Brad Feld

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Marketing Advice for $1000 Alex

Nov 28, 2004
Category Books

Ok – Amy’s been making me watch too much Jeopardy these days (although I’ve had a blissful week off from it since I banned TV from this trip.) Fortunately, I can read while it’s in the background (plus Ken just wins all the time – what’s the fun of that.)

So – I picked up Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got with my typically cynical point of view toward marketing. As I wrote in my post Your Marketing Sucks (the title of my favorite marketing book to date), I expected very little from this book even though it was recommended in a comment to the forementioned post by Troy Angrignon (who I don’t know, but did appreciate the comment.) Troy highly recommended this book so it went into the “read some day pile.”

Some day came. For a marketing book, it was a notch above sucking. The pretty little “bonus star” on the cover says “21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition” – never, in my mind – a particularly good sign. However, while the book was pretty simplistic, I found myself getting into it after about 100 pages. Jay Abraham (the author and self proclaimed “master motivator”) loads it up with examples – many of them commonplace ones that ironically made me think “oh – that makes sense – duh – why aren’t we doing that at company X.”

The chapters on Internet and email marketing were pretty lame, especially in contrast to the final publisher proof of Sign Me Up! by Matt Blumberg and the Return Path folks that I read earlier this week. But the rest of the book had plenty of straightforward but useful ways to out-think, out-perform, and out-earn the competition.

Ok – I’m done with business books for a while – time to go for one last run on the beach this trip and then disappear into The Runes of the Earth – Stephen Donaldson’s first book in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.