Review of Audio Course ‘How to Make More Money as a Translator’
This week I’ll talk to you about a book on social media marketing, one of my favorite subjects 🙂 I borrowed this book from the Toronto Public Library and read it on the bus trip to Guelph for a translators’ meetup. Let’s see the basics first and then I’ll tell you what I thought of the book and what I learned from it.
Basics of the book
Title: Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: 100+ Weapons to Grow Your Online Influence, Attract Customers, and Drive Profits
Authors: Jay Conrad Levinson & Shane Gibson, with a foreword by Guy Kawasaki
Published: October 1, 2010
250 pages
More details: Google Books or Amazon
Ten chapters
1: The Guerrilla Social Media Marketer’s Path (ten personality traits)
2: Building the Guerrilla’s Personal Brand (distinct, easy to share, easy to find, always on, human, consistent)
3: The Top Ten Attributes of a Guerrilla Social Media Marketer (name, branding strategy, positioning, quality, likeability, reputation, etc.)
4: The Guerrilla Social Media Arsenal (100+ guerilla social media weapons and tools)
5: Guerrilla ROI (metrics, analytics)
6: Guerrilla Focus (target markets, brainstorming)
7: Guerrilla Social Media Marketing Defined (technology, attention to detail, relationships)
8: Building and Protecting Your Guerrilla HQ (social vs traditional sites, landing pages, subscription, Google, etc.)
9: Recruiting and Partnering with Guerrillas (networks, hubs, partnerships)
10: Your Guerrilla Social Media Attack Plan (goals, competitive advantage, target market, marketing weapons, positioning, identity, marketing budget)
The book consists of generic advice on how to use social media, as well as tools and services to help you implement your social media strategy. The writing style is clear and to the point. Action plans and steps are outlined that will guide you in creating and growing your social media presence. The list of social media related websites, techniques and strategies to consider is good and you can choose the approach that fits your business best.
The book offers more food for thought than actual implementation steps for a social media strategy. If you are new to social media, the book is a good read. It will give you a general overview of how you can use social media to boost your visibility, network, and attract clients.
Sadly, social media resources tend to get outdated very quickly. This is true for this book as well. Most of the tools and services mentioned are still valid, but due to the book being almost 5 years old a few services are sadly not available anymore (like PostRank which was bought by Google in June 2011 and is currently integrated in Google Analytics). It’s like listening to a presentation from a translators’ conference a few years back (I just finished watching the presentations from ATA’s annual conference in Boston back in 2011; don’t judge…) and the presenter urges translators to get a fax machine!
Yes, there are things to be learned in this book but ultimately it failed my usability test; when I finished it, my to-do and ideas list was empty. But it was fun reading it in the bus on my way to meet colleagues for a nice lunch 🙂
Have you read the book? Did it help or inspire you in any way? Any other similar books that you enjoyed reading and would like to recommend?
Further reading on social media marketing
6-Step Strategy to Translators’ Visibility
5 Tips to Make Social Media Work
What is the Future of Social Media?
Using Social Media and Blogging to Find New Clients
About the author
Catherine Christaki has been a full-time English-Greek translator since 2001 and co-owner of Lingua Greca Translations since 2012. She specializes in Information Technology, Medical, and Technical texts and loves writing for the Adventures in Technical Translation blog. She regularly shares her experience and insight on social media and blogging for translators, giving interviews and presenting at conferences. Connect with her on Twitter @LinguaGreca.
You may also like
