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Title:
Winning E-Brand Strategies
Review:
Many would-be Internet millionaires spent thousands of pounds building
eye-catching websites, only for the mantra "build it and they will
come" to turn out to be false; visitors - even better, customers -
didn't arrive, and the entrepreneurs were left struggling to market
their website on a meagre budget or were forced to return cap in hand
to their financial backers.
The authors of 'Winning E-Brand Strategies' took a different approach;
they applied their in-depth knowledge of an existing trade (luxury
ties from Saville Row) and built an online business with minimal
funds; in fact they started out being paid by wholesale customers in
silk, and grew the business without venture capitalist backing.
The aim of their book is to transfer their experience and provide the
reader with practical advice on how to plan, launch and grow an online
business that is competitive and can adapt to new challenges. Topics
covered include ebusiness planning, collecting market data, website
development (using an outside consultant), building an online brand
and optimising a website to increase traffic from the search engines.
The information on planning and developing an online presence,
including a niche market and strong brand, is useful and the examples
of Hunter's successes and mistakes useful. However, the book is let
down by the chapters on marketing a website through search engines.
There is no mention of pay-per-click (PPC) search engine listings,
which appear at the top of search results on all the major engines and
are increasingly seen as an integral part of any search engine
marketing (SEM) strategy. Admittedly the book was written in 2002;
but PPC has been in existence since 2000 and there is no investigation
of the potential for sales leads offered by PPC advertising. This is
a surprising oversight. The book focuses solely on search engine
optimisation (SEO) of the code and content of a website to improve its
position in search results.
The information on SEO is worth reading - but do not change your
website based on this alone; some of the information is out of date
and some important methods are not covered (e.g. increasing the number
of links from quality websites to your site, to improve your ranking
on Google). However there is good advice - including a discussion of
methods to avoid because they may result in your site being banned
from a search engine.
What is disappointing is that the authors fail to explicitly state the
need to stay up to date with developments in search engine
technologies and how they rank websites. A list of websites that
would help the reader keep up to date would have been useful (e.g.
Webmaster World or SearchEngineWatch
). However, they do have a website
with some information on search engine marketing
and links to resources.
Conclusion
So, would I recommend you buy this book to learn how to plan an online
business and market a website? Whilst I am not aware of any
definitive texts about planning an online business or online
marketing, I would recommend you look for a more up to date title
before you consider this one. In fact, I expect that you will need to
buy two or more, as these topics warrant books of their own. Online
research is also crucial, so read the forums and articles on the sites
mentioned above.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Duncan Parry is an Editorial manager at Espotting UK, working on the
campaigns of major UK brands. Previously he worked on the link
directory on Lycos UK, specialising in IT, Telecommunications and
Internet categories. You can contact him here
<http://www.duncanparry.co.uk>.
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