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With 101 Ways Promote Yourself : Tricks Of The Trade For Taking Charge Of Your Own Success, Raleigh Pinskey is giving not so much 101 ideas you will specifically use as 101 ideas to start your own brainstorming session. The key to self-promotion is being fearless in putting on the yellow chicken suit and standing in front of your restaurant waving at passing cars and this book will give you ideas much better than the chicken suit. And even if your solution is standing on the corner in a chicken suit, you need to relate that costume to your business and get the attention of the media, not just the 500 drivers who will see you today.

The book promises to help you:

• Develop hot new leads
• Project a positive image
• Get your name in front of potential customers
• Promote instant name recognition
• Hold on to valued customers
• Build on your success by cultivating referrals
• Position yourself for greater visitibility in your market
• Grow and expand your network and database
• Explore media opportunities
• Market effectively on the internet
• Create goodwill in your community

Other than the next to the last, where the book is outdated because of the speed of change on the internet, the book doesn’t just promise, it delivers.

Get Clients Now!: A 28-Day Marketing Program for Professionals and Consultants by C.J. Hayden is a book that Guerilla Marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson recommends as turning marketing amateurs into marketing geniuses.

As you’d expect the book offers action plans and lots of great business building ideas. What’s unusual is that it focuses on breaking down the sales cycle to determine where you need the most work and focusing your action plan on that area. Most books in the genre are all about the strategy Hayden calls “Filling the Pipeline”, but this book offers three other strategies: Followup, Getting Appointments and Closing Sales. (After sale goes back to re-Filling the Pipeline.) Your action plan will contain elements of all four, but you go through an initial self-assessment first to determine where to focus. In fact, as someone who has read marketing books for years, the self-assessment idea and breaking down the action plans by strategy was more important than the specific marketing ideas though they are excellent also.

The book also emphasizes simple record keeping to track your progress and rewarding yourself as you go. The action plans, also called “menus”, include “dessert” items like writing in your Success Journal or even Get 8 Hours of Sleep Every Night, that contribute to your plan’s success, your motivation and your overall well-being all at once.