Get More Clients Online

Book Review - Get Found Now! Local Search Secrets Exposed

This is an amazing resource to make local search easy!

I just had the pleasure of reading "Get Found Now! Local Search Secrets Exposed: Learn How to Achieve High Rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing (Volume 1)" and was quite impressed with the info found within.  Local search is something that every business with a geographically-based target market should immediately implement on their website.  Without local search, these businesses are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in lost opportunities.

The instructions were very clear, concise and easy to implement, and the illustrations make the directions almost foolproof. I've taught a local search seminar, and Evans and Geasey presented information that was new even to me.  I love it when I can add yet another strategy to my marketing kit!

What I found especially impressive is that this book is on the cutting edge of mobile marketing, or marketing by cell phone.  They offered cutting-edge directions and information about the best ways to get your business found when someone is seeking local info about a particular kind of business and how to get yours to show up in this search.

If your business has a website and you market to a local audience, run, don't walk to Amazon to buy a copy of this book.  It'll be the best investment you make in your business this year!

The Forgotten Hurricane

I had the joy of attending a book signing this weekend by an author who's near and dear to my heart, Joyce King.  She lives in Dallas, and I first became acquainted with her when I read her first book published in 2003 called Hate Crime about a racially-motivated death that happened in my hometown of Jasper back in 1998. 

I wasn't living in Jasper at the time of the incident, but moved there about the time that the trials began for the 3 men who had been arrested for the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr.  I found her book to be a pretty fair portrayal of my hometown and of the trial and not prone to racial sensationalism as was the first book published about the ordeal. The great irony about her book is that she's an African-American, like the victim of the crime, and she cast Jasper in a favorable light.  Conversely, the author of the first book written about Byrd's death is Caucasian and painted a picture of Jasper as a hate-monging redneck town that never forgave or forgot the Civil War.

This past Saturday was the launch party of Joyce's third book, Forgotten Hurricane:  Conversations with My Neighbors. It's a painful read at times, as she tells true stories of how Southeast Texans and Southwest Louisiana residents coped with Hurricane Rita. There are two stories of bus drivers who endured a 50-hour trek (without a break) from Beaumont in an attempt to evacuate those without other means of transportation.  There are stories of brave Southeast Texans who lost everything in the storm and are determined to rebuild.  There are stories chronicling the utter frustration and anger of those in emergency management who were trying to cope with a situation like none of them had ever previously experienced at a time when all the local (and many national) resources had been depleted as Southeast Texas took care of tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees a mere two weeks before the landfall of our very own hurricane.

There's no finger-pointing in this book, merely stories of bravery and resiliency. If you want a real life view of what happens and what people think during a natural disaster, pick up a copy. And, if you happen to buy it, check out Chapter 14, featuring my brother, Jamie Gunter, as one of the Dukes of Newton.

"Get More Business" ebook from the Women's E-Commerce Association

Heidi Richards (Publisher and contributing author) and 21 members of the Women's ECommerce Association, International, (www.WECAI.org) have published a FREE eBook, Get More Business, that is filled with strategies to grow your business online and offline.

Here's what Jay Berkowitz, author of Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing had to say (he wrote the foreword for the book):
"The internet is exploding. It is exploding among users, over 70% of Americans now use the internet and over 40% have high speed access. It is exploding for business. Over $150 Billion of retail transactions will be conducted on the internet in 2006 and over 120 Billion searches will be conducted. Unlike marketing in the past, when you are marketing your businesses on the internet you can target web searchers looking specifically for your goods and services, and you can utilize specific strategies to build a permission based business relationship with these visitors to your website. Heidi Richards, and the members of the Women's eCommerce Association have written a great set of articles on the leading strategies and tactics for driving more traffic to your website, and converting those visits to leads or sales.?

To read all about it and to download your complimentary copy, go to http://www.wecai.org/get_more_business.asp

And while you're there, join the organization, subscribe to their newsletter, or join a Wire-Side Chat. I'm a member, and Heidi provides great information and resources.

A Marketing Plan for Life

If you're still trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up, then A Marketing Plan for Life is for you!  I loved this book, reading it in one sitting late last week.  The aspect of it that I found so appealing is that it involves life planning using marketing principles and analogies. 

As a business owner, I can easily relate to marketing my business (in fact, I LOVE the challenge of marketing), and creating life planning strategies based on marketing principles is just sheer genius! Bobby Fried tells many of the same stories that I do when I train and teach the marketing segments of my coaching program, so in many ways the approach felt very comfortable and familiar. 

What is especially poignant in this book is the fact that Fried found the writing of the book cathartic.  He discovered the falsehoods that he was living in his own life that were out of kilter with his authenticity and chose to work the plan as he wrote about it.

I emailed Fried and told him how much I loved this strategies and asked him if he were interested in licensing his content for me to do presentations.  Much to my surprise, he called me immediately and we discussed some possibilities.  Stay tuned to see what develops! :)