Jerry Leventer

I’m writing this post in response to a couple people telling me my holiday reading list looked interesting. They are in Teli Adlam’s new marketing forum that you can join by buying her new book and video tutorials, WP Affiliate Guide.

I started reading Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott, on the airplane on my way to visit family for the holidays.

Wikinomics: Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott

I had found the book by chance while shopping in Borders bookstore in Sunnyvale, CA looking for books on how to build an online business from the point of view of Harvard business school and Entrepreneur Magazine.

The intent of the author is to demonstrate how the Internet and Social Media Networking is changing everything yet again. Not since the Television and the Automobile have we seen this kind of paradigm shift in the way we do business. The opportunities to have your problems solved, by going outside your own company and tapping the knowledge, experience, and new ideas of people around the globe, have become apparent to some, such as IBM, Sun, and a Gold Mining company.

I’m only a third of the way through and I’ve been underlining and reading the notes in the back. You can almost read the notes like they are another publication, they are so lengthy and informative in and of themselves.

The next book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, I didn’t start reading until I returned home. I have only read the introduction and chapter one, but the main idea is made clear: It’s about “markets of multitude”, (p.5).

The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson

Although the concept of the long tail can be applied to keyword research, it was originally about selling products. I’ve always had the misconception that the long tail meant long keywords. That’s just not so. It can also apply to short keywords, as long as they aren’t the primary one’s in that niche.

Chris’ original intent was to describe the new way of doing business that doesn’t depend on the cost of maintaining inventory and renting shelf space. The cost of maintaining inventory has been so dramatically reduced by using the internet to sell products, that this entire market strategy has changed.

You no longer have to stock only the top-selling hit albums or books, for example. Now, you can stock the entire library, even the bad stuff.

The research shows that there will always be a small percentage of the products in a given medium or niche that will sell the most and bring in the lion’s share of the profit per time period (such as year, quarter, month). If you graph the sales of total inventory, the drop off is very steep. This is where the idea of the “long tail” comes from; it’s the way the graph looks after the drop off. It just keeps on going.

But the dropoff never reaches zero. Just about every item in the inventory, of the companies researched, sell at least once per time period. The profits from these “long tail” items have been shown sometimes to be greater than 25% of all sales - at NetFlix and Amazon for example.

Well, that’s all I needed to read for now. I get the idea, and it’s fairly clear how to implement that into yours and my marketing plans. Isn’t it?

The third book on my holiday reading list is Dan Kennedy’s “No B.S. Business Success: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners, Tough & Spirited Guide”. (phew! Long title. In fact, he had to find a special publisher who would allow him to keep it that way.)

Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Business Success Guide

This is the most practical book of the three. Dan Kennedy gives his own story of failure, struggle, and success with a very personal (if not cynical) touch.

But that’s all for now, sorry to keep you hanging, but I’ll be talking more on this book in a future post.

[tags]Wikinomics, Markets of Multitude, The Long Tail, No BS Business Success Guide, Don Tapscott, Chris Anderson, Dan Kennedy[/tags]