Customer Reviews

Get Slightly Famous: Become a Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business with Less Effort

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Top notch. As a marketing consultant to independent professionals and small service busineses, I found this book to be outstanding. For example, the book describes how a new trend for professionals and consultants who want to woo and win new clients is to offer teleclasses, also known as telephone seminars or teleseminars. The book explains that having heard you speak, people feel they know you personally, and are more confident about hiring you. The advantages are abundant. You don't have to be personally present to give a talk that reaches your target market, says Van Yoder. Online chats and teleconferences, using your own or others' telephone lines, can help you reach a lot of people eager to hear your message. The book is filled with great advice like this.

I have to agree with all the positive comments on this book. I've been in medical device consulting for over 10 years, and have tried some of the ideas in Yoder's book already (due to common sense or other consultants' / books' recommendations). But I found much more suggestions here, together w/ updated web-based ideas which I'm now working on employing. I also value his many real-world examples interspersed throughout the book. This is one of only a few books (and I have most) that I'll be rereading to assist in marketing my consulting services.

Get Slightly Famous provides an adequate overview of standard promotional techniques that are found in similar books. The ideas are presented without guidance on how to choose among them, and the author sets unrealistic expectations of activity levels. The book is aimed at small businesses and self-employed professionals, so the mentions of marketing strategies used by huge corporations is baffling and irrelevant to the target reader. Sloppy proofreading in several places also detracts from the book.

What redeems Get Slightly Famous are the sidebar stories about how entrepreneurs have used the various marketing techniques. These ideas are much more creative and likely to be more useful to a reader than much of the book's main text.

Steven Van Yoder has a deep understanding of the challenges facing small business owners - and offers innovative, low cost methods to succeed in today's fiercely competitive business climate. I enjoyed learning from the many real-life examples of successful entrepreneurs in the book. Steve's humor, expertise, and hard earned wisdom shine on every page. I have re-read Get Slightly Famous twice and highly recommend it to anyone trying to succeed as a small business owner or as a professional in private practice.

Get Slightly Famous is a rare find: excellent tips, inspiring true stories, and enjoyable to read without being full of fluff. At first I just flipped through it, reading "Real-World Success Stories"(they're easy to find, marked clearly--& there are dozens of them), but then I found myself reading the book cover-to-cover. There's quite a bit of good advice here that I haven't read or heard anywhere else, & I've read a lot of marketing & PR guides.

Get Slightly Famous is one of the best books on self-promotion that I have read. Steven Van Yoder provides practical advice that would benefit any person who wants to improve business or raise his or her public profile. While many books of this nature are disappointingly thin on substance, this book provides solid advice for building a career as an "expert."

Get Slightly Famous: Become A Celebrity In Your Field And Attract More Business With Less Effort by Steven Van Yoder is a unique and instructional business guide to becoming famous within the context of the business world and thereby attracting clientele and increasing revenues through sheer visibility. A wealth of tips, tricks, and techniques for acquiring and consistently holding media attention; using speaking engagements to become noticed by a targeted market; harvesting the full potential of the Internet; creating ancillary "info-products" to build public awareness, and a great deal more, Get Slightly Famous is excellent, profitable, and highly recommended supplemental reading for businesspeople and marketers on all scales and theaters of commerce.

This book has innovative and practical suggestions that you can apply to your business - without costing an arm and a leg to implement. Using some of the tips in the book enabled me to get media coverage for my business on a larger scale than I ever had before - resulting in more sales.

It is very comprehensive, but well-paced and easy to read. I highly recommend it to all business owners, regardless of industry.

Whether you have minimal or significant experience in positioning your company to stand out from the crowd, this book has something for everyone.

Steve has done an exceptional job of identifying the barriers most small businesses and private practices face whilst striving for success. This book outlines some key methods in developing a profile in your chosen field. Some very helpful tips on communicating with the media.

How is it that a few select people are able to attract attention from others in ways that increase their business opportunities? It's because they've mastered the art of becoming "slightly famous". Think of it as using networking in ways you never thought of before. Steven Van Yoder covers this in his book Get Slightly Famous: Become a Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business with Less Effort, Second Edition. Even if you're not running your own business, this book will more than pay for itself in turning you into someone who is considered an "expert" in your chosen field.

Contents:
Preface: How to Break Out of the Anonymity Trap
Part 1 - The Center of Your Universe: Just a Little Fame Will Do; Aim For a Target; The Brand Is You; Thought Leadership
Part 2 - Media Strategies: Media Strategies That Work; Attracting Media Attention; Getting an Article into Print; Broadcast Media
Part 3 - Reaching Out in All Directions: The Slightly Famous Website; Marketing in A Virtual World - Internet and Web 2.0 Strategies; Stand and Deliver - Speaking Strategies; Info-Products - Create Multiple Income Streams; Strategic Partnerships; Reach Out and Connect; Keeping in Touch with Newsletters; Cause Marketing - Doing Well By Doing Good
Index

You know the people... colleagues (or competitors) who are always in demand as speakers, consultants, writers, or sources for articles. Is it because they know absolutely more than anyone else on a given subject? Usually not. It's more because they've become "slightly famous" in their niche by making themselves known and available via various channels. Van Yoder covers the essentials of setting yourself up in this way. Part 1 of the book sets the groundwork for determining what it is that you want to be known for, and how best to position yourself as a person who is an authority on that subject. Once you've determined your niche and subject matter, you can use his techniques to start building your name as a brand in the marketplace. You don't need to become a household name to everyone on the planet. What you *do* need to do is start putting your name out there in your niche as someone who has valuable information, who can be trusted to share that information, and who is accessible. Once you start down that path, the rest of the book covers various ways that you can make this work in different channels, such as becoming an industry speaker or writer, becoming a person turned to for news stories, or making your knowledge available in audio/visual/written form for purchase. Once you start building up a little momentum (i.e., becoming "slightly famous"), the exposure starts to build a life of its own, and you're attracting business in ways you never thought possible.

While I'm not an independent businessperson or a consultant, I *am* someone who needs a certain level of exposure in my field in order to take advantage of various opportunities that come up. I fortunately did a number of things correctly up to this point, but with Van Yoder's book I can take it even further. Get Slightly Famous is one of those books that will cause you to rethink how you view yourself within your industry or community, and if followed it will lead you down paths that will surprise you.