“Welcome to our source of inspiration; a curated a list of books we have on our bookshelf.
We read all the time because there is such a wealth of knowledge out there and books make it super convenient to absorb this when and where we like; a good book is worth 100 times its cost to the success of your business.
On this page, we show you what has inspired us, where we get tips and tricks to running our business and everything in between which will help you on your journey. We have tried throughout our website to offer resources that cover all the steps of your online journey. So, you will find books specific to each step below to help you on your way.
Reading is such a powerful tool to opening up your world to others ideas and methods which allows you to then hone in your process taking snippets and ideas from others, which resonate with you.
Each book below has a short description, why we like it and a link to buy it on Amazon as a hardcopy or digital Kindle copy as well.” – Emily
Books
WEALTH CREATION –
Rich Dad Poor Dad has been around for 25 years, and there is a good reason for that! It’s a wake up call to a perceived normal and challenges this to the core. Robert Kiyosaki exposes the idea that you don’t need to
earn a high income to become rich. Some great insights into making your money work for you. We like this book because it is thinking differently about money and investing. Yes, it’ll challenge your views but we think that’s a good thing!
FINANCES –
Small Business Financial Management for Dummies is one of those must haves for those starting out on their own business. This book gives you all the basics that you need to at least be aware of, even if you have an accountant doing your books. We like this book because it provides a foundational knowledge of good financial management for your business and outlines the key things you need to be doing. It even includes some handy checklists and templates which we found great to print and use.
WEBSITE DESIGN –
The Psychology of a Website is a great book to use as a reference guide when setting up your website in terms of the offer. It goes into a range of ideas to focus your site design, content and layout on the end user and providing them with a great offer which they will want to buy. We found this book useful in being able to better understand and implement the techniques required to ensure or content was on-point and converted to sales.
COPYWRITING –
In Making Your Website Work, Gill Andrews sets out some fundamental shortcuts to ensuring your website copy is on point. Its based around some straightforward ideas and concepts that are easy to understand and to follow. Its perfect for business owners who are managing their own websites. We liked the way this book outlines some simple approaches resulting in copy that is king and wasn’t diluted by the websites design.
WORK LIFE –
We have always been a fan of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss as its one of those life-challenging books that everyone should read, even if you don’t agree with Tim's ideas! This book completely challenges the structure of what ‘working’ is and will open up your mind to other ways of doing work passively and being able to free up your time. We love this book because it changed our lives and our method of working so much. It is the bible for those going out on their own and looking to escape the 9-5.
GROWTH –
The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure is a book by Grant Cardone which will challenge your approach to effort. Grant pushes out the boat on setting goals, taking action and enjoying your life
through the power of multiplication. We liked reading this book because it doesn’t just try to motivate you to do better but goes way beyond the norm by suggesting applying 10 times the level you normally would. This is a real focus on dreaming big and then aiming a little higher!
DEVELOPER –
This book is another staple which we think every person starting an online business should have. It is a perfect reference book for beginners who want to get their hands dirty in doing some of their own web design and development work. At 800 pages, it’s a big book, but it outlines the process from start to finish. We like it because it’s a perfect reference guide even if you’re not building your own website and simply want to understand some of the techy side to help you in working with your developer. Its just a great reference to keep on the shelf for when the tech gets confusing!
SALES –
Russel Brunson is one of those masterminds in the online world who took an idea (sales funnels) and developed a mega successful company and web-product (Clickfunnels) around it. In Dotcom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online with Sales, he goes into his own process for attracting customers and adding value or upselling your offer to make more revenue from the same customer. We like Russell’s approach as its different and he challenges the need for a traditional website over a series of landing pages. It’s a great, timeless technique which we will continue to use in emilyandblair.com going forward.
EMPOWERMENT –
Brooke Baldwin is a well known CNN news anchor. In this book, Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power, she focuses on the power of ‘huddling’ or supporting one another to promote change and empowerment. We love this book because it provides real motivation for you in your journey and explains how to work with other women and embrace the power of the collective approach.
GROWTH –
The Leveraged Business focuses on using leverage techniques to multiply the results in your business and life. We like this book because it gave us some real easy techniques to follow and apply to our existing situation and see some great results in terms of our businesses revenues and freeing up more of our time.
MARKETING –
Digital Marketing Strategy is a great way to set out a comprehensive plan to your digital marketing. You can use this book to set up a full plan of how your social media, content marketing and seo will be implemented. We liked this book because it enabled us to effectively plan, implement and measure our digital marketing in a comprehensive way without the guesswork.
MARKETING –
Seth Godin needs little introduction. This book, This Is Marketing, focusses on the core foundation of good marketing; the customer and a good relationship with them. It’s a great guide to positive marketing in todays world, taking an empathetic approach and building trust in an honest, non-spammy way. We loved this angle as it rings true with our core business values so we found it aligned with our marketing approach in developing emilyandblair.com
SOCIAL MEDIA –
Social media is king and this is why its so important in successful online businesses. Michael Branding gives an up to date insight into social media marketing and explains how to build a strategy and make social media work for you in your online journey. We found this book to be a good starter to enable us to hook into some newer techniques on social and increase our following.
MOTIVATION –
Can't Hurt Me is a brutal example of a person committed to making a poor upbringing into a catalyst for change. If you’re looking for motivation on how to be better in yourself and how to excel beyond normal, then this book is a true inspiration. This was a bit of a different read for us in that it wasn’t based on business, but we thought it was a great one for maximising motivation from within.
MOTIVATION –
Finding Freedom is a moving book about Erin French and her tale of struggle and challenges and overcoming these to success. A great read for heart-warming motivation about being better and overcoming those downtimes that we all have in life and business. We included this one as one of those bedtime books suitable for a cold winters night.
MOTIVATION –
Called the “patron saint of female empowerment” by People Magazine, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed is a visionary book about finding yourself. Its an intimate memoir set to liberate women and inspire. One of Emily’s favourite books which just couldn’t be left of our list.
HEALTH –
Being healthy physically and mentally are so important in life. When you’re starting an online business, even more so. We recognised the need to break some of our lifestyle patterns with cleanses a while ago, and found them to be a real asset to keeping toxins at bay and setting ourselves up well for focus in our business. We recommend this book to anyone looking to interrupt bad health habits and restart their health clocks.
PLANNING –
Routine and planning is everything in your online business success and your health habits are key to this. Training for a Healthy Life is a great book for those who struggle with a healthy routine. This is a great journal style record which we’ve found very useful to ensuring we maintain exercise habits and healthy eating.
ROUTINE –
We talk a lot about creating and sticking to routine in your business journey and this book; The 5 AM Club, is a great example of this. We really resonated with Robin’s techniques for early morning tactics to maximise your day and fast track your success. The morning is key and Robin showed us how to master it.
MEDITATION –
OK so we’re suckers for a good meditation. Seriously though, meditation is key to keeping your brain and body relaxed and refreshed. The perfect natural cleanser. We often refer to this book to change up our meditations and the variety in here is superb. We are strong believers in mindfulness and its ability to help you deal with the stress of life and business.
FITNESS –
If your home is anything like ours, room is tight. With the home office dominating any spare room we have, this book was a revelation. We don’t have room for gym or fitness equipment so we opt for fitness routines without the need for extra kit. This book contains over 100 routines which we use to stay fit. This is a great one for those winter months when getting outside can be limited.
FITNESS –
Stretching is so important to combine with exercise, healthy eating and meditation to ensure your body is ready to take on your business journey. This is a great find which we use when tight on time, as these are quick exercises to knock out at any time of the day. We found that sitting on a computer for hours was leading to tight muscles and this book helped us work these pains out quickly and easily.
ROUTINE –
Creating good habits and breaking bad ones can sometimes be the key to success in your business journey. Atomic Habits by James Clear is a stand out book in terms of habit change. Self discipline and the formation of good habits within your routine is a key element of success so we highly recommend this book. We like this book because it cleverly takes complex human behaviors and changes them into simple to achieve methods that we can understand. We loved the real world examples in the book.
MINDSET –
I bought this book simply from its title! Seriously though, Mark Manson throws a whole new perspective on living a good life by simply stopping trying to be positive all the time and accepting reality. We found this book to be confronting, but in a good way which made us think and care less about some things, which made time for other important things to filter in.
MOTIVATION –
This book is one for all of you who feel they’re not good enough, have doubts or live in fear of being judged. Hollis is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and hits hard with this book. We like her process of identifying the excuses, refining behaviors and setting skills to encourage personal growth. A must read if you’re having self doubt and confidence issues in your leap into starting and online business.
SEO –
We read the previous version of this book. The current version was updated in Dec 2020 and is right on point with current search engine optimization techniques. If you are looking to school up and implement better SEO in your online business then this books a great place to start. We liked the way they introduce SEO, give the latest updated Google information and methods and provide some solid advice and checklists to follow. It’s a well rounded resource for anyone looking to get up to speed with SEO.
SEO –
This SEO book is a no-nonsense guide for 2021 that covers a large range of topics. Its aim is to provide you with all of the information and techniques you will need if trying to take on your websites SEO yourself. We liked the way they provide a full blueprint of SEO technique in a really granular way which SEO requires, but make it do-able for less experienced website owners.
SOCIAL MEDIA –
If you want traffic from social media, then this book is the go-to. Brendan Kane is the master at social media traffic techniques and goes into detail on how to build a social presence in 30 days. We found this book to be very granular at setting up your persona and messaging in social media, so it was a real hit with us.
BRANDING –
If you need branding help or even just a baseline knowledge about what branding is and how to do it, then this is a great resource. It was a real toolbox on branding for us as it includes information on branding, branding tools and checklists, case studies, illustrations and quotes, all of which served to give us all the branding help we needed in setting up emilyandblair.com
YOUR MESSAGE –
Stories are everything. When you tell a story people will listen and that is so important to engaging customers and keeping them. Stories that stick is a great reference check for anything we write to ensure that our messaging is engaging and powerful. A good book to have on the shelf and continue to use as you develop your online content and messaging.
OUTSOURCING –
When looking to scale your business, outsourcing is the key to spreading the workload and growing exponentially. Daniel Ramsey provides a step by step guide in this book for how to make the leap into outsourcing, in simple terms. We liked this book because it helped us learn what to do and what not to do when starting to talk with freelancers for our business.
OUTSOURCING –
Chris Duckers approach with Virtual Freedom is a easy to implements guide to outsourcing. We met Chris at a conference in Austin a few years back and bought his book as we were impressed with his knowledge and methods of outsourcing focused in the online space so his ideas were and still are, very relevant to our online business.
SALES –
Another fantastic book by Russell Brunson. In this one, Russell focuses on traffic, all the methods for getting it and keeping it. He goes deep into easy to follow, timeless methods of traffic growth. We love following Russell through his books, because he has some really effective traffic seeking methods and the little sketches throughout are a fun and easy way to follow Russell’s ideas visually.
emilyandblair.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for website owners to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites, as well as to other websites that may be affiliated with Amazon Service LLC Associates Program.
