If you are an entrepreneur, you know that applied knowledge = results.

That little formula makes things easy for us.  If we want more results, all we need is more knowledge and application.  Simple.

Here is a list of the 100 Best Business Books Of All Time – these are must-reads if you want to succeed and develop more knowledge to apply.  It was Jim Rohn that said “Poor people have big TV’s.  Rich people have big libraries”.

I completely agree.

I also found a resource for you to get these (and many other books) for free.  Check it out:

http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php

We’re not affiliated with either of these sites, but we like ‘em both.  For getting free books, here’s how the program works:

- You ship out books to people who want your books.

- People ship out their books that you want.

It has a point system set up, so you basically get points by sending out books, and you use points to get books that you want from other peeps.  So if you have some books that you don’t like or will never read, why not trade ‘em in for quality books that you WILL read and apply?  (BTW, it works for more than just business books )

You may be saying “100 books?!  Where do I start?”

I’ve read most of ‘em on this list.  Here’s where I’d start for each category:

Self Improvement: “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Suess (seriously, I read this to my children…and myself…every week).

Leadership: “The Leadership Moment” by Michael Useem (9 great examinations of leaders in crisis moments.  Very insightful).

Strategy: “Only The Paranoid Survive” by Andrew Grove (Grove was the former CEO of Intel, shares his strategy in leading Intel through some of the most turbulent business times in history)

Sales/Marketing: “The Forbidden Keys To Persuasion” by Blair Warren.  It’s not actually on the list, because it’s not in print.  You may be able to find it in digital format, and if you can, spend whatever you have to get it.  Last I heard, Blair ws MIA.  Priceless work, IMHO.  For the list, grab Harry Beckwith’s Selling The Invisible.  Great stuff as well.

Rules And Scorekeeping: “The Balanced Scorecard” by Robert Kaplan & Peter Norton.  Great read on developing the metrics to measure the success of a strategy.

Management: “The Essential Drucker” by Peter Drucker. Phenomenal.  If you’ve never read Peter Drucker, go punch yourself now.

Biographies: “Titan” by Ron Chernow.  In case you’ve never read anything by Chernow, he has the uncanny ability to make history interesting.  This bio is on John Rockefeller Sr., founder of the Standard Oil company.  Fascinating portrait of the richest man in the history of the modern world.

Entrepreneurship: “Guerilla Marketing” by Jay Conrad Levinson.  Classic on developing a business with nothing but an idea and shoestrings.   Some of the tactics have changed, but the principles remain the same.

Narratives: “The Smartest Guys In The Room” by Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind.  Details the rise and fall of Enron.  Seriously interesting stuff, and good word to all you would-be stock investing trillionaires.  Shows you how a company can blatantly lie about earnings and revs while suckin’ in investing dollars by the hundreds of millions.

Innovation & Creativity: “A Whack On The Side Of The Head” by Roger von Oech & George Willet.  Been showing peeps how to be creative since before I was born.

Big Ideas: “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman.  Brilliant (great stuff in there for parents too).

Takeaways: “What The CEO Wants You To Know” by Ram Charan.  Thoroughly explains the building blocks of business.  Everyone thinks their business and situation is special – a one-of-a-kind snowflake phenomena that is complex and difficult to understand.  Not true.  Every business succeeds or fails based on a very short list of critical factors.  Charan does a very good job of spelling this out.

Extra Credit (These didn’t make the list for some reason – maybe the list will get updated at some point)

“Think And Grow” Rich by Napoleon Hill.  If you haven’t read it, just read it.

“The Richest Man In Babylon” by George Clasen.  Amazing fiction that spells out the principles of building true, long-lasting wealth (regardless of how much or little you make).

“How To Be Rich” and “As I See It”, both by J. Paul Getty.  Insightful, humorous, and very informative.  These are two of my personal favorites.

So here you go – a wealth of knowledge, plus a way to get ‘em for practically nothing.  If you have a great book you’d like to recommend, simply post it up in the comments below.  Enjoy!

It’s not everyday that you get to speak with the World’s Greatest Salesperson.  I happen to have the privelage of knowing him personally, and not only is he phenomenally gifted at what he does, but he’s a very down-to-earth, funny guy as well.

Check out the interview now (split it into two parts):

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This video is a tutorial on how fast and easy it is to incorporate autoresponder software on to your website:

Now, you may be brand new to online marketing, or you may be a seasoned hand.  Regardless, you should absolutely be using some sort of autoresponder software on your website, for three main reasons:

1. Database Building

Building a database is one of the most profitable things you can do for creating residual income and having a long-term asset.  At HBSA, we use always go into a new market with the mindset of building assets.  Different business models take different tools to execute, and our mindset has always been “long term”, and having a database is essential to building a long-term, profitable asset.

2. Automated Followup

Are you busy?  Got a lot going on? Yeah, we know.  We do too.  And the fact is that as much as we all love the “human touch” in business, humans make mistakes.  They overlook details.  The forget stuff.

And that’s why we love autoresponders so much.  We use this technology to take some of the “oops, it slipped through the cracks” out of our businesses.   It basically allows you to write up a series of emails that go out on an automatic “drip” timeline, so that each person who opts into your list gets a predictable, steady flow of content and information from you.  Helps to build relationships, and be of service to your clients.

3. Broadcasting

This is where you can send out an email to your entire list, just with a click of one button.  Makes sending out invitations to webinars and teleseminars a breeze.  It also allows you to advertise time-sensitive specials and updates to your list as you need it.  I sent out an email last week to over 126,000 people, and it took less than 15 minutes.

Here are some additional considerations when using an autoresponder:

1. Website

What is your website designed to do?  If you have an optin website (which you can build easily with Weebly) then an autoresponder works well.  If you have a blog, it works well.  If you have a corporate website, and no offer to give people who opt in, you probably won’t get much action.  Give people an ethical bribe (i.e., a good reason to opt in) and you’ll get better results.

2. Single Opt In Vs Double Opt In

This is a hotly debated topic in the permission-based marketing field.  Kinda like when you get a bunch of Mac fanboy’s in a room full of PC nerds, the inevitable argument can be well-stated and well-made by either side, and it’s ultimately a matter of opinion.

The process for a single-optin setup is:

Lead goes to website >>> Lead opts into autoresponder >>> Lead receives what was promised immediately upon first email

The process for a double-optin setup is:

Lead goes to website >>> Lead opts into autoresponder >>> Lead gets email from autoresponder asking lead to confirm their identity >>> Lead receives what was promised after they confirm their subscription

Email marketing purists argue that double optin helps keep spam rates low (sometimes true) and filters your most “serious” people up to the top.

Personally, I prefer single optin.  I prefer to let leads filter themselves.  Fact is, some people want what you have (they opted in already) but they won’t confirm a subscription.  Plus, those email confirmation messages sometimes get sent to the users spam filter…meaning they never even get a chance to double opt in.

I’m able to keep spam rates low by only sending broadcasts that contain value.  Seems to work ok for us

3. Setbacks

You’re going to have setbacks when using an autoresponder.  It’s a fact.  If you’re new to autoresponders, understand that it is definitely one of the most profitable tools you can introduce to your online marketing campaigns.  It’s also new – which means you’ll need to learn the system.  As goofs will occur, it’s important to understand the mindset for how to deal with setbacks.  At the same time, you can avoid a lot of the more common goofs by getting an autoresponder service that simply has quality training on how to use their products.

There are several autoresponder softwares available.  We personally like Aweber.com for autoresponder software.  They have the highest deliver-ability of any that we’ve tested (and we’ve tested a lot).   Feel free to test ‘em all out, but this is the autoresponder we use.

Questions? Comments?  Post ‘em up below.

Entrepreneurs make mistakes.  It’s our job.  We are pretty much professional mistake-makers.  So long as we learn from our mistakes (and don’t repeat them) it’s all good.  Everyone successful entrepreneur has built their success on big piles of fail.

However, there is one mistake in particular that I’m seeing more and more that is concerning, simply because of ramifications of this mistake.  I’ve watched a lot of business owners crash during this recession, many of which fell prey to this one mistake.

And that one big mistake is simply this:

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So you want to make money online? Good for you!  There are many ways to make it happen, and some are even fast, free, and fun.

But before we get into all that, we need to talk about an ugly truth that may seem obvious.  It is easy to overlook this seemingly apparent factoid when we are looking for ways to earn some income online.   Many choose to glaze over this truth, or ignore it altogether, and do so at their own peril.

It is simply this:

Making money in anything takes work. The Interwebz is no exception.

Do you work hard at your job?  I hope so.   Because to succeed in working from home, you’ll need to work just as hard for yourself as you have for any employer, and maybe even harder at the beginning.  The rewards are more than worth it, but it does take sweat equity…especially if you’re doing it on the cheap.

I’m going to give you some of the best ways to get started in making money online.  One thing that I want you to keep in mind is that making money online from home is not a fallacy or a myth.  Real people do it every day.  I’ve been making a killing online for a long time.   It’s a TON of fun, it’s interesting, and it doesn’t take technical genius to figure it out.  It does take some perseverance, a positive attitude, and some focus.

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Thanks to everyone for helping us to pull of a great training webinar!  We appreciated the opportunity to clear the air about AdWords, and how to structure a proper campaign.

Enjoy the recording below.  We also have some recommended resources below, and if you have any questions just let us know in the comments.

Marketing Sherpa – Compendium of case-studies, surveys, and online resources for marketers.

Pingdom – Checks your web page load time.

AdWords External Keyword Tool – Pure awesomeness.

I love getting emails that go something like this:

“Do I have to be ________ (talented, smart, brilliant, good looking, a technical genius, a great speaker, etc) to be rich / successful?”

The answer is no.

Most wealthy people are not that smart – and they are happy to admit it.

Many wealth people are not particularly talented – and they will admit that too.

The vast majority of wealthy people are not blessed with uncommonly good looks, a privileged background, or any other type of advantageous predisposition that would guarantee success, or even make it easier to acquire.

In fact, in my examination of the wealthy / rich / successful from the rest of population, there is really only two character traits I can observe that stand out:

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As an entrepreneur, you are going to encounter setbacks. They are a part of the game.

Bad news: Setbacks are practically guaranteed. Factor them into your business plan.

Good news: Setbacks will cause many of your competitors to quit (yeah!), and create new opportunities for personal growth.

As Napoleon Hill said:

“Every setback has within it a seed of equivalent or greater benefit.”

And that’s true.  Let’s take Pat as an example…

Pat is an HBSA student that has been advertising online for over a year now.  A couple weeks ago, he was slapped by the big G.

He had every reason to feel sorry for  himself.  After all, he’d been an advertiser in good standing with Google for a long time.  How dare they slap him!

But he didn’t go that route.  Instead…he slapped back.

And a scant 17 days later, he’s back to generating leads online.

That’s an HBSA record – going from slap to mac in 17 days.  I called him up and forced him to tell me what he did to make it happen.  He cordially agreed.  Here it is:

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There Is An Author Update To This Post – See Below

Aweber and InfusionSoft are both considered tools for automating your marketing.  Aweber classifies itself as more of a straight Autoresponder (versus a gay autoresponder) and InfusionSoft classifies itself as more of a tool for automating all aspects of marketing.  I use both on a daily basis, and have so for years.  IMHO, they are different tools for different purposes, and both are great depending on where you are at in your business.  Lemme break ‘em down for you here:

Aweber – “Emailers Only”

Aweber’s system is the best for automated email followup.  Notice I didn’t say “broadcast” followup – just the automated stuff.  They have a pristine record with the ISP’s, and they aim to keep it that way.  What that means is that marketers who abuse their service (sending out spammy emails, etc) lose their accounts.  I like them for automated email followup, but I do NOT recommend them for broadcasting.

They stick to email only – they have no setup for direct mail, voicemail broadcasts, etc.  They do not claim to be a CRM tool, and offer none of the features to assist with that.  One could make the argument that they should add those tools to their system, but Tom Kulzer (their CEO) seems laster-focused on maximizing their brand in the email marketing vertical.  Good on ‘em.

The Good Stuff:

- Inexpensive (account starts at $15 USD / month)

- Easy for newbies (they have tons of free training, and the interface is simple)

- Dummy-proof (they make you comply with CAN-SPAM, which is good for people who don’t have  clue what they are doing).

- HIGH Deliverability (if the email doesn’t get delivered, then nothing else matters)

The Not-Good Stuff

- Limited customization (they don’t use triggers, they require double-optins to view one of their pre-written messages or require that they approve any custom messages)

- Limited features (it’s email only – no other marketing features included)

- They will spank you if your spam complaints get too high. This is good and bad – the idiots who spam people to death lose their accounts and therefore allow Aweber to keep deliverability high for everyone else.  Problem is that if you have too big a list, you can’t really broadcast at all, as even a small percentage of complaintes comes up as a flag.

- List segmentation is limited. You gotta get a shopping cart if you’re doing sales, and it’s tricky to do very sophisticated list segmentation.  For example, even if someone double opts for one list, they gotta go through the same process if they take an action and join another list.  It’s fairly redundant.

- Not big-list friendly. If you have a list over 20k subscribers, then you will have some special challenges.  List-importing is limited (they must all double opt to Aweber’s system when you import them) and if you make a change to your followup, then EVERYONE gets the change and cycles back through your followup again.  There isn’t any feature to make a change and integrate for new list joiners only – everyone gets it.  No big deal when you have a list of a few hundred or few thousand people, but it’s not so cool when you want to make a change and it affects 70k subscribers.

Get An Aweber Test-Drive Here

InfusionSoft – “IT Personnel Only”

Infusion was originally promoted by Dan Kennedy as the be-all, end-all of marketing automation.  It originally sold for $6k to set up, plus $300/mo for ongoing usage, and nobody knew what the hell to do with it after they got it.  Their training sucked, customer support sucked, and it was so damn complicated that marketers could barely send broadcasts without help from the IT department.

They have since upgraded their training, and adjusted their pricepoint to a sane level that actually reflects the value of the service.  They also got some customer support reps that knew what the hell was going on, which helped everyone out.

The “brains” behind the system is a tag setup, meaning that once a lead comes in, they are given tags to identify them for specific email followup campaigns, voicemail followup campaigns, or direct-mail followup campaigns.  Once you figure it out, it’s actually pretty cool – it offers much greater flexibility with your marketing in list segmentation, and you can make your segments much more action-oriented.

The Good Stuff

- Infusion is much more than email automation.  You can run affiliate programs, monitor and track leadflow through sophisticated funnels, integrate custom shopping cart solutions (or use theirs), run continuity programs, drop voicemails/direct mail, and manage fulfillment reports all from one interface.  It’s nice

- Much more sophisticated list segmentation.  By using triggers, you can be very, very specific with your followup marketing campaigns.  You can ensure that people who click a link get a separate followup series from those who do not, those who open a specific email can be separated from those who don’t, etc.

- Easy list importing and double optins.  You have much great freedom to customize your double-optin emails and links, and they allow the importing of previous lists (hot damn!)

- Much easier on Spam complaints.  They do not take the “marketer is assumed guilty” approach to broadcasts.  Really, this is good and bad (I’ll explain in a minute)

- Pricepoint is currently MUCH more reasonable.  It’s running $199 to start, then scales up depending on how much email volume you’re pushing.  When you factor in the other stuff it does, it’s pretty cost-effective.

The Not-Good Stuff

- Not for newbies. It’s not an easy system to learn (even now).  You don’t need an IT staff anymore, but you will need some time to get how the system works.  In order to make use of the additional customization features, you (or someone you know) will need to have some technical competency (comfortable working with html, API’s, etc).  Nothing too fancy, but it’s not “plug and play” like Aweber.

- Questionable deliverability. Their domain has been greylisted.  That’s not good.  I still don’t understand how they track spam.  They approached me several months ago saying our spam rates were way too high.  I looked in the system, and saw them chillin’ at 1.2% (1.2 people out of 100 were hitting the spam button when we mailed).  They said we were at 5% (which is crazy-high).  We said that the back office didn’t reflect those numbers – they said “tough – sort it, or we are shutting your account down”.  So we broke up for a little while (we have since been happily reunited).

- Good old-fashioned “dumb” in the system. Now, this is coming from a current InfusionSoft user.  I love many aspects of their system, and am currently spending several hundreds of dollars every month for it’s usage (and I happily pay it – saves us a bunch of time and money).  But there are some things that we have found that just don’t make a damn bit of sense with their setup.

For example – we needed to change merchant accounts for some of our continuity subscribers.  They had no feature to do this en masse - we had to manually go through hundreds of records one-by-one and update each to run through the new merchant account.

‘Nuther example - when you unsubscribe from an InfusionSoft email, they ask the person unsubscribing if they would like to flag the message as spam.  Yes, they actually present a “yes or no” push-button option to mark email as spam if a subscriber wants to unsubscribe.  That may have something to do with their greylisting issue…

‘Nuther example - they accidentally charged a bunch of our clients an unsolicited charge on their credit cards.  Yeah, I know – DUMB.  We refunded everyone, apologized to all of them because it lokos like we did the charge when IS was the culprit.

Good news is that they have gotten progressively less-dumb as they have developed as a company, and they are the first to make apologies when need be.  But they have had to apologize a lot.

>>>Author UPDATE (See Below)<<<

**NOT RECOMMENDED**

Listen, it takes a real stinker to get on my “not recommended list”.  But here are a couple that we simply don’t recommend under ANY circumstance:

Lyris

Lyris is a huge company chock-full of non-marketing morons.  Seriously, they don’t get it.  Their system is near-impossible to use, takes FOREVER to set up, and has terrible deliverability.  They do offer triggers, but they don’t work most of the time.  On top of all of it, they charge several thousand to get set up, and several hundred to several thousand per month.  Their customer service is lame, and they try to lock people into long-term contracts.

We simply don’t recommend them unless you are looking for a tax write off (without any emotional gratification).

“Free” Autoresponders

In the autoresponder world, the axiom “you get what you pay for” isn’t always true.   Sometimes, you get way more for less money.  But every free autoresponder software that we have used wasn’t even worth the time it took to download.  If you’re going to be mailing, you gotta pony up and treat it like a real business.  It doesn’t mean you need to get the most expensive solution out there, but you want to be paying for something if you’re going to be mailing on a consistent basis.

I know there are exceptions for everything, and we may get a thousand hate mails talking about how their free service rocks.  If you find a great freebie, good on ya.  In our experience, shelling out $15/mo for everything you get with Aweber is more than worth it.

>>AUTHOR UPDATE<<<

Alright, we are officially revising this update.  Infusionsoft is just awful.  This week, they did some sort of crappy update to their email builder that forces you to customize your emails to the point that it takes much, much longer to hit send now.  They added this feature in the name of helping me to double my sales.  As if they would know better than I how to double my sales.  Now we have to take twice as long just to broadcast an email to our database.  Twice as long means I can only send half as many broadcasts.  That’s HALVING my sales, not doubling them.

Then, we find out that it’s messing up the emails that we send on behalf of our Affiliates for followup positioning (our goal is to help our Aff’s make followup sales to our Intro-product clients).  Turns out that the variables they should be forwarding are invisible – no affiliate contact info at all.

Finally, we discover that some of our emails aren’t even going out at all.  As in – someone purchases a product, and they don’t get the intended followup emails to access the product.

I’m just done with InfusionSoft.  DONE.

I can no longer in good conscience endorse InfusionSoft.  We are in the process of moving all of our marketing over to Office AutoPilot.  They integrate in with Ultracart, and together, provide a solution that we believe is easier to use and much more powerful than Infusion.

We will use InfusionSoft as a CRM only – just because we have a bunch of client payment plans tied up in their system, and it would be easier to just let them run their course than try to extract them all.  Over the years, I estimate we’ve paid in about $17,000+ for Infusion.  They have disappointed time, and time, and time again.  Yes, they do have some good features.  Yes, they do some things that Aweber does not.  But Office AutoPilot does more than Infusion, and (in our humble opinions) it’s a million times easier to use, they have  an actual SATISFACTION GUARANTEE backing them up, their email deliverability is better, and they are less expensive.

And frankly, at this point, the disappointment factor is just too high.  It has officially become more painful to stay than to move.

We’ll keep you posted, but at this point, we suggest Aweber for newbies and email-only automation, Office AutoPilot if you need to automate other aspects of your business or use offline marketing.

Let’s face it – the holidays are a busy time of year.

Friends.

Family.

Traveling.

Great food.

Presents.

The holidays are a wonderful time for building memories.  There’s no doubt about it.

This holiday season, let me encourage you to put another quick “to do” item on your list.

Spend about 15 minutes reflecting back over this past year.  About the things that you did.  And the things you didn’t.

And as take a stroll down the hall of memories that you’ve made the past 12 months, consider the choices that you made.

You probably made some choices that you’re very proud of – and some that may not make you so proud.

Whatever the case, as you move closer to January 1st, 2010, consider what it would take for you to make this next year the MOST memorable year of your life.

What would it take?

Would you need to improve your business to a level previously unimaginable?

Is there a relationship that needs to be dramatically improved?

Is there a health goal that is becoming critical to reach?

Whatever the case, I encourage you to consider these questions so that you can skip the new years resolutions – and instead, focus on the one big thing that – if achieved – could make this next year absolutely unforgettable.

Then – hold it in the fore-front of your attention for the next 12 months.  We’d love to hear about the end results