Business Growth, Marketing, and Communication: My Top 11 Books

Monique (00:00):
This is how you know what to say when they say: "What do you do?". You can get people interested in you and what you do by showing interest in them. So the trick is to personalize the answer. Consider what possible interest the asker could have in you and your work. You want to tell them how your professional experience can benefit their life. For example, instead of saying: "I'm a real estate agent.", say: "I help people moving into our area, find the right home.". Instead of saying: "I'm a cosmetic surgeon.", say: "I reconstruct people's faces after disfiguring accidents.", or when an older person asks, "I help people to look as young as they feel through cosmetic surgery.". See how this brings your business to life, and makes it memorable, and it makes you sound way more interesting, and dedicated, and it allows people to instantly relate to you.

Intro (01:09):
This is the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Get ready for the digital marketing strategies and tactics that attract great customer relationships to your business. Here is your host, Monique Idemudia.

Monique (01:31):
Hi guys, this is Monique and you're listening to episode number 12 of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. I did a poll on Twitter and I asked you: "Would you be interested in a list of books that helped me become a better entrepreneur and I think are a great read for business owners?" And 100% voted for "Yes please". So now in this podcast episode, I'll tell you my top 11 books, that I've read, that changed my life, and I'll explain how to apply certain concepts to entrepreneurship and running a business, communication and leadership, and of course marketing. Right now is the perfect time to read and to focus on yourself, and to think about how to pivot and adapt. And I think that a fresh way of thinking about things, and learning a new skill is just really useful right now. The books are not in any particular order. They're just my top 11 best, favorite, most helpful books, that I've read in my life, and that truly, truly changed my life, and helped me be a better entrepreneur. So without any further ado, let's get started.

Monique (02:44):
The first book that I can really recommend you is called "Mindset: The new psychology of success" by Carol Dweck. This is my number one favorite book on this planet and I love it so much. It truly has changed my life. It's about how having a growth mindset will allow a person to live a less stressful and more successful life. A person with a fixed mindset beliefs that his or her abilities, intelligence, and talents are just fixed traits. A person with a growth mindset believes that his or her success depends on time and effort. The book really helped me with finding my inner strength and believing in my ability to learn anything, and not having to rely on talent. And not to give up when I can't do something with my current abilities, but put in the time and effort and learn and improve to get it done. As entrepreneurs, we have to figure out a lot of things, sometimes really quickly, and we need to learn new things all the time. We come into situations where we have to learn and deal with things we never thought of and it's important to trust in your ability. I grew up thinking that everything was fixed. That was the mindset that I was taught growing up. It's the fixed mindset. Like "you're either good at math or you're not", or "coding is only for geniuses", or "you can only learn this and that as a kid, but when you're older you can't learn it anymore". That's all fixed mindset thinking. I believe that this book is really a must read and there are so many great examples and stories that eliminate all of your self-doubt and imposter syndrome. And it really makes you believe that intelligence and abilities can be developed through effort and persistence, and trying different strategies, and learning from your mistakes. It transforms you from a fixed mindset person to a growth mindset person that believes in learning and that believes that everything can be changed. This is so, so, so important for you to have as an entrepreneur.

Monique (05:08):
The second book that I can really recommend you read too, if you haven't already, is "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. The core idea is that you can change other people's behavior simply by changing your own. It teaches you the principles to better understand people and become a more likable person, and improve your relationships, win others over, and influence behavior through leadership. It really helped me with understanding people better, understanding what people really want, and being able to see things from the other person's perspective and not just my own, and made me realize how the desire to be appreciated and to feel important is so deeply rooted in us humans. As a small business owner, you want people to like you, get them to identify with you, and trust you. You want your leads to understand that you can solve their problems in the best possible way, and you want your customers to understand the unique benefits you offer. It's all about people. And marketing is all about people and relationships as well. So communication is key. And to communicate effectively, you need to know what the underlying motives of people are, find out what drives them, know how to build rapport with them; you need to know how to correct someone if they are wrong or made a mistake, how to negotiate, how to get your employees to do the thing that you suggest, and so on. There are so many examples of why this is an amazing book for you to read as a small business owner.

Monique (06:57):
The third book that I can really recommend you guys is called "Influence: The psychology of persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. The book is about influence and persuasion. It talks about various psychological tactics used by compliance practitioners like salespeople, waiters, car dealers, fundraisers, and so on, to ethically influence people into saying yes to something they might have said no to. Robert Cialdini found that influence is based on seven key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. The reciprocity principle says that in many social situations, we pay back what we received from others. If you are offered something for free or receive a gift, you're more likely to do that person a favor. The principle of commitment and consistency declares that humans have a deep need to be seen as consistent. People want their beliefs to be consistent with their values. Once you've publicly committed to something or someone, you're much more likely to go through and deliver on that commitment. The social proof principle describes the psychological and social phenomenon, where people look at what others do in a situation, or what products they use, and then they copy these actions. That's why customer reviews and testimonials play such an important role for many people to make a buying decision. The authority principle refers to a person's tendency to comply with people in positions of authority. Now, people in positions of authority are not only government leaders and law enforcement representatives. Think about the credibility it gives to a tooth paste, when a doctor endorses it, like Colgate. Or a washing machine engineer recommending Calgon. See how the principles are so useful to know to improve your marketing? To learn more about these four principles and also about the other three (liking, scarcity, and unity) as well, well, you gotta read the book yourself. There are a lot of takeaways for marketing. Marketing is all about relationships. And this book has helped me to improve my communication skills, and to use the principles as like a checklist to see if my work is well thought out, and has all the necessary components to be the most effective. I think it can be helpful for you too because as a small business owner, you're a compliance practitioner too. Maybe you're a one-man or a one-woman-company and you're doing everything yourself. You're your own sales person and fundraiser and marketer and influencer and you got to do all of the communication. And even if you got a team of helpers around you, you still have to do a lot of communication and persuasion. Nobody is successful alone. As long as you have to interact with people, keeping the seven principles of persuasion in mind, will make your marketing campaigns more successful and convert more leads into customers.

Monique (10:27):
The fourth book that I can really recommend is "How to talk to anyone: 92 little tricks for big success in relationships" by Leil Lowndes. "How to talk to anyone" is a great book with 92 little tricks that help you to build rapport with any person in the world, and have a nice conversation without awkward silences, or you just not being on the same wavelength. It has helped me to build better customer relationships and interpersonal relationships in general, and it's helped me to break the ice with a lot of people, I wouldn't even know what to say to. I think this book is very helpful for you if you want to grow your small business and you need to find partners, you need to network with people, you need to talk to a lot of people at events and trade shows, or just perform better in interviews. If you are afraid to be at a loss of words when someone is from a different industry or culture or country or generation as you, or you just need to introduce yourself and don't want it to be boring, this book will solve that. I'll give you an example. This is how you know what to say when they say: "What do you do?". This is an incredible opportunity and you can get people interested in you and what you do by showing interest in them. So the trick is to personalize the answer. Instead of having one answer to the omnipresent question "What do you do?", consider what possible interest the asker could have in you and your work. You want to tell them how your professional experience can benefit their life. Never just give a one word answer. For example, instead of saying: "I'm a real estate agent.", say: "I help people moving into our area, find the right home.". Instead of saying: "I'm a financial planner.", say: "I help people plan their financial future." Instead of saying: "I'm a martial arts instructor.", say: "I help people defend themselves by teaching martial arts.". Instead of saying: "I'm a cosmetic surgeon.", say: "I reconstruct people's faces after disfiguring accidents.", or when an older person asks, "I help people to look as young as they feel through cosmetic surgery.". See how this brings your business to life, and makes it memorable? And it makes you sound way more interesting and dedicated, and it allows people to instantly relate to you. It's a great book to get better at communication, which is such a crucial skill, especially when you're running and willing to grow a business.

Monique (13:24):
The fifth book on my list is called "Purple cow: Transform your business by being remarkable" by Seth Godin. "Purple cow" is a marketing concept developed by the marketing luminary and entrepreneur Seth Godin, that states that companies must build things worth noticing right into their products or services. Creative advertising is not enough nowadays. You need a unique selling proposition and a unique value proposition to attract the people, that your values resonate with. People have so many options to choose from, more than ever before. And in the digital age, you don't just compete with the other businesses in your area, but with other businesses around the world, through the internet and through digital media. So Seth Godin came up with a list of 10 things, like 10 ways to change your product or service to make it remarkable. Reading "Purple cow" has helped me to find things that are just not done and do them. I also learned to always ask myself "why not?", because almost everything you don't do doesn't have any good reason for it. I think it can be helpful for you too when you want to make your small business, your product, your service, your brand, remarkable like a purple cow. When you're not remarkable, you're almost invisible.

Monique (15:02):
The sixth book on my list is called "The execution factor: The one skill that drives success" by Kim Perell. The execution factor is your ability to carry out plans of action that enable you to achieve your goals. It rests upon five traits, vision, passion, action, resilience and relationships. Each of these traits can be cultivated. In the book, Kim Perell demonstrates a number of key ideas, and she does this with amazing examples and telling great stories. Here are a few of the key ideas. Having a vision provides you with guidance on your journey to success. Passion provides you with the emotional energy you need to make the sacrifices that success requires. When beginning to pursue your vision, the key is to act by taking a small first step. Progress towards achieving your vision requires forward movement coupled with a daily review process. Resilience is the trait that can help you withstand and even benefit from the challenges and setbacks. You can develop your resilience by taking care of yourself emotionally and looking for opportunities to exercise it. Expanding, deepening and maintaining relationships are the key to augmenting your abilities to execute. To learn about all of the other key ideas that Kim has, you got to read the book yourself. I bought it when I was reifying my plans to start Dragon Digital Marketing. I've had the vision of starting my own digital marketing agency and I knew that marketing is my passion, and I love to work with people and learn more about what drives people and communication. I want to improve relationships and bring people together with what they need and want. That's been my vision and I wasn't completely inactive. I was taking some action and I've been learning and reading so much, right, but I was hesitating to take the first step, and that is the key factor, right, the execution factor. So whether you're just starting out, or you're planning to start out like I did a year ago, or your business is doing just alright and you want to take it to the next level and beat imposter syndrome and procrastination, this book is for you too. You'll learn how to refine an idea into a vision, how to take the first step towards pursuing your vision, and how to become more resilient in your pursuit of that vision.

Monique (17:55):
The seventh book I can really recommend to you is called "Everybody writes: Your go-to guide to creating ridiculously good content" by Ann Handley. This book will help you with your content marketing and it's the best out there. The book is a go-to guide to creating and publishing the kind of content that will make your business thrive. It teaches you how to attract and retain customers through stellar online communication, because in our content driven world, everyone of us is in fact a writer. If you have a website, you're a publisher. If you're on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we're all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We're all writers. Our online words are our currency. They tell our customers who we are. Your writing can make you look smart or it can make you look stupid. It can make you seem fun, or warm, or competent, or trustworthy, but it can also make you seem boring. That means you've got to choose your words well and write with style and honest empathy for your audience. A blog is amazing for SEO because it boosts your visibility in search engines like Google. And a blog gives you the opportunity and it's a place to publish your text-based content. There are so many mediocre blogs out there that don't stand out, so you can make yours stand out by learning how to write and how to tell your story really, really well, remarkably well, right. That's why I think you can benefit from this book and you should read it too. When you want to get better at marketing, you need to get better at communicating, and writing is a form of communication and a skill that is often overlooked, but it's such an important cornerstone of marketing. Everybody writes is full of actionable how-to advice, designed to get you results, and by the way, Ann Handley, the author, is a marketer herself.

Monique (20:12):
The next book, this is the eighth one on the list, is called "Atomic habits" by James Clear. The book debunks the myth that when you want to change your life, you need to think big. The good news is that this is not necessarily the case and there's another way. It's called atomic habits. If you search Google for "atom definition", here's what it says. An atom is an extremely small amount of a thing or quality and it's also a source of nuclear energy. An atom is the smallest building block of ordinary matter. An atomic habit therefore is a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power. It's a component of the system of compound growth. The book has helped me to understand that bad and inefficient habits repeat themselves again and again, not because we don't want to change, but because we have the wrong system for change. I think this book can be helpful for you too, to get the most out of your day. We all got the same 24 hours, right? And as small business owners, our resources and our budgets are limited, and we have to get the most out of everything to be able to keep up and keep going. So this book will help you to build a system for getting 1% better every day. Imagine getting 1% better everyday, just 1% right? Where would you be in a hundred days? 100% better. And then think about like a year from now. It's going to help you to break your bad habits and stick to the good ones. And you can apply this to your personal goals too. Like if you want to exercise more and you never actually get to go, or if you just want to get more done and form the right habits to grow your small business, it's also a great book for you. Or maybe you don't even necessarily want to get more done, but get the same amount done in just less time to spend more time with your friends and family. It helps you to avoid the common mistakes that most people make when they're changing their habits, so you can be better. And it also helps you to overcome a lack of motivation and willpower and develop a stronger identity and belief in yourself to reach your personal and your business goals.

Monique (22:51):
The next book on my list, the ninth book, is called "Contagious: Why things catch on" by Jonah Berger. This book will help you with your social media marketing because it's about making things go viral, and it explains what it takes to make things go viral. Jonah Berger spent years researching the science of "contagiousness" and in his book he simplifies what he learned into six principles. Those principles are social currency, triggers, emotions, public, practical value, and stories. Social currency is, people share things that make them look good in the eyes of others. Triggers are about making people remember your product or service and increasing word of mouth by designing triggers. The emotion principle says that people share things that arouse strong feelings in them, both positive and negative feelings. Public means that people naturally imitate what they see others doing, so make sure your product is used in some publicly visible way. Practical value: People like to share useful information that has practical value. And stories: Information can be embedded into stories because people find stories very easy to remember and share. If you want to learn more about these incredibly powerful principles and truly internalize them, you have to read the book. I think that this book will be a great read for you because even if your posts won't get like 300 million clicks, or views, or likes, or whatever, you will reach significantly more people, and you'll be able to grow your audience on social media, and increase your influence by making your content more share worthy and also more easily shareable. And it will ultimately help you to grow your small business. You can not only apply this to social media marketing, but also to your email marketing. For example, make your emails so awesome that people just have to forward them to their friends. And you can also apply this to your content marketing by, for example, creating amazing infographics that get a lot of shares. It is a super useful book for your small business marketing.

Monique (25:27):
The 10th book on my list is called "The lean startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses" by Eric Ries. Now, you may be a startup, that's great, congratulations for taking the first step and executing, or you may think, but Monique, we are not a startup anymore. The good thing is, this book is not just for startups. It's for all business owners that want to streamline their business and become leaner and more efficient. This is how you grow your small business. Get rid of all the things that inhibit you to move forward. Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles, and it allows you to quickly discover if your proposed business model is viable or not. It can also be applied to services though. The lean approach is a constant struggle between building your ideas, constantly measuring your progress, and learning through your own performance. Here's what it taught me. It taught me to do everything right away. It made me realize how far reaching and fatal delays due to procrastination can be in this fast changing world. Sometimes you just need to hear a story or a metaphor for something that you actually already know, but it makes it clear, that it just clicks, and it becomes a turning point in your life. And that's how I felt reading this book. I've also implemented ongoing inspections. I control myself. I check my progress daily. I got a system of to-do lists with reminders that remind me of the deadlines that I set to myself, every night. And I check if I reach my daily objective and if I do not, I do a gap analysis. Also, I've stopped to force myself to finish something when I feel like I'm not as effective anymore, and I take a power nap or just go for a run, and continue later when I got more energy and I'm feeling recharged. I've stopped seeing taking breaks as a bad thing. And I also let go of everything that doesn't work and I get the validation. For example, I asked you guys on Twitter if you want an episode like this and if you're even interested in hearing me talk about this and you were, so that's why I'm recording this episode. It's important to always get the validation and be in contact with your audience. Here are four valuable questions, so they're like key questions that I got from the book, that you can ask yourself. The first question: Do my potential customers recognize that they have the problem I am trying to solve? Right. You want to sell a new product or offer a new service because you got to be creative and come up with something really, really fast because of the whole Coronavirus situation, or you just want to innovate something in general. Question number two: If there was a solution, would they buy it? Question number three: Would they buy it from me? And question number four: Can I build a solution for that problem? When you read this book, you'll learn when to pivot and when to persevere. This is crucial, especially now. Now would be a perfect example for a time when it's time to pivot or change your business strategy. You'll also learn how and what to measure, and you'll measure only the things that bring you actual growth. It's easy to lose focus and get distracted by vanity metrics like followers. How many followers do I got and how many followers does my competitor have? This doesn't matter. It also shows you how to be and stay lean and get rid of all wasted effort, and how to get the most out of everything with the least amount of resources. That's all what the lean concept is about. Maybe you're overstaffed. You'll find out reading this book and you don't need a business consultant to come over for you to find out. Here is my favorite example from this book which made me understand the importance of the smallest possible batch size. If you want to send out a bunch of letters and I mean actual physical letters, would you write the address and all of the envelopes, then stamp all of the envelopes, then fill them with the letters, and then seal all of the envelopes? Or would you do it letter for letter? Let me know in a tweet and follow me on Twitter. The intuitive way to complete this task is to fold all of the newsletters, then attach all of the seals, and then put on all of the stamps. However, the counter intuitive way is actually faster and more efficient. As a matter of fact, it is better to complete each envelope one at a time. Do you think that is backward? Here's the deal. The one envelope at a time approach is called a single piece flow in lean manufacturing. It works because of the surprising power of small batches. Our intuition doesn't take into account the extra time required to sort, stack, and move around the large piles of half complete envelopes. The large batch size is what makes it inefficient. In a single piece flow, the batch size is only one, right? One single piece flows through to stages. In this example, one envelope at a time. It is not more efficient to repeat the same task over and over, and you do not get better at it the more you do it. Would you have thought that? I mean, I haven't. And this book is full of gems and you can get a lot out of it and improve your small business and make your whole life lean.

Monique (31:48):
And last but not least, the 11th book on my list is called "SEO 2020: Learn search engine optimization with smart internet marketing strategies" by Adam Clarke. This book is about SEO and if you want to learn more about SEO, I can recommend you this book. It's written like a guide and it tells you all of the small modifications that you do to parts of your website, that help you rank higher on Google. I think it's good to have an understanding of SEO for everybody that owns a website, even if you don't intend to do your own SEO. This book is a complete overview of the basics of SEO.

Monique (32:33):
That are my top 11 books that helped me to become a better entrepreneur, communicator, marketer, and leader and I feel like they can help you out too. In fact, I'm very confident that they will. They are truly amazing books. Many of them are bestsellers and they have tons of positive reviews on Amazon and around the web. Make sure to check out the show notes of this episode on dragon-digital-marketing.com. There you can find a transcript of the episode and there you can also find a short summary. Please share this episode with a person you wish well and you want to help them grow and improve too. Sharing is caring. Now you got a guide on what books to read this summer to improve yourself and your digital marketing and make your small business thrive. And if you feel like you need more help with your digital marketing, check out our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing. We're happy to help you out. That's what I got for you today. Never stop learning. And until next time.

Outro (33:46):
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. You can visit us at dragon-digital-marketing.com for more resources and for more episodes. Let us know how you like the show and write us a review. We are grateful when you like, share, and subscribe. We appreciate you.