They say… ”reading a good book can change your life and the way you see the world.” And they’d be right!
I really believe that books are the best source of knowledge ever known to mankind. You get to see other people’s perspective on something, their stories, wisdom, and how they live life. Reading books is one of the best ways to learn new things, and expand your mind.
But what about digital marketers and small-business owners? do they have to read books too?
As a business owner, reading books should be a vital part of your schedule. Why? because if you want your business to thrive and prosper, you’ll have to be constantly learning about new business strategies and reading about how other people live their life and run their business successfully.
However, not all books are created equal. Sadly, some books are just full of fluff and not worth your time. Your time is very valuable, and you should not waste it on useless books.
This is why I’m going to share with you my list of books that are worth your time, and that’ll forever change the way you do business (on or offline).
BY READING THESE BOOKS, YOU’LL LEARN:
- How to start, run, and grow a successful business
- How to identify people’s needs and wants, and fulfill them
- How to build real wealth, and make money while you sleep
- How to persuade people to buy whatever you’re selling
- How to improve the effectiveness of your advertising
- And why I love that particular book!
However, please don’t be like those people who just keep on reading books without any implementation whatsoever of what they’ve read. And they believe their life will change. It won’t.
With that being said, here we go…
1. Breakthrough advertising: How to Write Ads That Shatter Traditions and Sales Records
This book is probably the best copywriting book ever written, no words can really describe the true value of this legendary book.
The author of the book, Eugene M. Schwartz is arguably one of the best copywriters who ever lived. He’s a true genius when it comes to copywriting and writing ads. Moreover, many business owners, consultants, and marketers thank this book for helping them generate huge amounts of cold hard cash.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
I am a mail order copy writer who makes his living by producing results—in carefully-measured dollars of profit—from the written word. My income—my standard of living—depends bluntly and directly upon my ability to sell. And I have no salesmen to help me; no store-reputation to help me: no point-of purchase reminders, no discounts, no friendly sales clerks to give my products a push.
I sell, or do not sell, on the basis of one tool alone—my ad.
WHY I LOVE THIS BOOK:
Nowadays everyone is looking to learn the latest and greatest marketing tips and tricks, but in reality, if they really wanted to master the game of marketing and creating ads that resonate with their target audience, they should instead learn the fundamentals of marketing and persuasion.
… And that is what this classic book is all about—the fundamentals of copywriting that will forever keep producing great results, and that’ll never die.
Eugene Schwartz in this book literally shares with you the secrets and the success formula for guaranteeing that your ads will be profitable even before you launch them! he also shares plenty of classic and successful ads, and explains the reason behind their success, and how you can use their strategies into your own ads.
It’s a must read for any digital marketer or business owner that is serious about increasing the effectiveness of their ads, and growing their online business.
2. Rich Dad’s CASHFLOW Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom
Who doesn’t know Robert Kiyosaki?
The best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad (the #1 personal finance book of all time). He’s eye-opening ideas and are responsible for changing the lives of millions of people around the world who’ve read his book.
Before Robert Kiyosaki wrote his famous book – Rich Dad Poor Dad, no one really knew the secrets of rich people and what they’re we’re doing to keep increasing their wealth. Everyone was asking the same question: ”How do I get rich?”
Robert Kiyosaki’s short answer to that was this: build assets!
He discovered that the real difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people work on building assets that produce constant cash flow and poor people tend to focus on build liabilities that keep taking money out of their pocket.
Assets could be things like land, a house that you rent, your own business, etc. However, in the online world – assets could be things like your own website/blog, email list, product, etc. I call these ”digital assets”.
In short, if you want to master the game of wealth and financial independence, then you gotta to start reading Robert Kiyosaki’s books.
But today, I’m not going to talk to you about his famous book Rich Dad Poor Dad… Instead, I’m going to talk about another great book from his collection called – Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant: Employee, Self-employed, Business Owner, or Investor… Which is the best Quadrant for you?
The main idea from his second book is that people typically earn money using one of the 4 primary ways (employee, self-employed, business owner, or investor). In fact, I believe those are the ONLY ways people can earn money with. So you typically fall into one of those categories.
Here’s an excerpt from the book to give you an idea of what this book is about:
Each of us resides in at least one of the four quadrants of the CASHFLOW Quadrant. Where we are is determined by where our cash comes from. Many of us rely on paychecks and are therefore employees, while others are self-employed. Employees and self-employed individuals reside on the left side of the CASHFLOW Quadrant. The right side of the CASHFLOW Quadrant is for individuals who receive their cash from businesses they own or investments they own.
WHY I LOVE THIS BOOK:
If you see around you, you’ll realize that most people fall into the ”employee” category of the cashflow quadrant.
According to Kiyosaki, anyone who wants to be rich and financially free needs to focus on being either a ”business owner” or an ”investor.”
This book was really an eye-opener for me, because I feel that it really showed me exactly what I needed to do to become a successful business owner and investor.
I can’t recommend this book enough, it’s one of the best books I ever read.
3. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex
You’re probably thinking, ”Wait a minute… What is this? this is not related to business or marketing?
I know, I know. This book is not your typical business or marketing book. You won’t find any advice that has to do with business. This is the #1 best-selling relationship book of all time and it was specifically written for people who want to understand the opposite sex in order to better get along with their partners.
But if you can read between the lines, then this book can possibly change the way you do business. How?
Well, If I’m not mistaken – you’re probably already marketing your products and services to both men and women, and you’re most likely using the same formula, ad copy, and marketing message to advertise to both genders.
But this is not good. Why? Because men and women think differently. They’ve different needs, goals, dreams, and desires. Thus, your marketing message needs to put that into consideration.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
One of the biggest differences between men and women is how they cope with stress. Men become increasingly focused and withdrawn while women become increasingly overwhelmed and emotionally involved. At these times, a man’s needs for feeling good are differ ent from a woman’s He feels better by solving problems while she feels better by talking about problems. Not understanding and accepting these differences creates unnecessary friction in our relationships.
WHY I LOVE THIS BOOK:
This book by John Gray, Ph.D will help you understand the differences between men and women. (hint: they’re a lot more than you think). When I first read this book, it was really eye-opening, a lot of time we tend to think that men and women are similar to each other, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
By reading this book, you’ll understand that men and women are very different and they live life differently, they have different needs, desires, behaviors, and goals.
… And this will dramatically help you understand how you can fulfill their needs with your products and services. As we all know the secret of marketing success is to give your target market what they want.
4. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
They say if you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.
We all have this tendency to ”multi-task” and do a lot of things at the same time. We all have more than ONE goal, but we make one mistake, and that is, we chase all those goals at the same time.
This book teaches you that if you ever want to achieve anything in life and to increase your chances of reaching your goal, you will have to forget about everything else, and focus entirely on just that ONE single goal or thing.
The author of the book Gary Keller is the owner of the largest real estate company of all time. So there is no doubt that he really knows what he’s talking about, and he has written a book that if full of actionable concepts that’ll help you focus on what matters most to you.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
If everyone has the same number of hours in a day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others? How do they do more, achieve more, earn more, have more? If time is the currency of achievement, then why are some able to cash in their allotment for more chips than others? The answer is they make getting to the heart of things the heart of their approach. They go small. When you want the absolute best chance to succeed at anything you want, your approach should always be the same. Go small. “Going small” is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most.
WHY I LOVE THIS BOOK:
In a world where we tend to think that everything is so complicated, difficult, and that if we want to reach goals that matter most to us then we have to to do extraordinary things.
…And that is untrue, because surprisingly–the secrets to high achievements and success are actually simple things, habits and behaviors that we do every day. And if we could slightly change those actions and behaviors – we could achieve extraordinary results.
This book opened my eyes to the fact that I don’t have to do a lot of things in order to reach my business and life goals, and that I ONLY need to do one thing at a time. (and that makes life easier!)
The book can be summarized in one sentence: focus on one thing (something that matters to you) at a time, and forget about everything else if you really want to achieve that thing.
5. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
In today’s world, there are many distractions fighting for your attention; things like texting, social media, and watching YouTube cat videos are distracting you from doing your work. Thus, the reason why you keep banging your head against a wall wondering why it takes you forever to finish what you’re doing.
This is especially true if you have a home-based business, your wife, kids, phone, etc will try to steal your attention, and you’ll end up doing less work.
It’s more difficult than ever to actually focus and concentrate on doing some deep work with all these distractions around you.
Cal Newport, Ph.D. , suggests that you need to eliminate all these distractions (email, texting, social media, apps, etc) when you’re trying to engage in ”focused work”, turn-off your phone, ask a friend to change your Twitter password and basically remove everything that you may feel will try to steal your attention when you’re trying to work.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
In his book Daily Rituals, journalist Mason Currey sorted through various sources on Jung to re-create the psychiatrist’s work habits at the Tower. Jung would rise at
seven a.m., Currey reports, and after a big breakfast he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office.Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.
The idea behind this book is that if you want to achieve more from your work, you’ll need to get into ”cave-mode”, so to speak.
WHY I LOVE THIS BOOK:
This book showed me that you don’t have to spend the whole day to accomplish your tasks. You only need a couple of hours of ”deep focused work with no distractions” to do most of your tasks.
In short, this book will teach how to get a lot of things done in the shortest amounts of time, the tactics and concepts shared in the book will drastically increase your productivity, and business results.
This is the best productivity book I ever read.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular beliefs, you don’t have to ”hustle” and word harder than the competition to grow your business and achieve more results. The books above will show you a more effective and easier way to do that, and the best part is, you’ll get to achieve more while doing, (yes you got that right)… less!
So what’s the book that you’re going to read next?