Unlike big business owners, small business owners have the burden of taking care of every single aspect of their business – recruitment, marketing, finance, accounts, managing employees to managing vendors, and so forth. But here we focused only on books that can help you gain marketing knowledge and skills. Here are the top 10 books on marketing which we believe are helpful for new as well as established small business owners.

Book # 1: The New Rules of Marketing & PR – David Meerman Scott

In the new marketing scenario, the methods such as ad copy, etc. do not bring results for your business. With the popularity of smartphones and other devices and proliferation of the Internet, new methods, rules, etc. of marketing have evolved. This book discusses the importance and benefits of using such techniques.

David M Scott provides fresh examples of success from various industries and businesses across the world. He highlights the new tools and techniques that marketers should use to communicate with their buyers directly – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. In short, this book is a guide that offers actionable strategies and insider tips that can be implemented immediately.

Book # 2: Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking – Andy Sernovitz

This book by Andy Sernovitz emphasizes the use of word of mouth marketing for businesses. The book elaborates purpose of blogs, social media, viral emails, etc. – when to use them and how to make them work.

Word of mouth is an effective tool to share information quickly and easily to promote businesses. It is an effective tool that can promote your business via your customers, friends and relations.

Book # 3: Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business – Jay Conrad Levinson

This book furnishes strategies for Internet marketing, tips on using technology like pod-casting and automated marketing, programs for targeting prospects, cultivating repeat, referral business, management lessons in the age of telecommuting and freelance employees, etc. – exclusively for small businesses.

Book # 4: Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide – John Jantsch

John Jantsch is a well-known expert in small business marketing. In the book, he discusses all the proven tools and tactics together in a step-by-step marketing system. This road map helps small business owners in knowing what they need to do to market their businesses.

Book # 5: Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business – David Siteman Garland

This book provides strategies for building, marketing and promoting businesses. These techniques are smarter, faster, cheaper and therefore save your time and money. The book is equally helpful for start-ups as well as those who are already in the market for sometime.

Book # 6: Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed: Leverage Resources, Establish Online Credibility and Crush Your Competition – Patrick Schwerdtfeger

This book provides effective practical strategies and tactics – a complete tool kit to use resources sensibly, to establish online credibility. If you apply these strategies, you can get good results for your business within a brief span of time.

Book # 7: Ultimate Small Business Marketing Guide – James Stephenson

This book is an essential guide for every business owner. James Stephenson presents in this book 1500 great marketing ideas that are sure to boost your sales revenue, profits and customer loyalty and also to help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Book # 8: Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth – Stephanie Diamond

Marketing for small businesses was difficult in the past. But today, it is not the case. Web marketing enables small businesses to take advantage of marketing opportunities and win new customers.

The book ‘Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth’ focuses on different ways of marketing with a detailed strategy to put them into action. The main content of the book comprises checklists – niche, brand, story, search, content, social media tactics, traditional tactics and results. This book helps you implement web marketing strategies.

Book # 9: Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook – Dave Kerpen

This book is a key to unlock the door to new opportunities. It tells you about how to build brand awareness by engaging customers in social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and other social media networking sites.

Book # 10: 500 Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Advice, Hints and Strategy for Business: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and More! – Andrew Macarthy

This book is a guide to small businesses. It provides 500 social media marketing tips covering all the web’s biggest players like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and others. These tips will help you build brand awareness in social media networks, attract and engage your customers and ultimately help you increase sales.

With the growth of internet marketing, another platform has quickly emerged in the industry – social networking. Social networking is one of the most important areas that you can enter your business into. With social networking sites, you can reach an entirely new group of people that otherwise would never know that you exist. Sites like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Squidoo have literally taken the internet by storm. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone that doesn’t have an account with one of the aforementioned sites. This means that if you do things right, you can reach all the people that could benefit from your service or product. However, with the way things are growing, how could you possibly keep up with all of your social marketing tasks? Without some sort of help, the tasks can seem pretty daunting.

When you jump into the social marketing arena, there is often a lot of foreign ground to be covered. You have to set up a profile, which if done right, can take some time. You have to fill out all kinds of online forms and upload pictures, videos, and other information. This step alone can take hours of work. If you’re joining YouTube, you’ll have to make videos and figure out how to upload them. If you’re not experienced with this, it might be difficult at first. Basically, there is a lot to do right off the bat, as well as the daily and weekly tasks. If you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t have much free time, it can be overwhelming. Other than just buckling down and doing it, what other option do you have?

Actually, there is another fantastic option that you might not have thought of – hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants can take care of all of these tasks and more when it comes to social marketing. They can guide you through the entire process or just handle most of it for you. Their level of involvement is totally up to you. Have your virtual assistant put together a spreadsheet listing a dozen social sites that would be perfect for your business and industry. The virtual assistant will be able to guide you on just what type of social networking steps you’ll be able to take on the various sites.

When you start to look for a virtual assistant to help you with social marketing, there are a few things that you’ll want to consider. You want to find someone that has real-world experience in these matters. You want someone who has done social marketing successfully for their business or others before. You don’t want some newbie who has never done this before. You want a proven track record that can pay dividends. You’ll have more confidence in a virtual assistant that has walked the walk. Look for virtual assistants that have a certification in internet marketing. They’re out there. They have been trained specifically to support your internet business.

It’s also great to have a virtual assistant that is proactive in their marketing efforts. You don’t want to have to lead them along by the hand. Someone with initiative to get up and get things done is who you want. However, with that being said, you don’t want someone that won’t even consult you. You need to make sure that they have a very clear understanding of what you want. They should know all of your goals and desires for your social marketing plan before they do anything. Set up some rules and guidelines for what you want accomplished. Putting out some preliminary deadlines and outlines of your goals is probably a good idea for your virtual assistant. If you want to portray a certain image when you interact with your online contacts, the virtual assistant should have a clear understanding of this. You want to portray a certain image in the marketplace. This should always be seen in every bit of marketing that you do. You want a virtual assistant that will remain consistent in their efforts and message.

A good virtual assistant can handle many of the tasks that take a lot of time. For example, if you are wanting help with your participation in Twitter, you will still need to be the one who updates your current status. At a minimum you will email your status to the VA and they will post it for you. Keep in mind there are many time-saving techniques that the VA can put into place to make it easy for you to do things, such as emailing your status update and have it sent to 20 different social networking sites. Updating your Twitter status aside, what can a virtual assistant do for you? Using Twitter search and notification features your virtual assistant can monitor for your keywords, keep an eye on what your competition is doing, and reputation management (very important). And that’s just Twitter. Think of how helpful a virtual assistant will be to you in all the other social networking sites.

While your virtual assistant can take care of many things for you in the social marketing world, it should be a team effort so you won’t be so overwhelmed. Your involvement is crucial to the success of the campaign, even if it is limited. If you don’t take some kind of ownership over your social networking sites, it will start to show. It will be just another commercial website that is out there to sell products. None of your own personality will show through. However, if you actually take the time to develop some contacts and relationships, your business will flourish. There is only so much that you can hand off to someone else. Get in there and work with your virtual assistant. Your social marketing results will grow as a result.

There are a lot of guides, courses and coaches out there that promise you the world, but often fail to deliver. I’ve been there and done that. I started my online career by spending $8,000 on mentoring that didn’t work at all.

I then proceeded to buy products and courses that were scams and full of bad advice. I was about to give up when I stumbled on information that was truly valuable.

Article marketing is my favorite way to get traffic to my websites and help people improve their lives by recommending products and services I personally use or own. I sincerely care about people and want to help them.

If you have the same mindset, I think we’ll get along just fine. Here are three simple tips on how you can find the best article marketing guide out there:

1. Research

First of all, you want to do your research and compare all the different article marketing guides out there. While I sell an article marketing guide, I’m not going to tell you to buy it, because only you can know which guide is right for you.

I recommend you use search engines, social media and forums to see what people think of all the different products out there. If you’re objective and educate yourself, you will have no problem finding the best article marketing guide for you.

2. Proven Strategies

Only go for proven effective strategies. When I was learning article marketing I realized that the best advice came from people that had applied article marketing and made it work from them.

Simple, isn’t it? You’d be surprised how many people ignore this once a good marketer comes their way. Always look at if the person selling you the guide is using the strategies himself.

3. The Whole Package

Look at the contents of the guide and what’s included. Is it teaching you everything you need to know to get started or are they trying to sell you on something else once you buy?

It pays to keep your eyes open and your focus sharp. There are a lot of bad products out there, but if you keep looking, you’ll find the hidden gems, and I can say from personal experience that these hidden gems are more than worth the time you spend on finding them.

Start taking control of your marketing efforts today by finding the best possible information that will help you succeed!