The great thing about writing your own book, is when it comes to reading other books, you have a new found appreciation to what effort has gone in to create what you’re holding.

There’s certainly some effort put in on SitePoint’s latest title, Online Marketing Inside Out. Two authors, Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley collaborated on this tome; their upbeat, personal styles intertwine fluently, and certainly not disjointed as you may expect when there’s two writers involved.

Pitched at business and website owners who are looking for the knowledge to promote their services or products online, this book is a great starter for those without intimate knowledge of traditional marketing techniques, or who don’t have a decade of social media and web development experience under their belts.

The 210 page colour book is divided into nine logically grouped chapters. Chapter one outlines the changing face of marketing; it covers the basic reasons why organisations can’t ignore online marketing as part of their mix, and wraps up with some great reasons why you’ll love online marketing.

Chapter two, ’21st Century Public Relations and Media’ covers the modern Press Release, blogs and importantly, how to monitor social media for mentions of you or your product.

The third chapter, ‘Turn Page Views into Profit’ may seem shallow for those hardcore technical types, but I’m sure just like me, you’ll learn something from it. The chapter covers those all important on-site tweaks that you can do, to improve accessibility, usability, browser testing, content, landing pages and testing.

Search Engine Optimisation is covered in chapter four, and is a fantastic read for both beginners and advanced SEO gurus alike. This would be a great stand alone chapter to give web development clients who want to know what SEO is, without needing a PhD.

Chapter five is very interesting, covering Social Media such as micro-blogging, photo and video sharing, social bookmarking, podcasts and more. This is a great guide for those wanting to build a social media strategy.

Email Marketing gets a nod in Chapter six. This takes you from building your recipient list, to creating the content, to designing the delivery (and choosing the method), and even covers those tricky frequency and scheduling questions. Great thing here is the very clear warnings about spamming and buying email lists.

Chapter seven takes us through the topic of ‘Affiliate Marketing’. For those with a clearly affiliate ready business model, this sure looks like an exciting avenue to take. This chapter clarifies what this mystical affiliate world is all about, and takes out the snake oil component.

This book wouldn’t be complete without a chapter on online advertising – here’s where the penultimate chapter eight steps in. Banner advertising, PPC, text links, cost per mille, agency relationships and more are clearly explained.

The ninth and final chapter, ‘Tying It All Together’ does just that. It asks and helps steer your strategy by reiterating what you’ve learnt, how to create an online marketing strategy, setting goals, and then encouraging you towards writing a detailed plan.

Although I found I knew much of the books content already (but then I have years of interest in marketing, both online and offline), it certainly helped polish my knowledge, so the book was still valuable for someone with more than a decade of experience. I also started seriously considering the possibilities of distributing copies of this book to a number of my clients.

Online Marketing Inside Out is a great book for those who want a no-hype understanding on the how and why of online marketing, written by two people who have succeeded in this field. Perfect for the web developer or indeed their clients, this book is easy to digest (I read it easily on a four hour flight), and is the perfect level for anyone yearning for online marketing knowledge, who would be happy without pages of geeky code snippets.

Well done, Brandon and Shayne!

Disclaimer: the publisher of this book also published my book. I was given a PDF copy of this title, however will not see any personal gain from writing this review. I feel no obligation to write a good review, and if I had, I wouldn’t be posting one here.

A while ago, I wrote a post, titled Book promotion on the web, which was a collection of thoughts about how Authors best promote their book(s) online.

I’ve had a few people ask me for more details on this subject, so here are s a few steps you can take when your book is being released (these concepts work just as well for other products as well – don’t just think books).

Start a blog
Ideally, you should buy a domain name, organise some website hosting and install (my favourite) blogging software, Wordpress. Then, choose one of the pre-existing free wordpress themes you can download, or organise a web designer to create your own individual design.

If you aren’t going to go to all of that trouble (remember, you can pay someone to do all of it for you), you can always fall back on wordpress.com, which is free Wordpress hosting, however you won’t have the same control over the back end and design templates of the blog using the latter option.

See my book’s blog as an example of the former, at The Principles of Successful Freelancing Blog

In either situation, it is important that you keep up a frequency that your readers will appreciate, and add real value content (such as excerpts, book signing dates, etc), not just a sales pitch rehashed over and over. Make sure you encourage people to subscribe to your feed, and encourage comments on your posts.

Create a Facebook page
Facebook is much more than individuals – it can be a great place to promote your product or business. Facebook marketing ideas can be found all over the web, however as a start, make sure that you have your own Facebook account, and then visit their Facebook Pages for Business page, which will get you set up with your own book’s Facebook page.

Once you’ve created the page, make sure you upload an image of the cover, and completed as much of the information fields as you can. Add your blog URL, along with any publisher contact detail and the like.

Once you’ve done that, go to ‘Applications’ in Facebook, and install Simply RSS. Once you’ve entered your RSS feed address into this application, it will display your blog post headlines on your Facebook page, increasing the frequency the page is updated, without any additional work for yourself.

Once the page is all polished and ready to promote, politely invite all of your Facebook friends to ‘fan the page’ and consider adding a link from your blog to this page, and encourage people to fan the page. Share the link using the Facebook ‘Share’ button, as well as send individual messages to friends you know who would be interested in the book.

You can see an example of a book Facebook page, at my book’s page: The Principles of Successful Freelancing on Facebook.

Remember to visit the page often, and add new content where you can. There are great stats available to you, which give you a greater insight into who is visiting the page. See the ‘Ads and Pages’ link in your Facebook homepage.

Create a Twitter account
If you haven’t already got a Twitter account, go and grab one. Twitter is a micro-blogging system which allows you to interact in real time with your readers and friends. Search Twitter for existing friends, and don’t hesitate to look for other Authors to connect with.

A handy tool available for Wordpress is Twitter Tools. This Plugin will allow you to notify your twitter followers every time you publish a new post on your blog, and you can even set it up to post your tweets back as blog posts.

Then add further value by joining in the conversation with others on Twitter, however remember the golden rule is be authentic – if you barge into conversations (both online and offline) for the pure purpose of selling copies of your book, you aren’t going to be very well received.

You can see an example of how I use this at The Principles of Successful Freelancing on Twitter. I have a personal Twitter account as well, which I have been using way before the book, which is here: @milesb (feel free to start following me!).

These tips should get you started promoting your book online – there are plenty of other ways to use online social media to market your book, if you’re interested in more, comment below!

In my last post, I linked to many blogs and websites which discussed how to present, both technically and tips on stage presence, etc. However, that’s only half the battle – how do you approach conference organisers, and what are they actually looking for? How should you prepare your pitch, and make sure your presentation is warmly received?

I have interviewed Web Directions organiser, and friend, Maxine Sherrin. Here’s what Maxine had to say, as a web conference organiser.

Hi Maxine, thanks for being able to answer a few questions for me. Can I start with; How do you go about choosing speakers for Web Directions North and South? Is it the traditional Call for Papers or asking around who’d be great, or attending other conferences perhaps?

John and I keep our ears to the ground in the industry right throughout the year. I’ve got a pretty broad collection of blogs I skim every day and I probably find reference to a person or an idea at least once a week that I add to a listing of “things to follow up later when we get serious”. I’d love to swan around the world attending conferences and scouting for talent, but sadly I normally just have to confine myself to watching things like TED Talks online.

While we’d never do anything as formal as a “Call for Papers”, I love it when people approach me with an idea. I just wish they would do so before the program is finalised :)

Seriously though, over the coming 12 months we want to get a lot more community involvement in this process. Without moving completely into Barcamp territory, ever since Mark Pesce’s closing keynote this year, we have been tossing around ideas for how you could produce “The Crowd Sourced Conference”.

So, what makes you typically notice the speakers who you invite?

Two things:

1. Do something interesting and successful on the web
2. Tell me about it

If you then strike me as being articulate and thoughtful on top of that, then you’re in with a very good shot.

Now, of course, the above does beg the question of what “interesting” is. That really does come down to the editorial judgement of John and myself, as influenced by what we hear back from the the concerns community we live in here in Australia. Gosh, I’m starting to sound like John Howard here…..

I’d love to see more Australian web folk find the time to document what they have been working on, and thinking about on their blogs (says she with no blog :). I think there’s a lot of interesting work that gets done, but no one hears about it outside the small circle of people who worked on the project.

In your opinion, what is the most important element for a speaker to get right, in order to be remembered (such as humour, stage presence, technical knowledge, etc)?

Tell the story that only you can tell and it’s almost impossible to go wrong. People love walking away with specific anecdotes they can share with others back at work, and apply to their own challenges. So, get up there and tell us “I worked on Project X. We faced this challenge. All our initial research lead us to come up with Solution Y. But then we realised XYZ because of ABC. So, ultimately we came up with the elegance of Solution Z.” Hearing this presentation at a conference is the best, and sometimes the only, way of learning about these kinds of solutions.

Let me emphasise this point by outlining the corollary of the above. Spend an absolute bare minimum of time explaining generalities or going on about how exciting your area of interest is. Or don’t do it at all. People get (rightly) irritated when they are patronised with a whole bunch of statistics and general comments about how great a particular technology is, or how big a certain sector is.

Stage presence and humour, if they come naturally to you, will be the icing on the cake, but whenever I see a bad presentation anywhere, it’s almost always because the speaker is just regurgitating a whole bunch of stuff that everyone in the room already knows.

There was some widely spread debate last year about how web conferences in particular, still have a heavy male bias in the speaker line ups. Is this something you’re concerned about, or not?

I think the fact that we have always been concerned enough about this to try to right the balance as best we can has more than a little to do with the fact that our events really don’t have the same blokey/nerdy atmosphere that they might otherwise have. We don’t exercise Equal Opportunity or a quota system in any sort of rigid fashion.

However, we do keep a slightly more assiduous eye open for women doing interesting things on the web. By and large men won’t be backward in speaking and writing about and publicising their work (not that there is anything wrong with that!), you just have to put in a bit of extra work and you’ll find women doing interesting things as well. This pays off in that better atmosphere I refer to above.

So, if you could give one piece of advice for conference speakers in the making, what would it be?

Do something cool and rock solid in the next 6 months and tell me about it :)

Any plans you’re willing to reveal about the next conference?

I don’t feel like any themes have emerged as yet content-wise. The biggest thing I am going to hint at now is that idea of participation by the community I speak of above. We’re in the business of providing content of the highest possible quality that people can take back to their workplaces and start implementing straight away.

We’re very different to events like Barcamp because I actually believe a lot of our attendees find that kind of atmosphere and pressure to contribute and participate on the spot a little bit intimidating. However, I do think there is some sort of hybrid event you can create that will harness the energy and expertise of those who do want to contribute and participate while not intimidating those who prefer to be spectators for now.

I hope these points that Maxine have raised are useful, and look forward to seeing more people attending conferences as speakers in the future. Please let me know how it goes for you.

Image: Flower, Puri Saraswati, Ubud, Bali.