Top Shelf Reading Picks:

Diane is hard at work on her new e-book this week and has asked Kathleen Burns Kingsbury to step in as a guest reviewer.

The new book, The Sassy Ladies Toolkit for Start-up Businesses, is must-read for women entrepreneurs across the country interested in starting a business and doing it the right way. This fun, informative and inspirational book takes the reader on a journey from dreaming about a business to making it a profitable reality. The book is written in a conversational, down-to-earth style making the reader feel as if The Sassy Ladies are sitting with you, coaching and encouraging you every step of the way.

While the book is only 120 pages, it is jam-packed with resources and links to websites, books and tools to support you in your entrepreneurial endeavor. The Sassy Ladies have an online club that ties in with the book and provides more in-depth learning in six key areas. These include marketing, sales and revenue, office environment, strategic planning, networking, time management, financial management and self development.

Who are the Sassy Ladies? Michelle Girasole,Wendy Hanson and Miriam Perry are wonderfully diverse and talented women who have been there and done that when it comes to small business. Girasole’s technical expertise is sprinkled throughout the chapters and is most helpful in Chapter 4, Working from Home, in a section called Technology to the Rescue. Hanson is an experienced business coach who takes complex business concepts like developing a business plan and pricing your products and breaks it down into bite-size pieces for the reader. Perry is a writer and communications specialist who offers her insights into how to market your product or service effectively to the world. This talented trio will empower you to get in touch with your sassy side and inspire you to build the business of your dreams.

The biggest surprise in reading the book was how helpful it was for me, an entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in small business. While the concepts of starting with the end vision in mind, profitability, sustainability and marketing were familiar to me, the easy-to-read, practical approach and end-of-the-chapter exercises provided new ideas for taking my existing business to the next level.

If you are thinking about starting a business or want to take your current one to the next level, The Sassy Ladies Toolkit for Start-up Businesses is a great investment and must read.

Kathleen Burns Kingsbury is a national speaker, international author and money coach in a unique position to empower business women to “talk to their money” and attain financial freedom. She is also the co-director of the Boston chapter of the Downtown Women’s Club.

I had not planned on reading eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business by Corey Perlman. But I needed a short book to review on my train to NYC and was thinking about updating my online marketing plan. So I was delighted to find it in my “possible review” stack.

I found the book written exactly for my level (and a little below). This means that I could skim the sections on social networks, blogs, e-mail and article marketing, and other topics that fall within my expertise. That’s not to say that I didn’t make a note here or there about things I could be doing better.

However, for the uninitiated, Perlman provides some general, easy-to-follow guidance on those topics. The bulk of the book is about explaining organic search, i.e. how to make sure people find your website, even if they don’t know they are looking for it when they sit down to browse Google. While reading this book (which took less than a Boston-NYC Acela ride), I simultaneously did a website audit and will be making some changes based on what I learned. Here are some of the parts that caught my attention:

Choosing a website designer
Someone who can create a website and make it look attractive does not always have expertise to make a site search-engine-friendly. Says Perlman, “The litmus test question is: ‘How important is it to create metatags for my website?’ If the designer doesn’t say ‘very important,’ then I’d consider finding another web designer.”

The challenge with many websites is that the web designer built the site for you, his customer. He or she didn’t take into account the importance of meeting the needs of your customers. For this reason, some sites look attractive but lack the important content your users are seeking. Others convey the perfect message, but that message is lost within too many images or pictures that dominate the site. Hmmm. I think I recall discussing this in an earlier review where we noted that some of our favorite sites are not visually well-designed (i.e. Craigslist and Google.com).

Title tags and metatags
I knew these were important, but I’d put title tags at the bottom of my to-do list. Nevertheless, this is one of the best sections of the book because Perlman really explains their importance. In fact, I stopped reading and typed out title tags for all of my website pages that include key words and descriptions. What I like most about eBoot Camp is that Perlman understands that his audience is not technical. This means he doesn’t talk down to you and actually includes a draft e-mail you could send to your web designer about the title tags you want to include.

Things to think about when designing your home page
While he references one of my all-time-favorite books, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, Perlman gives a few good guidelines:

• Colors: White background with black text and no more than three primary colors.
• Main navigation bar: Five to eight links, and the links should be descriptive enough so users will know exactly where they are going (I learned this the hard way in an early version of the Downtown Women’s Club website, where my cutsy titles were too confusing.)
• Most important content: Above the fold. This means the “Buy now” button.

Top Shelf Bottom Line. If you have a website, you should do a yearly audit for search engine effectiveness. Even if you hire someone to do this for you, I recommend reading this book first so you can understand and evaluate the SEO services you are getting. And for the do-it-yourself types, it’s a good, easy-to-understand primer.