If you want to market a new book, or anything for that matter,  traditional advertising is dead. Paying big money to interrupt people when they are not paying attention is just stupid.

Seth Godin, the same marketing genius that gave away a book for free, packaged a book in a cereal box and consistently reinvents marketing forever is at it again. You just can’t keep a great mind down. There is no doubt that his new book, Linchpin: Are you Indispensable is going to be a runaway best seller.

Now, I don’t have a book to publish yet, but if I did I would definitely follow Sir Seth Godin’s tactics.

Step 1 Write a brilliant book and choose a brilliant cover.

The book has to be about one main idea that people can immediately understand and know that it will change their lives forever. The cover of a book is everything, and Sir Godin went through 150 versions to decide on the right one. Great design is simple if you work your ass off.

Step 2 Build a lot of early attention.

Sir Godin coordinated a free online ebook, What Matters Now,  of some of the best minds in business. What better way to get people thinking about your upcoming book launch?

Step 3 Connect with every major blogger you can think of

Everyone is writing about Sir Seth Godin this week. Why? Because Seth Godin is smart enough organize it this way. I can’t keep up with all of the guest posts and interviews he has done this week.

Step 4 Ride on the Momentum of Others

If you don’t think Seth Godin is smart enough, he also managed to be the first major author to announce his release on the expected Apple tablet. The tablet has been speculated on for months, what better horse to hook your wagon to?

Step 5 Offer bonuses and free content.

If the book was not enough in itself, Sir Seth Godin has managed to sweeten the deal.

Of course, we never expected anything less of Sir Seth. It just goes to show that even those at the top of their field are not afraid of hard work. In fact, it is that relentless work ethic and talent that made him the marketing guru of our age.

There is still ongoing debate about free versus paid content since the release of Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Companies, bloggers and authors are not giving away free content, they are buying attention. That is what social media marketing is, free content. Free blog posts, free Youtube videos, free tweets on Twitter, free images on Flikr, free comments on other blogs. People give away content online because that is the only way to develop relationships.

Try charging a subscription to a new blog. The only thing worse than zero profits, is having no one visit your website. A large and loyal audience can be sold something. Try profiting when no one cares who you are. “FREE” is the new advertising. Instead of paying for TV commercials, radio spots and print ads, forward thinking companies are investing that money into free content. The trick is to have something that some of those free readers are going to want to buy.

Your local pizza shop isn’t giving away free flyers. The flyers are advertising to get you to buy pizzas. Bloggers and other online content providers are not giving away free content, they are trying to get your attention so that maybe you will buy their products and services in the future.

It is happening in virtually every industry, but online the changes are coming much faster. Graphic designers used to be able to charge a lot more money. Now with cheap wordpress themes, inexpensive overseas artists and crowdsourcing sites, design got a lot cheaper. Sure great designers will always be able to make decent money, however everyone in the middle is competing for a shrinking piece of the pie. That drives prices down.

Look at the costs of virtually anything over the last two decades. Blank CD-ROMs used to cost more than $20 now they are under a dollar. Email accounts used to cost more than $10 per month, now they are free. Online storage is so ubiquitous as to be free. Even our food and clothing have become ridiculously cheap.

The key point in this debate is not about free versus paid. Creative and talented artists and entrepreneurs will always be inventing new products and art that people will be willing to pay for. The way this argument should be phrased is, “Anything that has a marginal cost of production of zero and is being sold now will tend to be offered for free over time.”

Every big marketer is offering free ebooks, videos or both to gain attention in an increasingly competitive world. What is important is that the quality of the free offerings keep increasing. Many of the same resources would have been sold in the past. Sean d’Souza’s calls it the bikini concept. Give away 90% of what you have for free but make sure the last 10% has a strong enough pull so that some of your readers will pay for it.

If I had a band, I would be giving away CDs and songs on every online platform I could find. Musicians should be ecstatic if new listeners give their music a listen. Trying to charge money is just another barrier to building a relationship with future customers. The way to make money is by doing concerts and selling merchandise.

If I was an author. I would be looking at publishing a free ‘unbook.’ If it was SEO optimized, then internet users would find my content and hopefully find some value in what I offered and would tell others. I would make money by charging for consulting, seminars or specialized follow up content.

If I was a magazine, I would be giving all the content away for free and develop an online community of active readers. There could be premium membership areas for the most serious fans. I would have seminars, conferences and meets ups regularly traveling the world to solidify the relationships of the community. I would have corporate sponsors that would value the highly targeted and deep connections with fans.

If you try to charge for everything from the beginning it is unlikely that you will ever get any sort of following. Even trying to charge a few pennies puts too much friction into the process and people will not be bothered to check out your offering. The real secret is to constantly increase the quality of your free products so that the world is continually astounded at the value your provide. This is what  successful bloggers do, mainstream companies won’t be too far behind.

Inbound marketing, attracting people organically to your blog rather than blasting out ads, seems to be the future of marketing. Traditional advertising just costs too much and potential customers are are too overloaded with information to pay attention anyway.

Search Engine Optimization is essentially free and customers are highly targeted so it is unlikely there will be any other more cost-effective way to market your business.  There are no shortages of SEO experts and gurus out to help you optimize your site, but do you really need to hire someone?

I am not an expert but the more I study about SEO and social marketing, the more I realize that it isn’t all that complicated. It is an ongoing process with every blog post you add so it makes a lot more sense to do this work in house.

Here is some advice that I recently received from the Hubspot newsletter,

Here’s the Shortest Tutorial Ever on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Put keywords in Page Titles.
Put keywords in Page URLs.
Put keywords in Meta Data. (Page Description and Keywords)
Put keywords in your H1 text.
Use keywords in page content.

That is some pretty basic advice that I am sure a consultant would be happy to do for you for several hundred or thousands of dollars per month. Or you could just make sure that all your posts follow this basic advice as you write them. Just those simple steps will have a huge impact on your traffic.

Another key factor is the links on your site. Incoming links are very important because they signify how much others value your content. Actively seek out links, but it is probably better to focus on writing great content that other sites will want to link to. I get about ten link requests a week on my sites, asking me to link to them inexchange for a link back.I’m sorry but that is not how it works. I link to great sites, not just the ones with a difficult to find reciprocal links page.

Don’t overlook outgoing links either. Descriptive links that include your keywords will help Google know what your site is about. Don’t just use “click here” types of links. Those are useless.

Hubspot is one the best sources for inbound marketing information. I highly recommend them if you are interested in getting more traffic to your sites.

With the success of Amazon’s Kindle and the hype around upcoming versions of tablet PCs, it is not too difficult to predict that our notion of what constitutes a “book” is about to drastically change.

Consider music for a moment. Songs used to be etched onto vinyl. They were plastic circles that required big stable machines to play them. Then we had reel to reel, 8-track tapes, cassettes, compact discs, Minidisk, MP3, iPod and iTunes. Music has been completely transformed in the last three decades. Books are just getting started.

FastCompany magazine offers an interesting forecast in, Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting.

Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobile devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.

I am actually quite surprised at how little experimentation has been undertaken with books. Even with online ebooks, the format is essentially the same except with the occasional video or link thrown in.

I think we are still a little bit stuck in the paradigm of blogging. We think content should be updated regularly in short chunks. That works for news and diary style posts like, what happened yesterday or where I went on my vacation, however it is not particularly suited for other content.

I don’t want to read 50 posts about how to use twitter for business. Some of those posts will be dated and no longer relevant. Many of the articles will cover the same material. Some of them will be completely useless.

I would like to see a single website or ‘Unbook’ that is a comprehensive collection of ideas and best practices that begins with easier topics first and progresses to more advanced issues that will take time to master. I would like this unbook to be constantly updated. It would be great to have comments on the different sections for users to add ideas or disagree. I would like notices of when new tools or applications come online to help with my desire to master Twitter. I would like to be updated about which Twitter related services have stopped. It would be even better if there were a wiki so that users can add content themselves. An unbook should be a community, not just a product.

I don’t want to subscribe to Twitter focused blogs and spend all my time studying how to use the tools. I just want to learn once then have only changes updated. The ‘unbook’ should have video, text, links to other sites and a directory of relevant blogs. It should screen content from other sites and tell me what is important.

Most of all an ‘unbook’ should be dynamic. It shouldn’t be written once and never updated. It should be an active online repository that is constantly being revised in a way that I don’t have to keep rehashing the same simple topics over and over. I just want to learn new things.

I feel this is the future of the book or blogs for that matter. We need hybrid blog-books for non-fiction content. It is a mess online to find reliable information. We need knowledge curators more than we need authors. Most business books are not particularly original anyway. Instead of saying the same thing in a slightly different way, how about organizing all the important ideas around a topic and keeping it current?

Update
Maybe the unbook is here and it is called a Vook. Seth Godin wants to be the first author to use the new platform.

There is an entire website devoted to the unbook. I should have known!

There is a great article on BusinessModelAlchemist called,

Business Model Management – a defining topic for the next decade

Staying ahead of competition requires more than an impressive one-time business model innovation stunt. It requires the careful evaluation and improvement of one’s more established business model (cash cows), while proactively playing with a portfolio of new business models. This can be presented as a spectrum ranging from “improving business models” to “disrupting/inventing business models”.

I couldn’t agree more. I constantly read about people and companies complaining about too much competition, customers who only care about prices, and declining sales. They seem to feel that it is unfair that they have to work harder for less profits.

If your business is struggling maybe it is time to start implementing new business models. Actually, the time was probably a lot earlier then when you noticed the problem. People are not going to pay thousands of dollars more to buy a car just because GM can’t sell them at a competitive price. It is not a market problem. It is a business model problem.

Jonathan Fields has a great article called  If your Business Sucks, Don’t Blame the Market about the tough times retail eyeglass businesses are facing and some ideas to fix the problem.

Seth Godin has a short post about how Groucho Marx managed to reinvent himself with the advent of films and then again television.

Godin, in another post about the discussion of Chris Anderson’s book Free: The future of a Radical Price also addresses a similar issue.

The first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?”

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”

Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

Be sure to check out the fantastic book, Business Model Generation and the process of how it was created. Very cool!

We all know that sharing is everything in a social media world. The more we contribute and give, the more we can get noticed ourselves. The first instinct is to create new tools and platforms in order to try an become a destination for like minded people. We all want to own the platform or group. The problem is that so does every one else, and you can no longer ‘own’ a community.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, by creating your own Alltop clone, Digg clone, Facebook Clone or Twitter clone, it makes more sense to go out and use the tools that your customers are already using. Go to where they are instead of trying to bring them to you.

Edward Boches wrote about how Chris Brogan shares his social media case studies using delicious. No fancy new tools, development or marketing required. Just do what you are already doing and make it available to everyone. It is no extra work but it creates a lot of value for Chris’s audience.

Chris Brogan also has an Alltop page where he shares his favorite blogs.

Both take little time and cost to create but add a lot of value for his audience, including me. Are you sharing valuable content your customers and audience want to see? Are you helping to promote your favorite bloggers and companies? The first law of social media is that the more you give, the more you get.

With inexpensive access to technology and a talented team, the costs and time required to build a new business from nothing are essentially zero. Here are two recently examples of companies conceived and developed in a weekend.

Mingly

ReadWriteWeb recently wrote about the universal address book startup Mingly.

In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles. They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers.

Two months later, the company was invited to Twiistup to present to potential investors.

Dr. Hue by 24-hour Startup

IanSanders mentioned a similar story that happened in London called 24-hour StartUp. The team conceived of, designed and built a web site to later be auctioned on eBay. You can watch a time lapsed video of the entire 24 hours with either link. The start up they built and sold was Dr.Hue.com, a shopping by color site. The final price was only $5100 but the project generated a lot of press. Not bad for a weekend’s work.

The key point is that big ideas can be taken to market very quickly with the right group of people. The world is getting faster and smaller. Instead of trying to be the next Facebook or Amazon, maybe entrepreneurs should focus on quick and big gains like these? What do you think?

Monocle magazine has discovered a unique store in London that is in the retail idea business. The School of Life sells books,  courses, vacations and products with a focus on helping you think about the world in a different way. Very interesting concept.

There is a short two minute video on the monocle site.

The School of Life website.

Business Model Generation is a brilliant idea.

“Business Model Generation practices what it preaches. Co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book was financed and produced independently of the traditional publishing industry. It features a tightly-integrated, visual, lie-flat design that enables immediate hands-on use.”

Business models are such an integral part of the entrepreneurship process that I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these books. I love everything about it; design, content and how it was created are all fantastic!

Lead Author, Alexander Osterwalder’s site, Business Model Alchemist

Spudaroo.com is new site allowing companies to crowdsource business documents like copy writing, resumes, brochures and business plans. Now you can have writers compete to create documents and companies can choose the best among many submissions. This is following crowdsourcing design sites like 99Designs and CrowdSpring, but will it work for documents?

The site is new so there is not much activity  yet, but I suspect that many companies will not want their business plans and company documents out in the public before they are officially used. Or maybe it doesn’t make a difference?

I will definitely be following this start up to see how it develops.