New York SBDC Research Network

The blog post How to Create Triggers That Get People to Spread Your Ideas was the introduction of sorts to a webinar I listened to earlier this month, Viral Marketing: How to Create a World Wide Rave . Both venues made these cogent points: "Nobody cares about your products (except you)...What people do care about are themselves and ways to solve their problems..." "No coercion required...When you've got something worth sharing, people will share it..." The webinar example was a dentist who created a free e-book, Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex! and ended up more than quadrupling her gross while allowing her to drop her expensive Yellow Pages ads. "Lose control...Yes, you can measure success, but not through business-school Return On Investment (ROI) calculators." Think of the Grateful Dead, who allowed and even encouraged recording at their concerts. "Put down roots...If you want your ideas to spread, you need to be involved in the online communities

There’s been a lot of talk lately about electronic books, what with new portable readers and digitization initiatives. We’ve sent some of you links to Google books, but it often seems that the pages that would be most helpful are precisely those not included! Wouldn't it be nice to have a directory of free online book resources? For those of you willing to take the online reading plunge, librarians at the University of Pennsylvania have put together an index of freely available online books, The Online Books Page . They’ve indexed more than 30,000 books on the internet, and the records are searchable by keyword, author, title, subject etc. There are also special features – like banned books and prize winning books online. I did a quick search for “marketing” and turned up a small handful of books, including a link to Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors . And around we go…