I like the Harry Beckwith series like Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing and What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business a lot more since they focus more on selling moi and my personal brand and service more than a product that you can hold in you hand.

I think you will be successful in your quest. Your command of the language and your expressive skills are excellent. More than that, though, you have an ethical and gentlemanly outlook.

I sense you identify very well with Masterson’s central theme of making your mantra “all about the customers.” It certainly shows in your topics for us. Also, you focus on positive qualities which effectively balance your courteous comments on issues you don’t particularly like.

My girlfriend and her sons are huge fans of your blog. I’m thankful she introduced it to me.

You have the drive and the processing skills to generate ideas and integrate them into your plan. I think you are going to do well.

Thank you for such a quality site.

Cade
http://www.StopGettingCheated.com

Flea
http://beasurvivor.blogspot.com/

In particular chapters 15 and 16 are something I would love to read, because I often do feel quite conflicted on the ethical nature of marketing.

Please more articles on entrepreneurship. I like them a lot. Perhaps an article on when to make the “transition”? I tried it once before and made the switch to early, effectively crushing my infant business. I also like the book “Start Small, Finish Big” by the founder of Subway.

Of course, my comments go directly to the marketing section (& many people do say a business is really all about marketing.) I found this to be way off base: “- I usually blame the large-scale marketers who carefully plot how ads can tweak people’s emotions.”

OK, agreed. There are some pretty gross people out there marketing using very unsavory means…& it never lasts long! They may stay in the industry floating around, but this tactic doesn’t last. It seems to be something people are rapidly losing interest in within the industry (despite outside perceptions.)

When you look at something I nearly call nouveau-marketing, or the really good older gents/ladies of marketing that have stood the test of time…these people are “large marketers” in every sense & do not use this lame tactic in the way eluded to here. Again, some more Seth Godin, Drayton Bird, Chris Baggott, & yes, David Ogilvy who was the largest of all marketers in recent history (just to name a very few) to tenor this section’s tone would have been helpful & more accurate in my opinion. I’ve seen just as many small scale people preying on people’s gullibility with lame approaches…and they usually switch up finding they can do far better with *real* marketing.

Great review, though.

Thanks for the thorough review!

Kelly James-Enger’s advice for freelancers could be construed for bloggers albeit the content is different.