Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways For Small Businesses to Market With Images and Design

I am a part of the Business 2 Blogger network, and I was lucky enough to be selected to review a Marketing book.  I received this book on a Friday, opened it on a Saturday morning, and DEVOURED it through the weekend.

It's that good.

The book is called Visual Marketing:  99 Proven Ways For Small Businesses to Market With Images and Design and is written by David Langton and Anita Campbell.  It is an easy to read, easy to follow manual for any person in business that wants to thrive in the 21st century.

And this is where I come in.  I blog, so I am marketing my own brand of "Brandon" on a daily basis.  My blog is my website, my marketing, and my personal business (hence the advertising spaces).  The better my site looks acts and performs, the better my 'brand' is performing.

If you blog, you're in business for yourself.  If you freelance at all, you're in business for your self.  If either conditions apply, you need to buy, read and learn from this book.

The authors talk about tips and tricks to unleash your site's potential, as well as show you examples of success stories in different industries.  They will show you the effectiveness of word clouds and QR codes, and how to implement them into your website.

After reading this book, I played around with some word cloud generators and came up with this:

I like the little 'UREMDURDRDURDRDURDRDUR' in there...

I'm not sure what to do with it yet, and I may change the design to be shaped like Idaho (or a middle finger) but the idea is now floating in my head, along with half a dozen others.

Each page is filled with visual example after visual example, and there are "Takeaway Tips" galore.  Since pictures are worth 1,000 words, there are easily hundreds of thousands of ideas in this book.

What Visual Marketing also showed me is the growing demand for graphics designers with a flair for marketing.  I have dabbles with graphics design in an informal way in the past, and I can construct a pretty basic website, but I am nowhere near the level to do some of the ideas listed in the book.  It shows a need for a marketing department in any successful company, and how important social media and outside-the-box thinking is for the 21st century.

In other words, it's making me want to go back to school, so I can 'put to paper' all of these cool ideas swimming around inside my head.

For now, I will leave it to the professionals.  If you consider yourself a professional, and are marketing your business in this economy, Visual Marketing:  99 Proven Ways For Small Businesses to Market With Images and Design is a must-have for your bookshelf.  Most business professionals are familiar with the Cheezy "Business Building" genre of books, and know if you get 1-2 gems out of a book, you're doing OK.  I challenge you to read Visual Marketing and come away with no less than 20.

Again.  It's that good.

To purchase this book at Amazon, please go here.  Print and kindle versions are available.  For Barnes & Noble / Nook-heads, please go here.  Any other versions, please go to http://visualmarketingbook.com.