Total Suite of Online Success in SEO and Social Media Marketing Books

Details: Sunday, 22 January 2012 18:42; Hits: 1360

Top How-To Practical Business Books
Karma has a way of guiding our steps in ways which, occasionally, make a total mockery of our sense of free will. Back in 2007, an emailed report from a new client’s previous SEO Adviser which stated that the client had been charged “for writing this report” drove the point home to me that there was a clear and pressing need for transparency in SEO.

The idea for SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page was born that day, from that report which was excruciating to read in terms of the mistakes made in promoting the client’s online business. It would take almost two more years before it found a home and in that time the book was refined into a purely practical step-by-step approach to optimizing your website to see it rank high on search fast.

In the two years between the book’s conception and publication I was also transformed. When you work for other people, even though you are a consultant or have been hired to do a specific job, your primary focus is on getting that job done. Although facts and figures, initiatives, ideas, thoughts and impressions accumulate they do not quite coalesce. They can’t, because you are, usually, too short of time, too pressed, too busy, too harassed, too worried and too close to the wood to see the trees. As I began, however, to spend less time working on specific projects and more time on analysis and advice my own perspective on the web started to change.

This began, inexorably, to exert some influence on my writing and the books I wanted to write.

By the time SEO Help came out and started climbing up the best-seller charts in the US, UK and Canada I had written Online Marketing Help: How to promote your online business using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. Social media was just beginning to take off then and there was the need for a practical guide which would take a webmaster through the use of social networks, providing tips, shortcuts and advice. What made Online Marketing Help exciting was the fact that in writing it I was also able to cover the aspects of SEO and search ranking which SEO Help, with its more practical, focuses approach had skimmed over. So, although I was on the face of it writing about something entirely different, in reality it was the next step. A fact testified to independently when one of my readers posted a review which drove the point home and which was itself corroborated with a comment by another.

Brilliant SEO – What You Need to Know and How to do it came just after that and it added detailed visual instructions and a number of extra steps for those webmasters who also needed to go deeper in the nitty-gritty mechanism of the optimisation process of their websites. As such it became a more granular approach to SEO helping webmasters who had benefited from SEO Help now take their search engine optimisation skills and knowledge to the next level.

In the meantime, since Online Marketing Help was written social media spread in use, even more. The web moves faster than ever, the way the online population makes purchasing decisions has also changed and the real-time web is, in many ways, here. We face challenges in terms of understanding the concept which is social media, sufficiently to be able to employ it properly and this is exactly where The Social Media Mind: How social media is changing business, politics and science and helps create a new world order came in.

On the face of it writing that book, for me, was a departure. Whereas SEO Help, Brilliant SEO and Online Marketing Help were intensely practical, guided by actionable techniques the logic of which I understood completely and could defend in any circumstance, The Social Media Mind was also conceptual. In it I poured thoughts and ideas which had formed as I accumulated data, talked to friends, colleagues and strangers in a dozen different social networks and exchanged points of view, and tales of social media disasters.

Like most departures from one’s comfort zone it was terrifying. From my vantage point on the web I could see patterns forming and trends beginning which were exciting and I wanted to share. It was also a step forward in opening parts of myself which I had frequently kept private. I am a techno-optimist at heart. I believe that technology can gives us the means to escape traditional ways of working, find new means of creating jobs and bringing ideas to mind and, as such, can help us improve the world we live in.

That optimism comes through. While The Social Media Mind, tells you how to use social media. Why some social media campaigns work and why some don’t. What companies which do it right, actually do right, and where traditional companies often go wrong, it is also peppered with my own enthusiasm for the opportunities I see in the way we use social media.

What makes these four books remarkable is that when they are examined in their entirety they become the blueprint you need to actually create a powerful web presence. SEO Help demystifies SEO, and helps you push your website up search engine rankings, Online Marketing Help complements some of the SEO tasks which had to do with social media and provides you with all the shortcuts to social media networks, Brilliant SEO adds visual guidance and some more refined points and The Social Media Mind now comes to actually give you the inside story on social media, to help you understand its concept as well as its practice and give you everything you need to help you use it properly. As such the three form the ultimate collection of top how-to practical business books on SEO, Social Media and Online Marketing.

Each of them was another step towards the demystification of doing business online, the desire for which had started with the reading of that spurious SEO report back in 2007. I suppose it is quite conceivable that had I not read it and got fired up I would have still found the time and drive to write these books, but it was a sense of indignation and a desire to actually help people who were putting their dreams, passion and hard work on the web, that got the ball rolling and that’s what I still find so amazing, even today.