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While you cannot learn every marketing technique from books, books can help you find your way through the digital marketing jungle. With long summer days coming up and business slowing down a bit, you should put some of these digital marketing books on your reading list. Some of these will simply be a good and entertaining read, some will give you new ideas, provide some new tactics, and some will explain things you always wanted to know.

Whichever books you choose, none of them will be a waste of time and you will find a ton of useful tips and best practices that will enable you to take your blog, business or other ventures to the next level through digital marketing.

1. The New Rules Of Marketing And PR

David Meerman Scott

When we started our (former) startup exploreB2B we planned to use PR to make it spread. But we totally failed at PR. We failed to understand the connection between Social Media Marketing, content marketing, and PR – and even the PR agencies that we hired for a ton of money failed to explain to us how the modern branding, public relations, and social media marketing go hand in hand and how we could have built our brand.

This book will give you a thorough understanding of how to use social media, content marketing, news releases and a lot more marketing techniques to push your brand recognition, your marketing, and eventually make sales with it.

2. Trust me I am Lying: Confessions of A Media Manipulator

Ryan Holiday

Online Marketing is not a fair and honest game. Digital marketing is about building trust, but not necessarily about telling the truth – or telling the truth so that people can recognize the reality behind it. I have written before about the deceiving nature of some shiny marketing numbers that in reality tell nothing but sound good enough to make a bunch of people fall for them. But there is more to manipulating the media. Rumors can break companies, false news can cause panic – and the right message at the right time and place has the power to catapult a mediocre product into the trendsetting heaven of a best seller.

Understand the manipulative power of blogs and online media and use them to your own advantage. That is digital marketing at its best.

3. Born To Blog

Mark W Schaefer, Stanford Smith

Digital marketing gives tremendous power to blogs. One blog can easily do the marketing for a company – or even several products. But you have to know how to start and build this blog. How to create great content for a targeted audience.

And Mark Schaefer tells you how to do exactly that, one step at a time. Because blogging is your fastest way to success in today’s online marketing world.

4. Content Chemistry

Andy Crestodina

With your own great content, you can earn the power to overcome limits. You can bypass the need for advertising. You can gain publicity and brand recognition without having to “know” journalists or convince media outlets to publish about you.

This book gives you the necessary knowledge about great content creation. You will learn about headlines, keywords and captivating writing and their impact on the success of content in the digital marketing landscape. It is not any content that will win in the digital marketing game – it is great content that will give you power. And here is how to create great content for your content strategy.

5. Ctrl Alt Delete Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.

Mitch Joel

The world is changing. We buy more and more online. Entrepreneurs and business owners are no longer settled industrialists with a factory or multi-employee company. Solopreneurs have the opportunity to become millionaires. And everybody can start a business right from their kitchen table.

You can complain – or you can see it as your chance to change your life and do something you love. Mitch Joel explains to you how you can leverage these new opportunities to your advantage: Reboot Your Life!

6. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

Joe Pulizzi

Digital marketing is a lot more about delivering helpful, entertaining and valuable content to your target group than talking about products, features, and benefits. This book by content marketing guru Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute explains how to create epic content to build a loyal and attentive audience – and still, keep your goals in mind. Instead of shouting louder to cut through the online noise, learn how to deliver content your audience wants.

This will definitely help you to create a better content marketing strategy.

7. Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

Mike A. Stelzner

This is partly the success story of how Mike Stelzner built Social Media Examiner. But it is also the explanation on how to build an online business by not focusing on selling but instead on catering to the needs of your audience. Even after a couple of years, this is still relevant. Because the philosophy of concentration on helping your audience and concentrating on their needs is what is the underlying key to the success of any blog or online business.

8. Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success

Neal Schaffer

You want to add some strategy to your online marketing? Try Neal Schaffer. He provides you with a roadmap for a successful social media strategy. If you have been struggling to get your social media on track, this book will help you find your way through the social media jungle, choose the right networks and put it all together in one comprehensive and consistent marketing strategy.

9. The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators

Chris Brogan

The world of online success stories is full of strange people: Geeks, weirdos, introverts, and geniuses. And that has a reason. The digital world is made for everyone – but a little insanity can help you stand out from the mass.

If you ever felt like you don’t fit into the classic world, this book is for you. You will find out that what makes you different can be your best weapon on the battlefield of digital marketing. And this book will tell you how to turn your “being different” into your best business advantage and your best digital marketing strategy.

10. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World

Gary Vaynerchuk

Have you ever listened to a talk by Gary Vaynerchuk? If he knows one thing it is how to make people listen to him! And in this book, he tells you how you can achieve that too. The main thing you can expect from Gary V is to motivate you and inspire you. Plus, you will learn a lot about building relationships and catering to them as a foundation for your business marketing and success.

11. They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer

Marcus Sheridan

Looking for a fix to your digital strategy? Here you go!

For many people, an integral part of traditional marketing is paying for advertising. That does not need to be like that. You do not need a huge marketing budget to be successful. You can market a business on a budget. Without paying for ads. By using marketing strategies like inbound marketing and content marketing and learning to distribute that content to a targeted audience via social media, search and other platforms.

Find out what your customers needs and wants, provide that with your content and figure out a way to let the potential customers know about your content! Sounds easy? Read the book!

12. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

Seth Godin

I am German. Every German knows what a purple cow is: It is a brand of chocolate, no need to say more, purple cow is Milka Chocolate 🙂

And that is what Seth Godin tells you in this book: How to be a purple cow. Stand out from the other boring brands of brown chocolate from boring brown, white or black-and-white cows. Be purple. Learn to be the purple cow. The cow that everybody recognizes.

The digital world is noisy. If you master the art of standing out and getting heard, you are more than halfway to success.

13. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers

Jay Baer

Are you afraid of complaining customers? They are not the problem. Unhappy customers are. And complaining customers will turn into unhappy customers if you ignore their complaints. If you take your customers seriously a complaint is not a problem and a complaining customer can still be turned into a happy customer.

In the digital world customer service becomes part of your branding and marketing strategy, as part of the complaints and your reaction to them will be public on social networks.

Jay Baer tells you how to deal with complaints and turn customer service into your best marketing to move your business to the next level. He will provide you with examples, actionable tips and best practices on how to deal with difficult situations.

Wow, that is a lot to read – I hope your reading list for this summer is not overflowing yet. I am sure you will find at least one marketing book that can tremendously help you with your digital marketing, inspire you or solve a problem you have. If you need some more book recommendations, check out this list of books for bloggers and our book recommendations for social media marketing.

Happy reading!

We have something new for you!

After years of loving Twitter, for the first time in our blogging history, Twitter no longer is our strongest social traffic channel.

It is no secret that we are always looking for new strategies to get more traffic. 

After playing around with Pinterest for some time now, I found the missing link in my Pinterest strategy. Suddenly everything else I had tried made sense – or it did not. That missing link made it all click into its place. And from one day to the next, our Pinterest traffic started to grow.

And now Pinterest is our most important source for social traffic – and growing fast.

And what if I told you that you can have the same traffic success from Pinterest.

Simply use our action plan, set it up and get it running for more traffic from Pinterest within days.

Are you interested? Check out our new book: “The Pinterest Traffic Code!”

And if you liked this list, would you do me a favor? Please pin it!

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