Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions: How to Promote Yourself, Your Business, Your Ideas Online 2nd Edition (Paperback)

by Peter Kent (Author), Tara Calishain (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Operators of small business have always been attracted to the Internet's seemingly bottomless supply of ready customers, but their hopes can quickly be dashed by the competitive realities of business on the Web. Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions aims to take the entrepreneur by the hand and show him or her how to draw attention to an Internet resource without spending a lot of money.

What the authors present is a sort of guerrilla model for online business in which you use your apparent weaknesses to your advantage. You might, for example, exploit your woefully low traffic level by delivering an extraordinary level of attention to the customers you do have. The idea is that good news spreads, and the publishers of Web resources should provide lots of good things for their visitors to pass along. You can also go outside your customer base to attract visitors without buying banner ads--you can join a professional association or a Web ring, for example.

In addition to their particular brand of marketing advice, authors Peter Kent (who also wrote the excellent Poor Richard's Web Site) and Tara Calishain do a fine job of explaining more pedestrian technical subjects, such as how to prepare your pages for listing on search engines. --David Wall

Topics covered: Audience identification, basic page design and coding, registering with search engines, creating newsletters and other mailing lists, joining affiliate programs, filing press releases, and tracking reactions. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"Fabulous how-to. Ingenious advice. High-density, goldmine of a book." -- Pathways

"This book offers readers the ability to discipline themselves and the resources they need to succeed. It's loaded! Highly recommended!" -- The Web Reviewer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Top Floor Publishing; 2nd edition (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930082002
• ISBN-13: 978-1930082007
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,257,459 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb resource for promoting your entity online., June 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions: How to Promote Yourself, Your Business, Your Ideas Online (Poor Richard's Series) (Paperback)

It's about time! Peter Kent and Tara Calishain have managed to avoid the tremendous hype surrounding internet promotion, by providing a well-organized volume of solid information. They cover not only search engines and adverting, but lesser-known areas, such as awards, newsletters, discussion groups, press releases, and e-mail, among others. This book provides not only information, but a basis for developing your electronic marketing strategy. Buying this book is a must for anyone with a web site because it will pay for itself very quickly. Highly recommended!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great tool for small businesses!, October 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions: How to Promote Yourself, Your Business, Your Ideas Online (Poor Richard's Series) (Paperback)

As a writer myself (Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies) and a small business person and CPA, I think I appreciate more than most people the skill and craftmanship of a technology writer who knows how to make the complex simple, the tedious interesting, and the painstaking fun. Peter Kent is in that small group of writers who has this wonderful gift. Buy this book--you won't be sorry! BTW, I especially recommend this book to small business owners and managers who want to use the Internet as tool for boosting profits and gaining a competitive edge.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Disappointing, May 4, 2000

By	"dmeredith" (Morris Plains, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions: How to Promote Yourself, Your Business, Your Ideas Online (Poor Richard's Series) (Paperback)

I am the CEO of an Internet design company. I picked up the book because one of my clients recommended it. I was very disappointed in the book and actually think that it would cause more harm than benefit to anyone following it's advice.

At least the first third of the book is completely unrelated to Internet marketing - it is more related to how to build a web site, with plenty of "this is what we've done" type advice.

As an example of how bad the book is, they spend 2 chapters on search engine registration. This is a vital part of any Internet marketing strategy, and yet there was zero useful advice on how to achieve a good position, or how to really optimize your site for SE's.

Also, many of the links in the book are out of date, many of the products they mention are no longer "best of breed", and I found their constant "Peter did this" or "Tara found that" extremely annoying.

The authors need to realize that "what they've done" is not necessarily the best thing to do - and does not necessarily work for different types of businesses.

If you are looking for a truly introductory text on how to get started on the Internet, you may want to consider it, as long as you are prepared for it to be out of date. However, if you are looking for help with your Internet marketing, there are much better books to spend your money on.