Someone just posted a question over on the Business of Software forum asking for recommendations on books and blogs related to sales. Since I’ve been doing a lot of reading on marketing (I know, marketing isn’t sales, but they go hand in hand), I figured I’d post my reading list so that others might benefit.

Here are the marketing books I’ve read recently:

• Inbound Marketing
• Duct Tape Marketing
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding (I recently wrote a summary of this book)

Here are a few books that I haven’t read yet but look good:

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR
• Word of Mouth Marketing
• Crossing the Chasm

Happy reading!

And no, the above are not affiliate links.

What about you? Read any good books (marketing/sales related or otherwise) lately? Leave a quick comment below and share them with everybody.

UPDATE Looking for more marketing books? Here’s a list of good ones that I’ve read recently (or am planning to read).

I just read The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and was happy that I set aside a couple of hours to do so.

I’m currently working on a new product and a lot of the material was relevant to me. I’ve read a few books on marketing, but nothing specifically on branding. This book has whet my appetite for more.

Here are my notes:

• Generate publicity, not advertising. Best way to get publicity? Announce a new category, not a new product.
• Claim your product is a "leader", not "better". All products claim they are better, but you can’t argue with leader.
• Own a word. Like "luxury".
• Perception of quality is built by a narrowly focused brand, a high price, and a better name.
• Promote the category, not the brand, and be first in the category so that your brand is associated with the category.
• Expand a brand, reduce its power. Contract a brand, increase its power.
• Welcome other brands in order to build the category.
• Generic brand name = bad
• Select a brand color opposite of that of your main competitor’s.
• Consistency is key. Never change your brand, ever.
• What’s a brand? A proper noun that can be used in place of a word.

Click on the thumbnail to the left to check out the marketing effectiveness of SendAlong vs. some of its competitors.

Compared to last month, I’ve jumped up in score once again (from 48 to 60 overall). Whoot! Slow and steady wins the race:).

I think a couple of the things I’ve done recently that helped were:

• registering the sendalong.com domain for longer than just one year (I guess search engines view domains that will expire in less than a year as “temporary” sites, and thus score them lower)
• updating my keywords – I’ve been using Google’s AdWords to help research what words I should be targeting – hopefully I’ll do even better given more time

Want to grade your site? I used Web Site Grader.

Time for the monthly update on the perceived marketing effectiveness of SendAlong’s site. I’ve been releasing a lot of updates lately, so hopefully some of the coolness and newness has trickled down into the SEO rankings.

Here are the results:

Compared to December’s results (I jumped from a 20 to a 48 overall), SendAlong’s score has improved a LOT. *capers about*. There’s still a long road ahead, but this is encouraging. *capers once more*

Want to grade your site? I used Web Site Grader.

It’s time for an update on the perceived marketing effectiveness of SendAlong’s site. Having just released a newly updated beta, let’s hope it does much better.

Alright, the results are in:

Compared to late October’s results, it looks like the grade has improved (although not as much as I would have liked), however there’s still a lot of work left to do.

Want to grade your site? I used Web Site Grader.

I’ve recently stumbled upon www.websitegrader.com – enter your site’s address and the address of a few other competing sites and get a report about how effective your site is at marketing its message.

It takes into consideration metrics like Google Page Rank, number of inbound links, etc (it also shows you those metrics). In the end, you’re also provided a “Website Grade”, which means that out “of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than X% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.”

The website grade for sendalong.com? 4%. Ouch! Time to get to work!

SendAlong’s results:

By the way, websitegrader.com is an excellent example of Linkbait – just what Patrick was talking about a few days ago. This will get people coming back repeatedly to grade their website, and in the process market HubSpot’s other services.

I’d consider this an absolute must read for anyone in the microISV business (or anyone else trying to sell something): http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/developing-linkbait-for-a-non-technical-audience/

If you’re not aware, a favicon is the 16×16 pixel image that appears in the URL field of your browser (see it in action right now in your browser’s URL field above). It can be a subtle but effective way of reinforcing the branding of your site to your visitors.

Here’s the one I created for SendAlong’s identity:

For five minute’s work, I think it turned out pretty well. I simply resized an existing image and saved it as an .ico file, included the appropriate links in the section of my markup, and there it is.

If you can’t move your eyes up to the top of the screen to see, here’s a look at the end result:

For those interested, here’s a tutorial on how to do it.