Jason McDonald Ph.D.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small. This book attempts to take the reader through the whole process.

What are you selling, a product or a service? Who is your customer?(Please be more specific than "everybody".) A Business Value Proposition defines what you sell that they want. Why should a person buy from you? Come up with an elevator pitch; describe your business in one or two sentences. Do some market research, and see if there really is a market for what you are selling.

Are you selling Business to Business (B2B), or Business to Consumer (B2C)? The marketing will be different for each. Find your niche; the high-end or the low-end, value part of the market.

Your business reputation is extremely important. Keep an eye on review sites like Google or Yelp. A single upset customer online can do great damage to an otherwise healthy company. Consider advertising on sites like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, but don't do it because "everybody" is doing it. Are your potential customers going to be there?

All this time and effort spent on finding the best places to advertise will be worthless without some amazing content in those ads. The book looks at topics like keywords and search engine optimization, or SEO.

This book is very much worth reading for any marketing person, regardless of the size of the business. Don't try to understand the whole book in just one read. It has good information for all types of businesses.… (meer)

These days, it seems like everyone wants their ads to show up on Google's search results pages. This book goes through the whole process, step by step.

First of all, when starting the process of setting up your ads, you will be encouraged to advertise on Google's Search Network and Display Network. Stay away from the Display Network; they are two very different things. The Search Network ads will show up on Google's search results pages. Display Network ads will appear on YouTube, Gmail and on questionable sites whose only reason for being is to get clicks.

You, the business owner, pay Google every time someone clicks on one of your ads (that is how they make their money). You are interested in high quality clicks, that turn into a sale from your website. Keywords are very important. Be as specific as you can about the kind of customer you are seeking. Come up with, say, half a dozen "perfect" keywords, and set up a separate ad campaign for each. There are ways to measure, and analyze, just how well each keyword is doing. Don't be afraid to change, or delete, any ad campaign that is not working. Keeping it is only costing you money.

Along with positive keywords, there are negative keywords, like "cheap" or "free", that you will not pay for. Every so often, get online and make sure that your ads are running (don't just take Google's word for it). It is also possible to make sure that your ads will appear within the first four or five results on the results page. People who are searching using their smartphone will not go through pages and pages of results.

This book is not exactly a page-turner, but it is very much worth reading. The author does a very good job at making the whole process as painless as possible, helped by lots of screenshots. Any business, small or large, that wants to advertise online would do very well to start right here.… (meer)