Everyone figures out that there are no barriers of entry, and social media promotion quickly turns into a massive spam machine. There are so many social messages going out daily through various media, that folks are beginning to feel overwhelmed, and they are tuning out and opting out.

This is a sigalert to business managers. They want to get their message out — not get tuned out.

What can we do about this dilemma?

Well, the best answer is: Be careful what you say and how you say it!  Readers often don’t get the message you think they are getting. In their minds, they read what they want to hear, not necessarily what you said. People may take a quick look at whatever message you are trying to get them to read and immediately abandon it, and you, forever. On the other hand, they may be interested, or even intrigued by the subject they perceive in your message.  Notice that word perceive.

Newsletters, for example, offer an opportunity to build a sender-reader relationship with customers, friends, and prospective customers. And we all know that you need to build relationships in order to build readership and to turn prospective customers into customers. Good newsletters are very powerful, whether printed and mailed, or e-mailed.

Sending out ads via email is quite different from sending out newsletters. Unfortunately many business owners/managers fail to realize this. They sign up for an email newsletter campaign, write or supervise the production of one or two ads to send out, and then give up, disappointed that the email newsletter campaign is “not working”. Of course its not working. Nobody wants to be sold anything.

A good newsletter, or a good tweet, or a good Facebook entry, or a good blog entry is quite simply one that provides information of interest to the reader. The most successful newsletters convey lots of information of interest and soft pedal the sales pitch. A good target is a 60/40 mixture or better. The more genuine information vs. advertising, the better the email newsletter campaign performs. Interestingly enough, the information portion need not relate to the advertising message in any way whatsoever. Humor is consistently the best-read section.

In the article, all the rest of the books mentioned were hard cover or paperback.  Mine was the only E-book.  P.S. It’s on sale at 50% discount this week only at Smashwords.

The discount is in honor of Read An Ebook Week.

Although the E-Book Reader was invented almost 40 years ago at the Xerox research center near Palo Alto, it’s only been lately that the hand-held reading devices have begun to become “mainstream” – mostly because of new developments in the display screens.

The Kindle, by Amazon, started the race.  Now there are more than a dozen viable competitors to Kindle.  The Sony Reader, the Apple Reader, and most notably the new Barnes & Nobel NOOK are already giving almighty Amazon a real run for its money.  A dozen more models from Best Buy and other manufacturers are available right now.  Thin and lightweight, they all let you read books online, anywhere, picking up their signal from the Wireless Internet.

Sales are skyrocketing, and hundreds of thousands of new books are available for downloading and reading, at amazingly low cost.

Google makes public domain books available for free.  Many wanabe new authors publish their works online for free – no cost to the author, no cost to the reader.  Novels, non-fictions, textbooks, instruction manuals, business how-to books, and children’s books are waiting for you to press a button and wait only a few seconds for your book to appear – yours to keep, stored in the handheld reader.

I just published my latest book on this medium.  It’s called How to Graduate from Self Employment. You can sample the book on your PC or on most of these new E-book readers.  You will find copious mention of it on Google and Bing.

I plan to publish my recent paperback novel No More An Island online before Thanksgiving.  It will remain available as a printed book.  My plan is to publish the Graduate book as a paperback also, if it demonstrates a market.

To read about and sample the Graduate book, Click Here.