A search for new fuel.

Can Launch refuel your business? If you are like me, you are always reading to stay current on the latest technologies and learn new marketing strategies to fuel your business growth, while continuing to provide your customers with value. Well, I found some new fuel this month in a book – Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition by Michael Stelzner. Was it good fuel? Will it help my business? Will it help yours? My answers will be revealed along the way.

I am a small business owner, and like other business owners I am passionate about what I do and I am strong minded about providing my customer base with quality solutions that solve their problems. I am always thinking and researching ways that can help me achieve to that end goal.

Like all businesses, whether large or small, we all want to propel our companies to the next level. As business owners we know that requires marketing. You may struggle trying to find the right marketing mix of fuel in order to propel your own company. Does it include conventional marketing such as newspaper ads and/or TV commercials mixed with a heavy dose of social media? If you said yes, you need to search for a new fuel mixture.

About Launch

In his new book Launch, marketing expert Michael Stelzner reveals a formula that made him a millionaire in the Great Recession. He calls it the Elevation Principle: great content plus other people minus marketing messages equals growth.

My decision to read Mike’s new book came from a combination of things. I have been following the incredible growth of Mike’s company – Social Media Examiner. I could see he was obviously doing something right. Six days a week he puts out stellar social media marketing articles that people devour, inclusive of yours truly. All of this resulted in my decision to attend one of Mike’s summits – Facebook Success Summit 2010. Was that a good business decision? I will tell you later in this article.

I won two copies of Mike’s book. Mike created a contest whereby he chose 50 bloggers out of a number of blogger submissions to receive two free copies of his book with the stipulation that you write an honest review of the book. Additionally, come up with a creative way to give away the second book. Now, it didn’t to occur to me that I might not like the book and have to write a negative review. Ouch!! So what do I think about the book? I am getting to that. First more about what the book is about.

The Elevation Principle

Mike perfected the “Elevation Principle” as a marketing method for his copywriting business in 2002. More than 85,000 people have registered to receive How to Write a White Paper – A White Paper on White Papers, the free 10-page PDF that helped rocket his fledging business to success.Mike shares the nuts and bolts of the “Elevation Principle” in his book (published by Wiley) Launch: HowQuickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition shows how any business can become the next Social Media Examiner. Hmm… can any type of business accomplish that using Mike’s Elevation Principle? I will get to that in a moment.

The elevation principle says that great content combined with other people and without marketing messages will help your business rapidly grow.

In Mike’s book he uses the analogy of your business as a rocket ship (I found the analogies very effective). The ship runs on two types of fuel: Primary and Nuclear. 

Primary fuel is the content you regularly produce to keep your business moving forward.

Nuclear fuel is special content that attracts many people and quickly grows your business.

What Can Launch do for your business?

 Having faced his own obstacles, Stelzner noticed a truism in the business marketing community, “Marketers like to throw around the word ‘content.’ But if you look closely, you’ll find that very few have mastered the art and science of creating useful, thought-provoking, and viral content to grow their businesses.”

 Mike tells us that Launch empowers readers with content marketing techniques that produce proven results. In the book, he reveals:

• How to defy gravity with the Elevation Principle: Great content plus outside experts minus marketing messages equals growth.
• Why the infamous ‘rule of reciprocity’ is a manipulative time bomb—and what makes people happier instead.
• The shelf life of primary and nuclear fuel—and precisely what to do with them.
• How to eliminate the need to pitch and sell—and grow your business faster than ever.
• Why you should give it all away—including how you do things, your knowledge and your secrets—and why you’ll make more money.

Stelzner advises readers, “Stop trying to force customers to conform to your desires andnstead walk beside them and see what happens. People don’t want to be pitched to, marketed to, or herded like cattle. People do want information, answers, access, and recognition—and they want it all for free.”

Launch reveals a new way to grow a business that involves focusing on the needs of others, giving gifts, working with outsiders, and restraining marketing messages.

Who is the book written for?

Michael classifies the answer in two categories – Marketers and small business owners. I fall in both categories as I am a marketer and a small business owner.

• Marketers: Launch was written for any marketer who’s been struggling to figure out how to grow a loyal fan base without the hard sell. It’s not just a book for social media marketers. Launch is for anyone who wants to get a grasp on how new media has forever changed the way marketing must function. The book was designed to help marketers figure out how to best launch a company, website, product, or service—or how to take an existing company to the next level.
• Small business owners: Launch was crafted to help small business owners figure out how to respond to an ever changing world without performing the types of activities people hate to do (like selling). The book provides a refreshing alternative to those marketing books that focus on “gaming systems and people.” Instead, Launch focuses on how to build lasting relationships that will help grow small businesses into empires.

What does Donna think about Launch?

Negatives and positives generally exist within any book. It’s time to give my candid thoughts. Personally, I think Michael Stelzner is a Moses of online marketing. If you follow his Elevation Principle it can release you from the bondage of old marketing methods that no longer work in this digital age. After reading Launch, you will understand why old marketing methods don’t work and why the Elevation Principle does. Mike applies this principle in his own business and you see how that has turned out!

It’s not rocket science but there is a science and strategy behind the Elevation Principle. Launch is a step-by-step guide to implementing the Elevation Principle. I consider it a treasure map with a personal guide.

The negative for me was the sparse number of business examples outside of Mike’s online magazine. However, that is not sufficient reason to bypass reading this book. It contains valuable marketing information that many different types business can benefit from if they apply the Elevation Principle.

I do read a number of marketing books but this one rang a bell for me. It will take front and center in my library of marketing books.

Donna Gilliland, Social Media Speaker and Trainer