The Ultimate Web Marketing Guide

I really didn't intend to be absent from my blog for nearly a month. I've been doing a lot of reading but I haven't been talking about it because the books have been long ones. I'm reading Gone With the Wind and am about three-quarters of the way through. The other long one that I've just finished is The Ultimate Web Marketing Guide by Michael Miller. It's over 600 pages and I've been reading a chapter or two a day when time allowed for the past several weeks.

Fifteen years in high school ago I was a media assistant and the library was the only place on campus students could access the Internet. I remember checking out a few websites and wondering what good it would ever do me. I just had my 10 year college reunion earlier this summer. Nearly everything that's in this book didn't exist when I was taking classes in professional communications to prepare for life after college. As I was doing research online for papers for the first time there wasn't yet a standard way to cite those resources. So things have changed a lot and this will continue. I imagine that everything I've just read about in the Guide may be obselete in just a few years.

The book was recommended to me by a graphic designer colleague several months ago. Reading it all the way through has been immensely helpful for me in thinking about how clients could utilize these tools to leverage their online presence. Some of the tools are things I deal with often (effective websites, search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging, Facebook and Twitter) and some are things I don't do directly but need to know about (podcasts, mobile applications, mobile websites, pay-per-click and display advertising, and others).

To me learning new things for business and personal growth is part of life. All the time it took me to read this book was well worth it. If you're in the business or in charge of marketing where you work but not sure where to start, get this book.