Essential Reading for New Entrepreneurs

Well, the birthday celebrations are over (see pics) and now it's time to get back to work!

To get re-inspired (and looking for an excuse to just read about business for the next few days), I browsed through my personal collection of business books for entrepreneurs this morning and decided to make a recommended reading list for you and yours who are in the entrepreneurial spirit this season.

You'll find a mix of both modern and classic instructional business books, some purely inspirational and others that are no-b.s. practical – with product descriptions supplied by Amazon.

1. Ziglar on Selling: The Ultimate Handbook for the Complete Sales Professional

   by Zig Ziglar

   A successful sales professional clearly understands that education and preparation for the task is never finished.

   It is a lifetime experience, and in Ziglar on Selling, best-selling author Zig Ziglar offers an integral part of the ongoing education.

   Filled with practical tips and motivation, this book will help sales professionals keep their clients happy, add to their income, and most importantly, add to their quality of life.

2. Scientific Advertising

   by Claude C. Hopkins

   Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising techniques, believed that “Advertising is salesmanship,” and as such it should be measurable and justify the results that it produced. In Scientific Advertising, he explains precisely how to do that, and the principles he discovered and documented are as true today as when they were first written.

   This business classic covers mail-order marketing, headlines, psychology, strategy, budgeting, and more advanced subjects like negative advertising and how to test an advertising campaign. Whatever advertising medium you use, from print to the Internet, the fundamental principles of Scientific Advertising are universal and timeless. Newly designed and typeset for modern readers by Waking Lion Press.

3. No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs

   by Dan Kennedy

   For more than 30 years, author, consultant, speaker, and entrepreneur Dan Kennedy has dished out no-nonsense advice, bases on his own experience, to achieve business and sales success. He regularly get “millionaire-maker” results for satisfied clients in hundreds of professions and industries. His bestselling books include How to Make Millions with Your Ideas.

   These proven-effective productivity strategies address reality—the information-overload world of cell phones, PDAs, faxes, e-mails, and need-it-yesterday business demands. This hard-hitting guide boils it all down to 10 time management techniques worth using.

4. Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

   by Tony Robbins

   Master motivator, Anthony Robbins brings back to life what lies dormant in most human beings — the power of self.

   Not at all a “get rich quick” scheme, Robbin's work instructs the reader on how to effectively manipulate and utilize one's natural talents.

   By following the steps outlined by Robbins, the reader is empowered to increase the quality and enjoyment of his or her life.

5. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

   by Tim Ferriss

   What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
   controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

   • “I race motorcycles in Europe.”
   • “I ski in the Andes.”
   • “I scuba dive in Panama.”
   • “I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

6. Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom

   by Robert Kiyosaki

   The Cashflow Quadrant is the follow-up guide to finding the financial fast track that best works for you. It reveals the strategies necessary for moving beyond just job security to greater financial security by generating wealth from four selective financial quadrants.

   A reader comments:
   Great book for putting your money management habits in perspective. Helps to show you the right and wrong things you're doing that can be uplifting or devistating to your personal finances. It is a great book for those ready to make a change. Great book to help people crossover from the poor and middle class “quadrants” to being a business owner and a savvy investor.

7. Think and Grow Rich!

   by Napoleon Hill
   Napoleon Hill's classic book — the all-time bestseller in the personal success field — offers a life-altering experience.

   It teaches thousands of people the practical steps to high achievement and financial independence every year. This new edition is the first to contain extensive footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and an index.

   Now more than a motivational work, it is also a reference book and a mini-history book providing valuable information about Hill, his times, and his success philosophy.

   TGR's greatest value is not only that it can make you financially successful. It can help YOU — or ANYONE — get whatever it is that you desire from life.

8. Goals! How to Get Everything You Want–Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible

   by Brian Tracy
   Based on more than 20 years of experience and 40 years of research, this book presents a practical, proven strategy for creating and meeting goals that has been used by more than 1 million people to achieve extraordinary things in life. Author Brian Tracy explains the seven key elements of goal setting and the 12 steps necessary to set and accomplish goals of any size.

   Using simple language and real-life examples, Tracy shows how to do the crucial work of determining one's strengths, values, and true goals. He explains how to build the self-esteem and confidence necessary for achievement; how to overpower every problem or obstacle; how to overcome difficulties; how to respond to challenges; and how to continue moving forward no matter what happens. The book's “Mental Fitness” program of character development shows readers how to become the kind of person on the inside who can achieve any goal on the outside.

9. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

   by Chris Anderson
   In THE LONG TAIL, business journalist Chris Anderson examines the revolution in the online world, identifying key trends that affect the way people sell and shop. THE LONG TAIL is an expansion and a rethinking of Anderson's widely circulated 2004 Wired magazine article in which he highlighted the importance of niche markets in the new economy; his ideas are grounded in economics, mathematics, distribution curves, and marketing.

   Using graphs, Anderson illustrates the phrase “the long tail,” which refers to products that, in the old economy, did not sell in large quantities, and thus did not merit space on the very limited shelves of brick-and-mortar stores; the blockbusters, or “hits,” which made profits and were restocked, fall into the “short head” of the graph. Anderson explains how and why, using virtual inventories, e-commerce sites can exploit the “long tail,” by recognizing niches–small pockets of high interest–since, as he says in his subtitle, selling less of more things can be profitable.

   Anderson shows this to be true by means of examples drawn from the fast-evolving music and entertainment sectors.||Essential to all of this are more sophisticated search engines–including Google–and “aggregators,” companies that assemble and organize information about products so that companies can sell further down the long tail. Anderson also sees a trend toward the greater use of filters and recommendations, including sites, such as Daily Candy, that do nothing but advise shoppers about what to buy. Anderson shows how enormous profits are being made by companies such as eBay, Netflix, Rhapsody, and others whose virtual inventories offer a selection of products many times greater than brick-and-mortar stores–independent videos, for example, versus Hollywood blockbusters. In THE LONG TAIL, it all comes down to “hits” and “niches.”

10. Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul: Advice and Inspiration on Fulfilling Dreams

    by Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield

    Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul is a compilation of short stories from entrepreneurs, both large and small, who share their experiences of success, failure and courage, with a little helpful advice mixed in.

    Many of these stories, told for the first time here, will enlighten you to new methods of entrepreneurship or simply help you believe in the possibilities of getting started. People such as Doris Christopher, a stay-at-home mother, introduced her love of cooking to others, thus founding The Pampered Chef; sticking to his instincts and putting value at the core of his business, Tom Chappell, founder of Tom's of Maine, explains how success can go way beyond the balance sheet; and Carol Gardner intimately shares a desperate time of debt and divorce, until along came a bulldog named Zelda, followed by a greeting card line — Zelda Wisdom — which became one of Hallmark's number-one sellers. These entrepreneurs and many more will inspire you with their amazing life experiences and fascinating beginnings.

Have you read any or all of them? What did you think? Do you have other suggestions? Please feel free to comment below.