Marketing Research

I've been learning about marketing lately. Marketing appeals to my practical and scientific side. Marketing research also makes me realize just how impressionable we all are.

This path started while I was visiting my Mom in Elmhurst, IL for Christmas. I have a friend who was interested in a book I mentioned to him in passing, "Criminal Interrogations and Confessions." While looking for that book in my Mom's basement, I came across and old copy of another book, Guerilla Marketing Attack.

I was given my copy of Guerrilla Marketing Attack by a friend when I was starting my first company. I remembered liking at and decided to re-read the book while I had some downtime. It turned out to be better than I remembered, if a bit dated. So, from there, I wanted a more up-to-date book on the subject. I was at Borders, shopping for Christmas presents for my Mom and I picked up the seminal book in the series, Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business.

Levinson, the author of the Guerrilla series, writes in a very practical and direct style. He has a ton of experience and you almost feel as though he is personally coaching you along. This is great.

From there, I went to the library and started looking for more books on the subject. I got Guerrilla Publicity, E-Service, and Cashing in with Content. I still need to read these three so more on them as I figure out what they are about.

Finally, I bought a book by Timothy Ferris called "The 4-Hour Work Week." Ferris is an out-of-the-box thinker who gave me some pretty cool ideas on how I can start to put some of this marketing knowledge to work. He addressed one of my main concerns which was: "how do I make this scale?" His idea, basically, is to outsource and automate. These are topics near and dear to my heart so I found myself agreeing with a lot of his theories.

In parallel to all this book research, I've been following some topcis online. One of them is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Levinson touches on this subject briefly but he realized that the best place to talk about the web is on a web and not in a book. He suggested searching for the term "seo" and going from there.

I've also been viewing some videos from an outfit called stompernet.com. There most recent video introduced me to the topic of Social Marketing. The salient points in their video were that social media sites are a huge force on the net today. Some even outpace Google in hit count.

The video also introduced me to several new sites that are relevant for managing one's online presence in the social media context. Those sites were:

Scribd
Squidoo
Socialmarker

Stay tuned for more updates on the above marketing topics. I'm just getting started here.

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