Connect: The Secret LinkedIn Playbook To Generate Leads, Build Relationships, And Dramatically Increase Your Sales


Josh Turner - 2015
    We go to networking events, meet associates for coffee, or maybe even email prospective clients, but it’s never quite enough. The challenge that faces us, and the problem with these activities, is that they don’t scale. The number of people you need to need to meet in order to advance your business, build your influence, and fill the top of your sales funnel is simply too many to handle. This book contains the solution. In Connect, Josh Turner lays out a step-by-step process to meet and connect with the people that matter to your business at scale. The techniques contained in these pages will teach you to use new tools and marketing channels to build relationships without being confined by time.

It's a Jungle in There: Inspiring Lessons, Hard-Won Insights, and Other Acts of Entrepreneurial Daring


Steven Schussler - 2010
    Drawing from his own life and business triumphs, Schussler offers would-be entrepreneurs a new way of utilizing creativity to achieve their dreams. Schussler distills his principles for entrepreneurs on a budget, and also reveals the ways in which his lessons-from self-branding to developing strategic partnerships to giving recognition where recognition is due-can work in larger corporations. Just like his famous themed restaurants, Schussler's insights provide entertainment, education, and ample food for thought for all business people aspiring to their next level of success.

Etsy Excellence: The Simple Guide to Creating a Thriving Etsy Business


Tycho Press - 2015
    This book provides actionable steps to help shop owners engage the Etsy community in authentic ways that attract buyers and generate sales. The best Etsy shops stand out among the sea of sellers and draw loyal customer bases, but how they’ve done it isn’t—and shouldn't be—a secret. In these pages, top Etsy sellers share the tools that have helped them, the changes they made that yielded positive results, and their best advice for achieving and sustaining a successful Etsy shop. Beyond sellers’ words of wisdom, this book offers a roadmap all sellers can follow in order to: • Choose keywords and tags to drive traffic to your shop • Photograph your products for maximum appeal • Create a unique shop that stands out • Write winning product descriptions • Price your goods appropriately • Market your products effectively on social media platforms • Maintain lasting relationships with your customers • Diversify your product offerings

The Nuclear Effect: The 6 Pillars of Building a 7+ Figure Online Business


Scott Oldford - 2020
    Its energy feeds other reactions, creating endless possibilities for self-sustaining growth. Imagine harnessing this kind of energy in business—what if you could create your own nuclear effect?It's easy to feel trapped when you start an online business, stuck in a tug-of-war between success and the requirements for continued growth. The more you progress, the more money you need. Your company's bank account mirrors your own emotions in a rollercoaster of inconsistency and instability—you've left the rat race, only to find yourself on a 6- or 7-figure hamster wheel.In The Nuclear Effect, Scott Oldford shows you how to free yourself from this cycle, scale a profitable, multimillion-dollar business, and keep the money you make. By following Scott's 6 pillars of sustainable growth, you will create the momentum your business needs to become an unstoppable force.

The Handmade Entrepreneur-How to Sell on Etsy, or Anywhere Else: Easy Steps for Building a Real Business Around Your Crafts


Dani Marie - 2015
     What if you could start your day out with an excited shout instead of a frustrated sigh? Unfortunately, selling handmade goods online is no longer as simple as throwing together a product listing and waiting for sales to roll in. There are now millions of people with handmade products and they are all eager to build a sustainable income. The Handmade Entrepreneur uses precise methods based on proven marketing techniques to set you above the competition. It teaches you how to create a genuine business you can count on rather than a bundle of shop pages and social media accounts built on a foundation of guesswork. What You Can Expect to Learn from This Book: • How to take DIY pictures that get clicks and sales • How to set up a shop that turns visitors into buyers in under two seconds • How to price your items • How to write titles and descriptions • How to brand your business with DIY techniques • How to rank your pages • How to find targeted audiences • How to build up your list of followers • Where to promote your listings • How to sell without selling • How to form relationships with people who can send you extra sales • How to start a "buzz" about your products • Which tools to incorporate into your business The goal of this book is to free you from having to rely on any third-party website for your sales. Yes, you can take advantage of platforms like Etsy, and you should, but websites come and go, and if all your sales come only from that website, you run into trouble every time there are algorithm changes, a saturation of sellers, or cheaper products to compete with. You are trying to generate sales, which means that you are trying to run a business, which in-turn means that you need a real business plan. Brick and motor stores don't just buy a bunch of goods, throw them in a building, and hope people will come. They plan, study their target market, pick a perfect store location, and prepare to market themselves. Just because you sell online does not mean that you can skip all of these steps. You have billions of products to compete with online and a crowd of shoppers who have an overwhelming number of options before them. You must prepare your storefront, get your products ready, know your audience, and then know how to market to them. Optimizing Your Shop for Sales Dani starts out showing you how to prepare your products with photos that attract clicks and sales. It doesn't just tell you how to do it, though. It SHOWS you. Thanks to the help of many carefully selected Etsy sellers, there are many example photos for each point. In addition to this, the author only shows you DIY photos to prove that you can do it all on your own. Next, Dani discusses how to optimize your shop. She goes through every aspect such as banners, profiles, descriptions, tags, and titles. You will learn how to optimize your pages so that people stay there instead of leaving instantly. This can be done by creating an inviting environment with images and content that buyers can skim through in under two seconds. If buyers can determine that your page is worth staying on in less than two seconds, you have won the battle. Finding Targeted Audiences and Marketing The issue with selling online is finding people who would be interested in your products.

Real Life Money: An Honest Guide to Taking Control of Your Finances


My Frugal Year - 2020
    Real Life Money is a holistic approach to personal finance that addresses the deeper causes of debt and financial difficulties.Part memoir, part guide, Real Life Money takes the reader on a journey that can be adapted to their own pace and circumstances. It will cover everything from how to negotiate repayment terms with creditors and setting realistic budgets without punishing yourself, to dealing with money anxiety.The goal is not to get rich overnight, or to pay off debt at the expense of all of life's pleasures, but rather to gain an understanding of why we feel the way we do about money, and how we can use that to change our mindset and our finances for good.

Launch Your Dream: A 30-Day Plan for Turning Your Passion Into Your Profession


Dale Partridge - 2017
    In Launch Your Dream, Partridge distills the essence of that course into a hyper-practical, 30-day journey for readers looking to follow their passions and realize their dreams. In clear, easily grasped steps, he teaches readers how to hone their ideas, build an audience, construct an online presence, launch a business, master social media, craft a beautiful brand, and create experiences that keep customers from ever considering competitors. Sharing time-saving "smartcuts" to make readers more efficient, Partridge also helps them identify and resolve business-killing blind spots.For anyone looking simply to make money on the side or seeking to become a millionaire, for the CEO or the stay-at-home mom, for the would-be entrepreneur or the freelancer, Launch Your Dream provides the steps necessary to begin living your dream in just 30 days.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business


Mikkel Svane - 2014
    Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea, and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional.Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three thirty-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. is now one of the hottest enterprise software companies, still rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined. With revealing stories both funny and frank, Mikkel shares how he and his friends bravely left secure jobs to start something on their own, how he almost went broke several times, how they picked up themselves and their families to travel across the world to California and the unknown, and how the three friends were miraculously still together for Zendesk's IPO and (still growing) success.Much like Zendesk's mission itself--to remove friction, barriers, and mystery in order to make customer service easier and more approachable--Startupland removes some of the myths about startups and startup founders. Mikkel's advice, hard-won through experience, often bucks conventional wisdom and entrepreneurial tropes. He shares why failure (whether fast or slow) is awful, why a seemingly boring product or idea can be the most exciting, why giving back to the community is as important as the bottom line. From how to hire right (look for people who are not offended by swearing) to which personas generate the highest response rates, Mikkel answers the most pressing questions from the perspective of someone still in the trenches and willing to share the hard truth, warts and all.While there are books by consultants who tell you how to build businesses, or by entrepreneurs now running billion-dollar businesses, there are few books from people still in the trenches who acutely remember the difficult daily decisions, the thrill (and fears) of the early days, the problems that scale with growing a business, and the reason why they all went on the adventure in the first place. Startupland is indispensable reading for all entrepreneurs who want to make their ideas the next big thing. The book will inspire and empower you to follow your own dream and create your own story.

Do Scale: A Road Map to Growing A Remarkable Company


Les McKeown - 2019
    It can increase your reach and future proof your business. But how do you scale ? And how does it differ from flipping for a quick profit or slower organic growth? Les McKeown advises industry leaders on how to achieve scalable, sustainable growth. In Do Scale, he draws from his decades of experience to provide a clear understanding of what's involved, and the strategies needed to take your business (or not-for-profit) to the next level. You'll find out: What it means to scale and if now is the right time; Why founders need to get out of their own way ; How to develop winning teams; Your secret weapon for decision making. With practical advice and clear guidance, Do Scale is an essential manual for anyone looking to grow a successful and sustainable organisation and turn it into something truly remarkable.

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success


Megan McArdle - 2014
    So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure.McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world’s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work. Drawing on cutting-edge research in science, psychology, economics, and business, and taking insights from turnaround experts, emergency room doctors, venture capitalists, child psychologists, bankruptcy judges, and mountaineers, McArdle argues that America is unique in its willingness to let people and companies fail, but also in its determination to let them pick up after the fall. Failure is how people and businesses learn. So how do you reinvent yourself when you are down?Dynamic and punchy, McArdle teaches us how to recognize mistakes early to channel setbacks into future success. The Up Side of Down marks the emergence of an author with her thumb on the pulse whose book just might change the way you lead your life.

Adaptability: The Art of Winning in an Age of Uncertainty


Max McKeown - 2012
    Strategy and innovation expert, Max McKeown, draws on millions of years of evolution to create a practical and strategic set of rules which take adaption from an involuntary coping strategy to a deliberate winning strategy.To show how adaptability works McKeown looks at a rich set of examples, problems and situations. He includes the 15-year old geneticist working from his basement, and the Italian town that said no to seemingly inevitable change. Along the way, he visits the adaptation of Western technology to the social structures of sub-Saharan Africa and explores how quantum games may solve the world's trickiest problems. He looks inside global corporations like Starbucks, Netflix and McDonald's to see how they flirt with extinction, create internal barriers to adaptation, and adapt to transcend their situation.Adaptability proves that innovation is important but not enough. Strategy, branding, marketing and operations are all useful, but insufficient. And highlights that the ability to adapt smarter and faster than the situation changes is what makes the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.

The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future


Steve Case - 2016
    At the time, only three percent of Americans were online. It took a decade for AOL to achieve mainstream success, and there were many near-death experiences and back-to-the-wall pivots. AOL became the top performing company of the 1990s, and at its peak more than half of all consumer internet traffic in the United States ran through the service. After Case engineered AOL’s merger with Time Warner and he became Chairman of the combined business, Case oversaw the biggest media and communications empire in the world. In The Third Wave, which pays homage to the work of the futurist Alvin Toffler (from whom Case has borrowed the title, and whose work inspired him as a young man), Case takes us behind the scenes of some of the most consequential and riveting business decisions of our time while offering illuminating insights from decades of working as an entrepreneur, an investor, a philanthropist, and an advocate for sensible bipartisan policies. We are entering, as Case explains, a new paradigm called the “Third Wave” of the internet. The first wave saw AOL and other companies lay the foundation for consumers to connect to the Internet. The second wave saw companies like Google and Facebook build on top of the Internet to create search and social networking capabilities, while apps like Snapchat and Instagram leverage the smartphone revolution. Now, Case argues, we’re entering the Third Wave: a period in which entrepreneurs will vastly transform major “real world” sectors like health, education, transportation, energy, and food—and in the process change the way we live our daily lives. But success in the Third Wave will require a different skill set, and Case outlines the path forward. The Third Wave is part memoir, part manifesto, and part playbook for the future. With passion and clarity, Case explains the ways in which newly emerging technology companies (a growing number of which, he argues, will not be based in Silicon Valley) will have to rethink their relationships with customers, with competitors, and with governments; and offers advice for how entrepreneurs can make winning business decisions and strategies—and how all of us can make sense of this changing digital age.

Allen Carr's Easy Way to Enjoy Flying


Allen Carr - 2000
    This title intends to remove the root of the fear, not just the symptoms and is packed with tips to help you on your next flight.

Start-Up Sutra


Rohit Prasad - 2013
    Through the true stories of two sets of people who braved the rough road, Startup Sutra presents entrepreneurship in its essence not a checklist to be crossed, but a vision to be realized; an iterative process of near-death experiences and incredible turnarounds that founders of businesses bravely navigate through a combination of chutzpah, sagacity and sheer brazen luck. In bringing to life the daily dramas, the struggles in the trenches, the battles with insatiable inner demons and impossible external odds on the journey to achievement, it enumerates, in wise words, the five qualities that entrepreneurs necessarily possess. For everyone who dares to dream big, this book will change your life.

The Value of Debt in Building Wealth: Creating Your Glide Path to a Healthy Financial L.I.F.E.


Thomas J. Anderson - 2016
    In The Value of Debt in Building Wealth, bestselling author Thomas J. Anderson encourages you to rethink that. You'll walk away from this book with an understanding of how you can use debt wisely to secure the financial future you envision for yourself and your family. Student loans, mortgages, lines of credit, and other forms of debt are all discussed in detail, with a focus on smart planning for those who are accumulating assets--and debt--now.Should you rent or buy? How important is liquidity? What is good versus bad debt? How much debt should you have? What debt-to-income and debt-to-asset ratios should you aim for? Fixed debt or floating debt? What's the best way of saving for college and retirement? These are big questions that deserve thorough answers because the choices you make now could influence the course of your life. This thought-provoking book will open your eyes to savvy financial strategies for achieving your goals faster and with healthier bank accounts.Explore strategies for smart debt management, explained by one of the nation's top financial advisors Gain an understanding of investment basics and key financial concepts you'll need to achieve your long-term goals Understand the risks of having debt and the potential risks of being debt-free Make financial decisions now that will maximize your wealth, freedom, and opportunity later This book is not about buying things you cannot afford. It is about liquidity, flexibility and optimizing your personal balance sheet. The Value of Debt in Building Wealth is full of ideas you can apply to your own situation--no matter what your current asset level. Read this book today and thank yourself later.