Irish graphic designer David Airey brings the best parts of his wildly popular blog of the same name to the printed page. Just as in the blog, David fills each page of this simple, modern-looking book with gorgeous logos and real world anecdotes that illustrate best practices for designing brand identity systems that last. David not only shares his experiences working with clients, including sketches and final results of his successful designs, but uses the work of many well-known designers to explain why well-crafted brand identity systems are important, how to create iconic logos, and how to best work with clients to achieve success as a designer. Contributors include Gerard Huerta, who designed the logos for Time magazine and Waldenbooks; Lindon Leader, who created the current FedEx brand identity system as well as the CIGNA logo; and many more. Readers will learn:• Why one logo is more effective than another• How to create their own iconic designs• What sets some designers above the rest• Best practices for working with clients• 25 practical design tips for creating logos that last
Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time
Maria Veloso - 2004
Simply put, what works in the brick-and-mortar world does not necessarily grab Web shoppers. Companies selling products and services online need to promote their wares with engaging copy that grabs attention and compels Web site visitors to buy.Web Copy That Sells presents copy strategies that have been proven time and again in the e-commerce arena. Maria Veloso, perhaps the most widely acclaimed Web copywriter in the world, reveals her revolutionary approach based on five simple questions, which, when answered, make the copy practically write itself. Veloso crams all the information from her 12-hour, $997 live seminars into a comprehensive book that will help any Web copywriter:* write sizzling and irresistible Web copy, e-mails, and marketing communications* quickly turn lackluster sites into ""perpetual money machines""* use Neuro-Linguistic Programming and psychological tactics to compel Web surfers to buy* avoid the top three blunders that can wipe out your sales* convert up to 50% of online prospects into paying customers* and more!"
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal - 2013
Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.Eyal provides readers with:• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.• Actionable steps for building products people love.• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.
The Story Engine: An entrepreneur's guide to content strategy and brand storytelling without spending all day writing
Kyle Gray - 2017
Your story is the most powerful asset you have at your disposal. It can cut through the noise and connect you with your customers. Content marketing is one of the most affordable and powerful digital marketing tools available to tell your story at scale. Maybe you’ve considered content marketing to tell your story, but instead of opportunity, you see setbacks. Creating content takes a lot of time and energy. How is it that some entrepreneurs can produce tons of content, run a business, and still have time to relax with their kids at the end of the day? The Story Engine provides you with a clear, concise, and actionable strategy to reap the benefits of inbound marketing. Inside you’ll learn: • How to set yourself up for content marketing success early, and how to avoid common pitfalls • Content strategy for both B2B and B2C businesses • How to use content as an influencer marketing and relationship building tool • Simple metrics to understand how your content is performing • How to use brand storytelling and transparency to drive growth for your business • Simple guides to use SEO, email automation, and paid traffic to support your content strategy and convert visitors into customers • How to automate and delegate time-consuming parts of creation, and still feel secure knowing that your content fits your unique brand. All without breaking your budget. This book also includes easy-to-use content marketing templates to help you take action right away and to get the results you want. Available free at thestoryengine.co/resources.
Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel
John Carlton - 2002
Hooks, Killer Salesmanship, The Function of Seduction, and Operation Moneysuck...
The Rejection that Changed My Life: 25+ Powerful Women on Being Let Down, Turning It Around, and Burning It Up at Work
Jessica Bacal - 2021
Featuring fascinating interviews with more than twenty-five women, including Keri Smith, Angela Duckworth, and Roz Chast, The Rejection That Changed My Life provides an exciting new way to think about career challenges, changes, and triumphs. Rejections don't go on your r�sum�, but they are part of every successful person's career. All of us will apply for jobs that we don't get and have ambitions that aren't fulfilled, because that is part of being a working person, part of pushing oneself to the next step professionally. While everyone deserves feel-better stories, women are more likely to ruminate, more likely to overthink rejection until it becomes even more painful--a situation that the women in this collection are determined to change, and in so doing, normalize rejection and encourage others to talk about it.Empowering and full of heart, the stories in this collection are diverse in every sense, by top women from many cultural backgrounds and in a wide variety of fields; many of their hard-earned lessons are universal. There are stories from engineers, entrepreneurs, activists, comedians, professors, lawyers, chefs, and more on how they coped with rejection and even experienced it as a catalyst for their own personal professional growth. Powerful, motivating, and endlessly quotable and shareable, The Rejection That Changed My Life will become the go-to book for women at any stage of their career learning to navigate the workforce.
Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
Lisa Cron - 2012
Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets--and it's a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper. The vast majority of writing advice focuses on writing well as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail--they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do: ignite the brain's hardwired desire to learn what happens next. When writers tap into the evolutionary purpose of story and electrify our curiosity, it triggers a delicious dopamine rush that tells us to pay attention. Without it, even the most perfect prose won't hold anyone's interest. Backed by recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as well as examples from novels, screenplays, and short stories, Wired for Story offers a revolutionary look at story as the brain experiences it. Each chapter zeroes in on an aspect of the brain, its corresponding revelation about story, and the way to apply it to your storytelling right now.
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
Darren Rowse - 2008
Whether you're just starting out or have been blogging for years, these two professional bloggers show you how to turn your passion for blogging into extra revenue. This practical guide to creating and marketing a blog with the potential for generating a six-figure income shows you how to choose subject matter that works for you, handle technical issues, and evaluate your blog's success so that you can use your blog to generate income indirectly.
Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School
Philip Delves Broughton - 2005
Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviest entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokerage houses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS to groom them for future power. To these people and many others, a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights of American business.In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join nine hundred other would-be tycoons on HBS's plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the best--and the rest--of American business culture that HBS epitomizes. The core of the school's curriculum is the "case": an analysis of a real business situation from which the students must, with a professor's guidance, tease lessons. Delves Broughton studied more than five hundred cases and recounts the most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprising pleasures of accounting, the allure of beta, the ingenious chicanery of leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workings of the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarity reminiscent of Liar's Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings of b-school culture, from the 'booze luge' to the pandemic obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression that stalks too many overburdened students. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, work/life balance.Published during the one hundredth anniversary of Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richly detailed and revealing you-are-there account of the institution that has, for good or ill, made American business what it is today.
The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
John Maeda - 2006
We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.Maeda—a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on.Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Jake Knapp - 2016
And now there’s a sure-fire way to solve their problems and test solutions: the sprint.While working at Google, designer Jake Knapp created a unique problem-solving method that he coined a “design sprint”—a five-day process to help companies answer crucial questions. His ‘sprints’ were used on everything from Google Search to Chrome to Google X. When he moved to Google Ventures, he joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky, both designers and partners there who worked on products like YouTube and Gmail. Together Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz have run over 100 sprints with their portfolio companies. They’ve seen firsthand how sprints can overcome challenges in all kinds of companies: healthcare, fitness, finance, retailers, and more.A practical guide to answering business questions, Sprint is a book for groups of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.
Breakthrough Advertising
Eugene M. Schwartz - 1966
This is not a book just for copywriters and other advertising experts but a book for every business owner, marketing expert or anyone who needs to increase sales.The reason why is because it deals with how to channel the forces in the marketplace which control sales.Put simply, Gene's book addresses the universal problem of all copywriting: How to write a headline — and an ad that follows it — that will open up a whole new market.
Fascinate: Unlocking the Secret Triggers of Influence, Persuasion, and Captivation
Sally Hogshead - 2010
It's more persuasive than marketing, advertising, or any other form of communication. And it all starts with seven universal triggers: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust.Fascination plays a role in every type of decision making, from the brands you choose to the songs you remember, from the person you marry to the employees you hire. And by activating the right triggers, you can make anything become fascinating.To explore and explain fascination's irresistible influence, Sally Hogshead looks beyond marketing, delving into behavioral and social studies, historical precedents, neurobiology and evolutionary anthropology, as well as conducting in-depth interviews and a national study of a thousand consumers, to emerge with deeply rooted patterns for why, and how, we become captivated.Hogshead reveals why the Salem witch trials began with the same fixations as those in "Sex and the City." How Olympic athletes are subject to obsessions similar to those of fetishists. How a 1636 frenzy over Dutch tulip bulbs perfectly mirrors the 2006 real estate bubble. And why a billion-dollar "Just Say No" program actually increased drug use among teens, by activating the same "forbidden fruit" syndrome as a Victoria's Secret catalog.Whether you realize it or not, you're already using the seven triggers. The question is, are you using the right triggers, in the right way, to get your desired result? This book will show you.
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Marty Cagan - 2008
The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, nearly every industry). Inspired covers companies from early stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don't)
Sean D'Souza - 2009
Your customers don't want to walk away. They want to buy from you. So how does the brain make decisions? And what causes it to get confused? The Brain Audit shows you how the customer takes decisions. And what you need to put in place, so that the customer feels happy to buy products or services from you. The Brain Audit isn't about persuasion or any mind tricks. Instead it shows you the information that your customers need in order to make a decision. It shows you how to present that information, and thereby enable the customer to intelligently go through a purchase sequence. The Brain Audit is designed to do the following: brain_audit_benefits 1) Enable you to spot every one of the 'seven bags' that are required to make a decision 2) Present those bags to the customer in the right sequence. 3) Enable you to get the customer to buy without needing to use pressure tactics.