 Today we're going to talk about the top 10 marketing books that every marketer needs to read. Now, the great thing about books is that somebody spent years of their lives, most often more than a decade actually figuring this stuff out and then a year or two writing the actual book. They have an editor go through it. So it is a highly curated piece of content that there's a lot of thought has gone into it. Now, if you go out there and you read like a blog post or a podcast, that might have been whipped up by a freelancer in an afternoon. So the value of a book compared to some of the more temporary content that we consume today is massive. Reading books is one of my favorite ways to figure out what is the next move for my company. So if you're a marketer and you want to be better at your job or you want to make more money or you want to get more leads, more sales, or you just want to absolutely crush it and destroy your competitors, these books are going to help you out. Now, you don't need to read all of these at once. I read these over years and I'll talk at the end about how you should actually read these books to get the most out of them, but let's jump in and talk about the top 10 books every marketer should have in their collection. Number one is Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. This book was written in 1966 and it has everything you need to succeed in today's marketing world. In fact, this book, when it comes strictly to the art of marketing and writing marketing copy, it's probably better than any other book that's ever been written and nothing has changed since 1966 when it comes to copy. The concepts in this book are timeless, okay? It's going to show you how to figure out what level of market sophistication your market is operating at. That basically just means what kind of offers is your market going to respond to. It's going to figure out how to write a great headline, how to write a hook, how to speak to your market depending on how hot the traffic is. All of this in a book that was written in 1966 and like I said, he scientifically breaks down these concepts in a way that is better than I think any other marketing book I've ever read. So this is really a book that you should study throughout the years, but it's an essential book to read for anyone who wants to be great at copy, which is one of the most important parts of marketing. Book number two, we have a little known book called The Big Idea by Todd Brown. Now Todd Brown didn't make up The Big Idea. In fact, in breakthrough advertising, you're going to read about The Big Idea, but Todd Brown is one of the modern marketers who has actually taken the time to write a book about this concept, then actually lay out tons of good examples from modern marketing. A lot of people don't understand that copyrighting starts with The Big Idea and no matter how technically proficient you are at writing copy, if your Big Idea sucks, so does your marketing campaign. So if you want to learn how to create campaigns that can produce millions of dollars in sales and capture the imagination of the public, you need an amazing Big Idea. If you know anything about Agora Publishing, now kind of famous for this, where they sell literally billions of dollars in newsletters in the most everyday niches, like financial newsletters. So if you want to figure out The Big Idea and you need a campaign, not just a local campaign where you're going to bring in a few hundred or a few thousand leads, if you need a campaign that's going to bring in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of leads, you need to nail down The Big Idea. Often this Big Idea is the foundation for an entire business. Number three on the list, we have 80-20 sales and marketing by Perry Marshall. Now the Pareto principle or the 80-20 principle or power loss has been around for hundreds of years. Richard Koch was the one who actually wrote the first 80-20 book, but Perry Marshall took Richard's book and turned it into a book for marketers. Now if you know anything about power curves, this is the 20% of your efforts that are going to produce 80% of the results. It's figuring out how to work smart instead of hard, figuring out what things you do in your business that are actually going to make an impact. And Perry Marshall has written an amazing book about this. One of my favorite things about this book is that he lays out the value dollar of tasks in your business. And he tells you that if you want to make more money, you need to focus on higher value tasks like creating new offers. And again, that would tie right into our book number two, the Big Idea. That's one of the highest value things you can do in your business is create new offers that are going to hit in the marketplace. But Perry's going to remind you things like updating the colors on your website or randomly posting on social media are $10 an hour tasks. So if you want to figure out how to gradually shift your working hours from those $10 an hour tasks to the $10,000 an hour tasks, then you have to check out 80-20 sales and marketing by Perry Marshall. Next on the list, we have The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. Now this book, at first glance, it's kind of a cheesy cover and it's called The Millionaire Fastlane. You're kind of like, what is this all about? But MJ breaks down the economics of making it big. He talks about scale and magnitude, the big things that you need to master if you want to be a millionaire. MJ teaches you that the money that you make is really all about the value you create times these two factors. The magnitude of the value you create. So how big of a change can you produce in somebody's life and the scale at which you can create that change. So how many people can you affect with this? And he says, millionaires, they've mastered either scale or magnitude when it comes to selling things in the marketplace. But billionaires have mastered both, right? They've mastered scale and magnitude. So they create a change in people's lives that is giant on the scale of magnitude and then also scales across hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. He says, what's the simplest way to make a million dollars, to understand how to make a million dollars, is to get a dollar from a million people, right? That's scale. But if you get $10,000 from a million people, that's scale plus magnitude. Anyways, you need to check out The Millionaire Fastlane if you really want to break down and understand how to become a millionaire. He's going to break down the economics of that in a really simple way and that's going to help you in your marketing because you're going to figure out that marketing is all about distribution when you're trying to scale. Next on this list, we have the talent code. The talent code is all about how to develop skill sets. And marketing is a skill set like anything else, like tennis or the guitar. It is a skill set that needs to be practiced. It is a skill set that you need to drill. You need to perform exercises to get better at it. And the talent code is really going to break down how you can become a master at your craft. And I've talked about many times before, the key to overwhelming success to beating everybody else in your market is mastery. So you've got to check out the talent code. It's going to change the way you approach things. It'll get you out of shiny object syndrome and teach you how to actually stay focused on something long enough to get amazing at it and get extraordinary results. Next on the list, we have the culture code from the same author. Now, the culture code is the book he wrote after the talent code. But what he does is he breaks down how great cultures are made. Now, to any great marketing angle, there are aspects of culture. And to any great company, there is a culture both for your employees and for your students. So if you want to figure out how to sell more of your product, then create an amazing culture for your customers. And this is going to factor right back into your marketing. Because in our marketing, we're going to talk about our values. Our values are directly related to our culture. So check out the culture code to learn how to build an amazing culture that keeps people involved in your business, keeps them coming back for more, and really has a positive beneficial impact on their lives. Next book, we have Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I have reviewed this book on this channel before. This is one of those books where you read it and it almost sounds too simple. Like there's no good use for it. And usually when something seems too simple, that is the key to success, right? Because the fundamentals are everything when it comes to marketing. And the difference between like a mediocre marketer and somebody who is a multi-millionaire is mastery of fundamentals, of those simple common sense things. But the one who's a millionaire can do them really, really, really, really well over and over again, where the one who's just average or struggling understands these concepts, but they don't actually know how to implement them over and over again in the marketplace. So Made to Stick, a really entertaining book, it's going to teach you how to communicate ideas, how to create that big idea, just like Todd Brown's book will teach you how to get ideas to take hold in the marketplace so that other people can understand them. So I don't know if you've ever heard, but a lot of times the angles that do best in the marketplace, they're not something crazy, sophisticated and advanced. It's something that a fifth grader could understand as well as a 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 year old. It's putting the concept in a way that sticks in people's minds, okay? Because we're overloaded with information. If you're going to get your ideas across, you'll have to know how to make them sticky. That's exactly what this book will do for you. Number nine, I have Story by Robert McKee. This is not a book that you would traditionally see on a list like this because it's not about marketing, it's about story. But depending on what kind of marketing you do, and I would say in almost any kind of marketing, story is really, really big, okay? If we want to shift people's beliefs, then we have to use story. And if you read Made to Stick, this is one of the factors in how to get things to stick. It's using stories to communicate your ideas. So Robert McKee is going to teach you how to write a story that sticks in somebody's mind that has an emotional impact, that has them thinking about your business long after they've seen your marketing. It's going to teach you how to create something called stakes in your stories. So if you've ever watched a movie or read a book, which I'm sure all of you have, you'll notice that something is at stake. If the main character doesn't get what they want, life will not go back to normal, okay? There's no going back to normal. There has been a turning point where there is something at risk, and this teaches us something both in our marketing stories, we have to have stakes where people will not be captivated, and also for our own lives, right? We have to have turning points in our lives. We have to put something at risk to get a personal evolution, to get the change that we want, to get an extraordinary life, we have to be willing to risk it. And so both for your marketing stories and for your own life, I recommend that you read Story by Robert McKee. It's about screenwriting. Next on the list, we have the obstacle is the way. This is an amazing book because it talks about the concept that the problems that we experience, the frustrations, the obstacles that we experience are simply showing us the way. And this couldn't be more true than in data-based marketing. So if we have a funnel and we're looking at our funnel stats, and some of our stats suck, maybe our click-through rate is terrible, or maybe our opt-in rate sucks, or conversion rate sucks, whatever it is, that's not something to be moan. The obstacle is the way. The thing that we're weak in is showing us exactly where we need to improve in order to get the results that we want. So if nobody will click on our ad because our copy sucks, like the data is going to show that. Instead of getting upset that nobody's clicking, all we have to say to ourselves is, okay, the obstacle is the way. What do I need to improve here? Or maybe we're selling in customers and we have too many refunds. Instead of getting upset or stressed about that, the obstacle is the way. What is that showing us? It's showing us we need to put our focus on the customers for a moment and figure out how can we make them happier? How can we get them to stick? And you can take any piece of your business and you can see where your business is breaking down. That's going to show you exactly what you need to work on to improve and get the results that you're after. It's such an important concept. It's going to reframe problems so that when you experience a problem, you no longer get upset, but you get excited because that is an opportunity to do things different and better than you've been doing them. It's an extraordinary shift in the way that you think and the results that you'll get in your business. And lastly, I have Principles by Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio is the founder, co-founder of Bridgewater, one of the most successful hedge funds in the world. And Ray says that the key to success is understanding reality better than anybody else. And he talks a lot about how humans operate on an unconscious level. Humans are not these rational, straightforward, direct beings that we wish that they were, right? People do not make logical decisions all the time. And so he talks about understanding yourself and understanding others on a deeper level than most people will. And not seeing the world as you wish that it was, but seeing it as it actually is so that you can function effectively within the world. This is stuff that is important to understand if you want to be a high performer, if you want to excel in anything, okay? Most people walk around completely either asleep or deluded. Most people just want to see the world as they wish that it was, and they're unwilling to admit that it might be any other way. And this book is gonna break down how do you figure out what blind spots do you have? How do you figure out what your blind spots are? How do you get past them? What blind spots other people have? How do you deal with other people who have blind spots? And how do you actually execute successfully in this world? Those are the 10 books that I think every marketer should read. Now, we're all in different stages of our life, and we all need different books at different times. So this is not a one-size-fits-all. These are 10 books that have had a profound impact on my career and on my life. And something that I have to tell you is that books are not about getting through as many as you possibly can, right? Whoever reads the most books does not win the game of life. You have to actually internalize this stuff and put it into practice in your life. And so what I do is that I'll have a study group, a book club, or whatever you want to call it, and I will find people who are really deeply interested in the subject that I'm going to go into. For example, if we're reading the talent code, then I'm going to form a group of people who are deeply interested in talent development. Maybe four to six people, and then we're going to meet once a week and watch it go over the chapters that we've read that week in the book. We're able to do a whole series of books and every two weeks we'll read another book. But just reading through a book once, you might find the ideas to be really cool, but you're not going to get any actual results from that book in your life. You have to study it. You have to highlight things. You have to pull out the notes. I pull out all the notes that I find interesting. I put them in a Word document, and then every morning I read through my notes from all the books that I've read this year. So it's December right now, so every morning I'm reading back through 12 months of notes, and I read usually at least a book a week. So you can imagine it takes me quite a while by the end of the year to read through all the notes, but by using the power of repetition, I'm actually reprogramming my mind to internalize the concepts from these books rather than reading it once and forgetting it. And the other thing is that a lot of these books, a lot of these books that have had a big impact on me, I will read more than once. I'll read them once every six months or once a year. Every time that I read them, I get something different out of them. So these books that some, the author has put so much of their life into, there's so much wisdom in these books. The idea is not to read them once, find out what you think is cool, and then forget about it forever. The idea is study these, implement them, internalize them, put them into practice, and then revisit them when things change in your life. I hope you found this list to be helpful. Let me know in the comments, have you read any of these books? Which one do you like best? In which one are you gonna put next on your reading list? Do you have a book club, have you ever studied books, or do you just read books and then forget about them forever? Also don't forget to smash that like button. The more likes we get, the more videos we will make and subscribe to the channel if you wanna see what's coming next. That's all for today. It's Christian Martin from digitalnomad.com. I'll see you on the next one.