The Book Reviewer

The Sticking Point Solution by Jay Abraham

While I can’t tell you exactly what my favorite business book is, I could easily place “The Sticking Point Solution” in the top 3. Jay’s first book titled “Getting everything you can out of all you’ve got” would also be a top 3 for me. This book is all about strategy and growing your business in tough economic times with little or no capital. It’s one of those books you want to read over and over again. At least twice a year and maybe three times.

Here were my favorite points:

• One of the best ways to maximize your time is to do only things that you can do. If someone else can do it, or do it better, then delegate.
• Marketing provides the highest leverage point of any investment in your business.
• All marketing should be measured.
• Everything needs to provide a positive ROI. Most people attach ROI to marketing, but Jay believes ROI should be tied to all expenses including purchasing new computers or hiring new people.
• You don’t have to spend money to make money. This was a point Jay spoke about often and used many examples where his clients grew their business without any monetary investment. One common way is through joint ventures. This is where you develop a partnership with a company that is in your field, but not a direct competitor. Then you pay that company on a performance basis for the new business they send your way. As an example, I have a joint venture partnership with a web design firm in the legal industry. They send me SEO clients and I give them a referral fee based upon how much the client spends with me. This is great for both parties because:
• I only pay for the new business I receive.
• They receive compensation for the new business they send my way.
• The best type of marketing is performance based marketing. Continuing on the point above, hiring people or purchasing advertising on a performance basis should always be the goal.
• The best time to grow a business is in tough economic times. Why?
• Your competitors are scared and struggling. They are cutting back on marketing or spending money on marketing that isn’t producing a good ROI.
• You may have opportunities to buy out your competitors at a great price or hire away key salespeople or employees.
• There may arise opportunities to perform joint ventures with your competitors where they continue with the selling and you fulfill the shipping (as an example). The point is to utilize your strengths and theirs.
• Optimize first, innovate later. My last book about landing pages talked a lot about innovating first, then optimizing later. But with businesses, the most effective way to grow your business is to optimize first (make the most of what you have), and innovate (completely change your business model, products…etc) later.
• What’s the lifetime value of a customer? Let’s use MojuProject.com as an example…. We sell t-shirts for $25. It’s possible that our total cost to obtain a new customer is $30 including the t-shirt. Some people would say that we lose $5 each new customer. However, if each customer buys more than one shirt throughout the year, then we’re actually making a profit. That’s why it’s important to track how much a client is worth to your business (both lifetime value and yearly value).

Those were just some of the points that this book covered. It’s really a must read!

Life of the Beloved
by Henri J.M. Nouwen

One of the great challenges for Christians throughout the years has been finding a way to connect with non-believers.  Many can relate with people based on past experiences, but fall short of being able explain the mysteries of the Christian life.  Life of the Beloved attempts to bridge the gap between living a life as a beloved child of God and living in the secular world that teaches you to strive an become someone.

This book was the result of two things, a deep friendship and a challenge.  The deep friendship started when Henri was a professor at Yale and was being interviewed by a young, vivacious man named Fred Bratman.  The interview quickly went from Fred asking the questions to Henri trying to understand why this young boy was about to give up on his dreams.  Henri invited Fred to be his apprentice for one year while Fred worked on his dream, writing a novel.  From that moment on a friendship began to develop that would permanently impact the direction of them both.  Henri continued to study the bible and teach at Yale.  Fred didn’t complete his novel, but did graduate, got a nice job, moved to New York, got married, got divorced, and so on.

Throughout the years Fred became more and more controlled by the world around him.  He struggled to find joy in anything he did.  One day when Henri was visiting New York he was presented a challenge.  Fred asked him to explain what it was like to be a Christian, to understand whom this “God” was, what it meant to be in a relationship, and why he should care to even try.  Henri’s book Life of the Beloved is an answer to that challenge.  He decided to write the book as a long letter to his friend.  In hopes that he would at the very least be able to reach the one person he had grown so close with over the years.

Henri broke down the life as a Christian into four categories, Taken, Blessed, Broken, and Given.  He breaks down each category and tries to explain things on a level that anyone can grasp.   When he talks about being “Taken” he explains and challenges his dear friend.  Attempting to communicate to his dear friend the importance of each key element he says things like “We have to dare to reclaim the truth that we are God’s chosen ones, even when our world does not choose us.” “What makes you resist such a deep and life-giving truth?”

Throughout the book Henri tries desperately to connect with his dear friend.  He tries to show him the power that God has given each person by embracing what is readily available to him or her.

Sadly, in the end, Henri is unable to reach the breakthrough that he longed for.  When Fred read the book he could understand what it meant to “reclaim the truth” and so on.  Henri wrote a book in an attempt to reach non-Christians, but realized that he would have to dismiss fundamental truths that he had lived with his entire life to be able to truly connect with the people he was so desperately trying to reach.  Even after reading the book, Fred felt that his friend hadn’t answered questions like, Who is God?, Why does he love me?, and What is a beloved?.

This book has broken down key elements of the Christian life in a way that it is easy for Christians to understand.  It is a short read, yet powerful.

My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising
By: Claude Hopkins

This is an excellent book written by one of the greatest copywriters in the past 100 years. His name is Claude Hopkins and these two books were written in 1924 and 1927.

The basic premise for this book is to “test everything”. You cannot know for sure if one advertisement will outperform another unless you test.

The value of testing – and testing small – cannot be understated. In fact, proper testing would greatly reduce advertising losses. Not sure which advertising opportunity proves the highest yield out of Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing PPC or Facebook ads? Why not test? Why not spend $50 on each and measure the results?

Once you have proven a profitable response from your target market, then you can spend a lot of money and be confident of the returns.

Start with principles – then test everything

With successful advertising there are basic principles and guidelines that improve your chances of success. Some of these principles include:

- Show a picture of a person enjoying success with your product

- Provide coupons for free samples of your product

- Make specific claims about your product as opposed to general claims (e.g. our product reduces your cost by 43%)

- Write an enticing and benefit driven headline

These are all principles that guide successful advertising campaigns – but principles are just the beginning. Once you’ve outlined the principles with your ad, you need to test all the variables to determine the most profitable ad possible. For example:

- Which headline proved to be the most enticing?

- Which coupon outperformed the others?

- Which picture pulled the highest profits?

Double your chances of success

Mr. Hopkins was also a very hard worker. In fact, in his first 16 years of business, he would work every night of the week and all day on Sunday. His days started around 6am and would end around 12 at night. Claude believed that if he worked twice as hard as “the other fellow” he could double his chances of success.

This mentality proved to work as Mr. Hopkins brought in over $100,000 per year in most of his 30 years as an advertising professional (that’s equivalent to $2.4 million per year in today’s economy).

Here are a few more concepts that I learned in this book:

• Give them an offer they can’t refuse
• The best advertisements do not ask people to buy. The ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They city advantages to users…etc
• Make your failures small. Test using just a few hundred dollars. Once you have a proven concept, that concept will perform well whether you’re spending $100 or $100,000 on an ad campaign.
• The difference between one headline and another headline can be 8-10 times increased profit.
• Most people will spend very little to prevent problems – marketing “cures” is much more profitable.

This will be a beneficial read for anyone in marketing or sales. Even though this book was written 90+ years ago, most of the principles discussed are still relevant today.

Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve made the effort to increase my knowledge in the areas of conversion rate optimization (CRO). In short, CRO is the art and science of getting more people to buy from you, online. Your conversion rate is measured by the number of people who buy from you, divided by the number of people who visit your website. As an example, if 100 people visit your website, and two people buy, you have a two percent conversion rate (CR).

The beauty about CRO, is that you can boost your bottom line profits without spending any more money on advertising. For example, if I have two percent CR, and I double that CR to 4 percent, I’ve doubled my business without the increase in advertising costs. Now I can afford to spend more money on advertising, product creation or other marketing activities. I truly believe that CRO is one of the most valuable skill-sets an Internet marketer can obtain.

Honest Seductionwas a good book on the creation and enhancement of landing pages. Landing pages are simply the pages people visit after clicking a banner ad, email advertisement or search marketing ad for your company. While this book provided excellent insights, it was very repetitive. After purchasing the book I realized that the pages were comprised of blog posts from the previous few years. Nonetheless, I learned valuable thought processes that will help me in my future marketing efforts.

Here were my favorite points:

Innovation vs. Iteration

When you think about improving the CR for any web page, most people look at testing individual elements on a page (Iteration). For example, does one headline, color or image work better than another. While this approach can provide sizable improvements, the greatest increases are resulted when you completely change the landing experience alltogether (Innovation). Some examples would include:

• Changing all the copy on your landing page
• Using a three-page landing experience as apposed to a single landing page (or as the author’s would describe – a “plain old landing page” or POLP)
• Using a mini-site instead of a landing page
• Creating videos or flash presentations
• Adding a social network into your landing experience
• …etc

Using the concepts of innovation vs. iteration will no doubt help us improve our conversion rates on Moju Project (likely) more than any other factor.

A/B Testing vs. Multi-Variate Testing (MVT)

The author’s were very much in favor of using A/B testing vs. MVT. The reason being, A/B allows you to test fewer items on a page, and allows you to make conclusive decisions faster than testing hundreds of scenarios and variables, which is the purpose of MVT. I was very pleased to hear this as using an MVT program didn’t excite me. I was also pleased to learn that Google Website Optimizer was one of their recommended A/B split testing products.

Segmenting

Another ‘game changing’ tactic was segmenting your audience once they visit your page. With most landing pages, you may send 100 people to that single landing page, and 3-5 will convert into a customer. What have you learned about the other 95-97% that left your website without converting? Nothing, if you’ve used a single landing page. However, if you use a multi-page process, you can segment your visitors into various funnels and learn a lot about them even if they do not convert.

Overall, I learned a lot from this book, but I don’t think I would recommend it to my friends because of the length and repetition of their tactics and strategies.

Knockout Entrepreneur
By: George Foreman

Let’s admit it, most of us judge books by their cover.  Based on a quick glance of the cover of Knockout Entrepreneur, my preconceived notions of this book was that it would be very cheesy, riddled with boxing analogies.  Against my better judgment I decided to read it, I was intrigued to figure out how the heck George became so successful in the business world, no matter how corny it may be presented.  My pre-judgment was pretty far off. While George Foreman did correlate lessons learned in boxing to the business world to drive a point, but it was not overkill at all.  Half auto biography, half motivational / educational book, George Foreman knocked this book out of the ring, so to speak.

The epitome of an American dream, George Foreman, born in the ghetto of Marshal Texas in obscurity, goes on to become an Olympic gold medalist, two-time heavy weight boxing champion of the world,  preacher, and currently a multi-billion dollar earning Entrepreneur.   George Foreman was arguably one of the greatest boxers to ever live.  He now is known for the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine.  George has made more money wearing his apron promoting his grill than he did wearing his trademark red trunks.  Hard to believe that fact when he was accustom to getting multiple millions for each fight, but Its true, the George Foreman grill has sold over 80 million grills since its introduction in 1994.    The greatest aspect of this book is George Foreman’s positive spin and outlook on every subject covered.   After reading this book you are uplifted and refreshed with new vigor and focus.   George is an encourager, risk-taker, mentor, and giver in a world that often reflects the opposite.  He is defined by integrity and generosity rather than title and possessions.   A key point George teaches is that your greatest ROI is faith, family, and community.

The book overall was very well written, an easy read.  Knockout Entrepreneur covers topics in both business and personal life.   At the end of each chapter you have three to four “Knockout Ideas to Stimulate Your Success”.  These ideas are reminders of key points within the chapter you just read to help summarize what you just learned.  I would recommend this book to anybody who enjoys an easy, positive and encouraging read, especially entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs.

The Richest Man in Babylon
by George S. Clason

In the pages of history, there lives no city more glamorous than Babylon. Its very name conjures up images of gold, riches, and wealth. As far as recorded history is concerned, Babylon had the first engineers, astronomers, mathematicians, financiers and the first people to have a written language. In 1934, archeologist combed through the ruins of this ancient city and discovered many artifacts dating back 8000 years, including five fascinating clay tablets. These tablets contained the financial principals that this book is widely based upon. Babylonians faced very similar financial problems as we do today; debt, lack of saving, and poor investments to name a few. The Richest Man in Babylon is a simple and quick read. It is made up of several short stories that tell tales to back up its stated financial principals. Trying to tell tales as they were told 8000 years ago, the author writes the book in old English style. Here is an excerpt from the book, “Therefore, engrave upon the clay each thing for which thou desireth to spend”. It was hard to follow that type of English at first, but before I knew it, instead of asking my wife when dinner would be ready I would say “My dearest, when should thee expect to partake in fattening of thy stomach?”

One of my favorite and most practical short stories was the story called “Seven Cures for a Lean Purse”. This short story tells of a great dilemma. After several years of the King of Babylon financing the construction of the great canals and temples for the gods, the masses were unemployed and unable to support themselves. The laborers did not know how to make money without government employment. So the King commission Arkad, the wealthiest man in Babylon, to teach the masses on how to acquire and keep money. Each day for seven days Arkad offered up a new principal to teach and debate.

- Start thy purse to fattening: Every $10 you take in, you should put away $1.
- Control thy expenditures: Purchase only that in which you have means.
- Make thy gold multiply: Start to invest the money that you are saving.
- Guard thy treasures from loss: Only invest in ventures of familiarity.
- Make of thy dwelling a profitable investment: Make a wise home purchase.
- Insure a future income: Invest money into your retirement years to draw from.
- Increase thy ability to earn: Work hard, never stop educating yourself.

The financial lessons in The Richest Man in Babylon are somewhat elementary, but a solid reminder of the principals that we all need to learn or be reminded of. Over all I give this book a huge thumbs up. I especially recommend The Richest Man in Babylon to young people entering the work force or those who learn best from stories and examples versus black and white facts. Over two million copies have been sold, that should be a testament of the books broad appeal, buy 2 and give 1 away.

In July 1962, a scared 10 year old Ralph de la Vega departs Cuba to travel the 90 mile trip to America. . . . . alone. Now in 2009 Ralph is the President and CEO of AT&T Mobility. Using his vast life experiences and challenges, he writes the book Obstacles Welcome. Ralph begins the book with a brief look into his childhood and journey to America. He discusses all the obstacles he encountered in his life time that in hindsight, made him a stronger or more seasoned individual. The book is a very easy read with summarized key points at the end of each chapter. Ralph had an extraordinary life and accomplished a lot in the telephone industry. Therefore each time Ralph expresses a lesson learned he follows it up with an example from the cellular business. For me those examples were fairly interesting, but maybe not for all readers. That being said this book is still a great tool if you are a leader, or if you aspire to be one. In Obstacles Welcome Ralph discusses the importance of such things as integrity, credibility, teamwork, attitude, excellence, and vision for your life. If you want a basic guide on how to turn adversity to advantage in business and life, I would absolutely recommend Obstacles Welcome, by Ralph de la Vega.