Here is one of my latest reviews for Amazon. It is for the book Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing: How to Use Websites, Blogs, Social Networking and Much More by Jon Reed. ISBN 0133066274

As small on line sellers at ecrater.com, our world has been rocked by Google deciding that they will no longer show listing of items for sale for free in their search. As small sellers, we can't afford to pay the cost of the product just to drive someone to buy from us. So getting this book and reading it was like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Ideas! Good ideas. I ideas I can use! Techniques I didn't understand. I have never marked up and highlighted a book as much as this one. I couldn't believe how much my understanding of the different social media sites worked.

One of my frustrations with the internet over the years is these new, neat things like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. hit our computers but nothing ever comes with instructions manuals anymore. It is difficult at times to truly understand how to use these programs to the fullest. That is what I liked about this book was the understanding of the different social media sites and how they worked and how a person can use them to drive interest and customers to their business.

Now that I have read the book, I plan on going through it and setting up a plan of action showing which social media sites I will be using (or using better) and how we will use them. This thing with Google could really be weighing us down, but after reading this book I feel hopeful. Unless you already have a PR team in place and lots of money to drive customers to your business, this is a good book to read for the basics. Even if you have a PR team, this book could help you know what they are talking about. The only thing that I missed with the book is Pinterest came on the scene in the midst of the book being published and so it isn't mentioned in the book. I guess I will have to figure that one out myself. I highly recommend this book to anyone running an online business of any type.

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NOTE TO THE AMAZON REVIEW TROLLS THAT LIKE TO DIS REVIEWS BECAUSE WITHIN 24 HOURS OF READING A BOOK LIKE THIS, OUR STORE HASN'T ACHEIEVED 1ST PLACE PLACEMENT ON ALL THE SEARCH ENGINES. I am not interested in your comments nor do I believe anyone else is. Online marketing involves work. We understand that. We will be working on our on line marketing along with everything else we do to run a business. This is a great book and will be helpful to many who read it. I know it will be helpful to us as we put many of its principles into practice.

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Over the bit of time that I have been writing book reviews for Amazon I have been astounded by the rude people that tell me basically that I'm stupid because if the book was so great why is my store, Moonwishes Sewing and Crafts, not ranking #1 in searches. Okay, well DUH! It takes awhile to work through new ideas and get them into practice! However, I think this book would be a great one for anyone who is selling on line to read. I plan to put a lot of the ideas into practice ASAP!

Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You

Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You by Jeff Molander


In the world of books on how to sell on line, I have noticed many books make big promises but fail to deliver. In this book however, not only does the author take a different approach and thought pattern to using social media to sell on line, he also gives logical and practical examples. He gives urls to sites that show what he is talking about so that you can see how the different people took action to build their companies and make money via social media. After reading this book, not only was I full of new ideas for our home based on line business, but with the need to do homework. That homework consists of going to those many websites that he referenced in the book, reading the various blogs, websites, Facebook posts, and then studying their techniques so that I can truly understand all of what he was talking about and also to glean more ideas to put into practice. I have lots of work to do. I can say though, I took just one of the ideas that popped into my head while reading the book and applied it and got positive comments in return. Suddenly by customers were communicating with me in a way they never had before! Amazing! Of course, the whole idea is to make money, but I wasn’t even sure that my customers read anything I wrote. Now at least I know that some are paying attention and that more will as I continue to develop the concept that I am working on which will make customers want to buy from me instead of someone else.

We have been selling at various sites over the last ten years and one of the biggest problems I found to marketing and promoting our products was just exactly how to draw people into our store by way of our blog, Facebook posts or website content. What kind of content should we be using? The author makes it very clear what types of content to be using and what types of things to avoid, such as sending emails marketing a company on a daily basis which I think most of us hate. After a while that company’s e-mail heads to the junk/blocked box instead of the in-box.

If there was one bone that I had to pick with the author, it was in his use of the word ‘sexy’ in referring things like software and cell phones (at least 9 times that I counted in the book). I don’t know when our society started using the word ‘sexy’ to be a descriptive word for inanimate objects that by their very nature have nothing ‘sexy’ about them. There are so many other words that could and should have been substituted such as: captivating, fascinating, enthralling, educational, etc. Check out a Thesaurus and find some words that are more descriptive of what you are trying to say.

All in all a great book for trying to understand what you should be doing as a business person when faced with social media. This book does not help beginners learn how to start a business page on Facebook or start a blog, but it does help you to understand the types of content and information you should be posting.

You can visit the author at his website or at his blog where you can get a lot more good information about using social media to sell.

Facebook for Business in 10 Minutes by Bud E. Smith

If you have never been to Facebook and own a business, then Facebook for Business in 10 Minutes by Bud E. Smith should give you some knowledge about setting up an account for your business as it does go step by step. I am familiar with Facebook and read this book to see what I might be missing. Well, I got it the week that Facebook did it’s latest major change (the need to scroll on the right side of the page to see your friends posts) so I knew it was already a bit outdated. I read the book looking for bits that would help me have a better Facebook page for my customers to see and relate to. However, when finished with the book, I could only remember one thing that I hadn’t known prior to reading the book and that was about the Facebook Insights page. Other than that it was pretty cut and dried and really only a book for beginners. It really doesn’t help you understand what kind of content to post or ways to make sales for your business with Facebook. If you want that kind of information you might want to try this book Off The Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You.

Outsmarting Google by Evan and Bradley Bailyn

I know I haven't been around for awhile. I had knee surgery in April. Very successful surgery I might add. I figured during my recuperation time I would have lots of time to catch up on my book reviews and other sit around projects. Well between physical therapy, time laying in bed using a CPM machine I was exhausted. Sitting at the desk computer was totally uncomfortable until this past week or two and I discovered that using a laptop while having an ice pack on your knee defeated the purpose of the ice pack as the heat from the laptop kept melting the ice. I finally gave up. But I'm back again until the doctor revises my other knee.

One of the things that I do to keep busy is run an online sewing pattern store called Moonwishes Sewing and Crafts. I'm always looking for ways to get my site noticed more, so when this book came up as an option on the Amazon Vine program, I grabbed it and was very glad I did! Here is the review on Outsmarting Google by Evan Bailyn with Bradley Bailyn that I did for the Amazon Vine program.

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Many people have a website, an ecommerce site and a blog or two. But how do you get the attention you want and need. You especially need search engine attention if you are using your website or ecommerce site to earn money. If you aren’t getting noticed (i.e. you aren’t showing up in the first page or two of the search engines), you may be blaming the economy, the war, politicians, PMS or the phase of the moon. But really when it comes down to it, are YOU doing what you need to, to receive search engine attention and especially Google’s attention? This book tells you what to look for in your site and how to correct things so that you can progressively increase your ranking when someone searches for one of your keywords. This is a very practical book written for normal speaking people as opposed to a book written in techno-geek-speak. After reading the book, I immediately sat down to figure out what I could do to further the cause of my website, store and blog and you should too.


My only problem with the book itself was that the examples/illustrations were too small and I needed a magnifier to see and understand them. I would have also liked to see a simple step-by-step “to do” list at the end of the book as a easy guide to be sure you are doing what you need to do and keep your priorities straight. Then I realized that the Table of Contents takes care of that need fairly well.
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When checking the reviews from other readers, most of them were also enthusiastic about the book. A few felt that the authors were making guesses and were just writing about what everyone knew anyways. Well, I didn't know some of what was in the book and I felt like I learned a lot and that is what was important to me. I have more ideas to try. I hope you find that this book is useful to you also.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

As a seamstress and a reader, I was impressed by this book. Even though there might have been technical flaws with the timeline of the book, the story itself was astonishing. In our world today, most of us who sew have sewing machines, if not more than one. We also may have embroidery machines, all sorts of notions and gadgets, access to all sorts of fabric and the freedom to use them any way we like. Here is a story of women risking their lives to sew to provide needed financial help to their family. This book will make you appreciate your freedom to sew. This review is from my Amazon Vine book review.

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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe
by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon


As a seamstress I was fascinated by this book. When their world has gone mad and life as they know it had changed, the women of Afghanistan found themselves in a peculiar situation. They could not leave their homes without a male escort, they could not work out, they had a new dress code that was so old fashioned many of the women had to borrow clothes to leave their home as they didn’t have the proper dress to satisfy the Taliban. As many of them found that they were widows with children to support they were left in a quandary. How do they support their families, feed their children and keep a roof over their heads and still follow the rules? If they didn’t follow the rules they could be beaten, tortured and killed. For women who were used to going to school (now no longer allowed), holding down jobs, and being able to shop and visit at will, not only were they in financial straights but bored beyond belief. They were essentially under house arrest.

For one family of many daughters, Kamela Sediqi found a way to be productive, earn an income and involve not only her many sisters but other women and girls from her area. She became a seamstress. With one sewing lessons from her married sister that was a tailor, she set up shop and made her first garment. Escorted by her younger brother, she went to the market, avoiding the Taliban soldiers, and took orders for the dresses she and her sisters would make. As someone who has sewed for 40+ years, she did something I would never even think of attempting. But she got orders and took them home and carefully she and her sisters cut the cloth and hand sewed and embroidered the garments. Her business grew, all being secretly done in her home, to the point she was able to hire other women and girls to help her and thus also help with their financial difficulties.

Sewing by lamplight and eventually with sewing machines during the times of infrequent electric power, Kamela and sisters and friends, beat their boredom, supported their families and showed that even when the chips were down, they could succeed against all odds,

I very much enjoyed this book although there were some areas that were confusing, especially the timeline. I was reading the advanced reading copy so I hope someone caught the discrepancies before actual publication. Other than that, it was a very inspirational true story that I enjoyed very much.

Blogging To Drive Business by Eric Butow & Rebecca Bollwitt

I had already chosen a book on blogging to review, Create Your Own Blog, when I had the opportunity to pick this book also. I thought that I might be able to compare them and if content was missing from one then I should be able to pick it up in the other. Well I must say I was very disappointed with Blogging to Drive Business. It was apparently written for someone who is a CEO of a large brick and mortar company that needs to be convinced, still at this point in time, that his company needs a web presence. Unless I missed it, this book didn’t address the needs of a completely internet run business or a sole proprietor business. In general the book covers the philosophy of being on the internet, who in the company should handle writing the blog entries, how to hire a blogger, etc. As to the actual composition of the blog for the company, that part of the book skimmed through those points, giving a paragraph or two to each of the major blogging sites with no real recommendations given or points on how to really go about setting up and using the blog. If you didn’t know anything about blogging in the first place, I doubt that you will get much information from this book to help you. Although the authors tried to make the information flow in some kind of order, they continually seemed to go off track.


The illustrations were mostly screenshots and were all too small also, but even with my magnifying glass I couldn’t see what the point of most of them were. The font size of the text also seemed to be on the small side which makes reading difficult. Terms and expressions were thrown around assuming that the reader would be familiar with them. This was rather odd as the book seemed to take the stance that it was geared towards the reader that didn’t know anything about blogging or using the internet to drive business to their company, but if the reader didn’t know the internet terms then they would be lost and not understand what the authors were writing about.

As someone that owns an on-line store, I didn’t feel that I got anything out of this book that would truly help make my store more of a success or enable me to drive more business to it by using a blog. I found a couple of nuggets that might be helpful but certainly not an entire books worth so I was glad I got the book for free to review and hadn’t spent my money on it.

This is a copy of my review of Blogging To Drive Business for Amazon, I only gave it 2 stars, both for technical difficulty of small fonts and impossible to see screenshot illustrations, and also because its content is seriously lacking and chaotic. If you want to learn how to both blog and drive business with your blog I would suggest Create Your Own Blog instead.

Create Your Own Blog by Tris Hussey

I choose to read this book, Create Your Own Blog, when it was offered to me as I had been thinking of starting another blog and was wondering what was new on the Blogging front. A book like this, the first thing you need to worry about is how out of date it has become between the writing of it and the actual publishing. This book was published in January 2010 and my reading of it took place in April 2010. While some things had changed such as TypePad now has a free `microblog', for the most part the book itself was packed with lots of useful and timely information. It was presented in a clear manner. As long as you have basic knowledge about computers such as receiving and sending emails, surfing the net itself, etc. and are interested in having a blog of your own, this book is a very good guide. It's format covered what you needed to know in a very logical manner and can be used to help you set up, promote and keep up with your blog.


My only complaint about this book was the size of the screenshots. Considering between one quarter to one third of the book consisted of screenshot examples, they were all too small to see without a magnifying glass. As the screenshots were an important part of the message of the text itself this would be detrimental to those who are visual learners and need to see what to do.

After reading the book, I was able to sit down and start a blog and was able to add in bits and pieces that I hadn't known were available until reading this book. You can see the blog I created at http://www.moonwishesreads.blogspot.com/ . I still have things I would like to do with the blog and many posts to add to it, but this book was a great help and has plenty of ideas for also promoting your blog to get readers. I definitely recommend this book, but keep a magnifying glass handy!

This is a copy of my Amazon review of Create Your Own Blog. I gave the book 4 stars due to the problem with the illustrations being too small to see without a magnifying glass. If you are looking for a book to help you start your own blog, this book should do the job.