The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing
for Small Business
Tom Antion
(Reviewer - Wayne Turmel)
2005 John Wiley & Sons Inc.
ISBN: 047171870X

Low-Cost/High-Return Tools and Techniques That Really Work. Packed with practical ideas, useful low-costing resources & expert advice provides great ways to get the word out about what your company does & what you sell in an affordable, low-risk way.

Associate Reviewer Wayne Turmel writes:

Books with a title this long & this full of promises (the ultimate anything is a big claim) have got to deliver on three things:
 • Can the audience -- in this case small business owners with little net or marketing savvy -- understand a darned thing he says?
 • If they do understand it, can they act on the suggestions (does it say stuff like, “first, get a million dollars in funding”)?
 • Do they work?

On all three fronts, Tom Antion's book works well, if not perfectly.

The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Small Business is broken down into easy-to-digest sections like “How to Create a Small Business Website That Kicks”, & “How to Create and Distribute a Kick-Butt Electronic Magazine”. The text is broken down into small bites that can be read in a hurry, or one at a time, depending on the audience's ability to cram so much technical information into their heads.

Additionally, the book is full of websites to visit & places to get good information. Unlike so many books like this, the information is current & the links (at least the ones I visited) are all up & running -- & just as useful as promised. Of course, the fact that most of them are owned & run by Mr Antion is both a blessing (you can see how they look & work -- he follows his own advice) & a curse.

The curse is that books written in a conversational style like this make a giant assumption -- that you would want to actually have a conversation with the writer. While Mr Antion has great ideas & the information is really terrific & instantly applicable, his “hey, I made a gazillion dollars with this, look how smart I am” style & the use of words like “kickin'” wears thin after a bit. Read this book in small chunks.

While hearing how he made $50,000 in a long weekend sounds a bit like a late-night infomercial, the readership is made of people who'd like nothing better than to make 50 Grand in their sleep so it works. The reader who takes the time & effort to do the research and use the tools he provides will be amply rewarded.

The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Small Business is worth the time spent on multiple readings if only for the nuggets that will help launch future online gazillionaires like, well, Tom Antion.

More from Tom Antion: Wake 'em Up! How to Use Humor & Other Professional Techniques to Create Alarmingly Good Business Presentations -- most all his other books (all with breathless titles) are Adobe downloadables.
(10/23/05)

Wayne Turmel
2005©Wayne Turmel
A RebeccasReads.Com Reviewer

Reviewer's Bio:
Wayne Turmel is the Business Book Reviewer for Rebecca's Reads. Besides being a corporate drone, he's a published writer in the field of business communication & training, as well as the author of A Philistine's Journal: An Average Guy Tackles the Classics. He can be heard on the web as the host of the popular podcast: The Cranky Middle Manager Show at (www.thepodcastnetwork.com/cmm).