Millionaire maker Dan S. Kennedy and local-level marketing specialist Jeff Slutsky empower small business owners to take on big box companies and distant discounters using their best asset—their ability to bond directly with their consumers. Small business entrepreneurs are armed to go “grassroots” given winning strategies to take their marketing to the street level resulting in higher customer retention, greater referrals, and a thriving business for the long-term. About the Book Kennedy and Slutsky dare small business owners to break free of the ingrained tendencies to “advertise when you need more customers” and to copycat what they see big, national companies doing. Local business owners are urged to add some politicking to their business presence, focusing their marketing on directly connecting with their customers, integrating them into their community and even, their daily activities. Kennedy and Slutsky deliver creative, high impact alternatives and supplements to disappointing traditional advertising and new media including strategies for gaining free advertising from local news media, creating events that multiply customers, and effectively using direct mail. Small business owners also uncover surefire tactics that capitalize on their neighborhoods, the four walls of their business, and the internet, reaching their local customers and creating a sense of a personal relationship. Throughout their lesson in going grassroots, Kennedy and Slutsky also reveal the nine inconvenient truths of grassroots marketing, keeping small business owners on track and on their way local business stardom. Features • Presents a marketing approach specifically engineered for small (local) businesses • Reveals 9 No B.S. inconvenient truths and how to implement them • Illustrates concepts with examples from practicing business owners • From Dan Kennedy, author of the popular No B.S. books including No B.S. series, which shipped more than 250,000 copies • Identifies what’s wrong with traditional and new media advertising • Offers methodology to break free from ingrained tendencies and copycat marketing

In this revised edition of Marketing Without Megabucks (1993), a Massachusetts-based consultant hawks key marketing and copywriting tricks for low-budget self-promotion via traditional media and cyberspace. Includes examples and resources. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Interested in promoting, selling, and distributing music online? Have the website but not sure what to do next? Web Marketing for the Music Business is designed to help develop the essential Internet presence needed for effective promotion, sales, and distribution. Author Tom Hutchison provides instructions on how to set up a website, as well as how to use the Internet to promote you or your client, and the website. Includes information on maximizing your site to increase traffic, online grassroots marketing tactics that will advance your career and how to best utilize social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The accompanying website will keep you up-to-date, with online resources for web support. The author's blog is continuously updated to include the latest breaking techniques for promotion.

Accelerating profitable growth has been one of the long-standing challenges of business executives. Even today, with stock markets booming and M&A activity returning to record levels, organic growth is anemic for many companies. In our experience, the root cause is a lack of strategy in the organization's thinking, planning, and marketing. Many successful business leaders have built their careers on execution and efficiency but have relatively little experience making the strategic decisions that drive the top line. Lean, Six Sigma, and other efficiency-focused methodologies are fantastic at answering questions around how to do things better, but they are not suited to answer strategic questions around what they should do and why. Through our experience, we realized that there are a set of core principles and frameworks that can improve, sometimes dramatically, the selection and targeting of growth opportunities and importantly, turn good ideas into good businesses quickly and with more confidence. Over time we realized that there was nothing magical in the concepts we were using in our work. We do not claim to be mystical seers interpreting some strategy oracle that only we can understand. And that became our mission: to teach capable people at all levels of an organization how to apply strategic concepts themselves. There are significant advantages to embedding strategic thinking capabilities throughout the organization. 1. Some of the best organic growth ideas bubble up from lower levels of the organization. 2. Embedding strategic thinking skills creates a more discerning audience for top-down initiatives. 3. Leveraging this process over time will groom the next generation of general managers for success 4. Building organizational strategic capabilities can be a real differentiator in the B2B world. To accomplish this we developed Grassroots Strategy, a seminar-based approach that teaches good strategic thinking by having the participants apply what they're learning to actual challenges confronting their business. This book walks through the approach and concepts that we teach and apply during those seminars. The title of this book speaks to our perspective on strategy. The best strategies are not dictated from an "ivory tower." Rather, they are firmly rooted in the reality of the market and leverage the cross-functional experience and intelligence of the entire organization. And once they take root, these strategic principles not only lead to better targeted growth initiatives, they provide the healthy foundation that is needed for a growth culture to thrive. Throughout this book we take readers from strategy apprentice to journeyman strategic thinker. We will show you how to apply proven strategy concepts and tools within a framework that enables their use. With diligence and discipline, this process will separate the best growth ideas from the also-rans. And it will enable you to redirect resources and accelerate the best ideas to deliver results more quickly. How do we know this works? Well, our clients give us credit for hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental operating profit, and that's good enough for us. The number of companies that would benefit from our approach is far larger than those we can reach with our consulting practice. Although there is no substitute for the full, week-long Grassroots Strategy seminar experience, we created this book as a "do-it-yourself" guide for those who want to encourage strategic thinking within their organization from the ground up. Whatever your situation, this book is a convenient way to share these concepts with all teams and individuals seeking strategic growth. We hope you enjoy the journey.

I originally got my start in insurance as a captive agent. It's amazing how much success a person can have in the insurance business, but nobody ever tells you about it. Insurance always seems like a person falls into it as a career and then stumbles on blindly. I had to figure out how to do this business, without a large upfront investment. So what did I do? I turned to Grassroots Marketing. I personally did not buy a lead during my first three years in business and have created a highly successful agency. This book is to help everyone else build a successful business using grassroots tips and tricks. These ideas have all proven to be successful in creating steady growth year over year.