A Start Up Life

How to Start a Home-Based Online Retail Business
Jeremy Shepherd

You would think that it would be difficult to find up-to-date information about online businesses at a public library, but I struck gold with this one…or maybe it was pearls. Once again proving that if you use your resources such as the public library, you can continue to better yourself and use your knowledge to your advantage.

How to Start a Home-Based Online Retail Business is the perfect book to help you do just that. The book is well-written, easy to read, and provides you with the essential information to begin to do business online.

Jeremy Shepherd got started early in the online world. In 1996 he opened PearlParadise.com, and has become the leading online pearl wholesaler and retailer. His business, which started with the purchase of one pearl necklace during a trip to Beijing, has grown to be a multi-million dollar enterprise.

Shepherd’s book details how to save money while starting your online business, how to design and create your website, how to market your business, and how to use a merchant account to allow customers to pay you by credit card. He doesn’t even forget to give tips on shipping, which is oh so important to an online purchase, or to tips on avoiding fraud, which is oh so important to you and your business.

How to Start a Home-Based Online Retail Business gets right to the point, doesn’t talk down to you, doesn’t require a degree in Computer Science to understand, and covers all the necessary details of becoming an online entrepreneur. I love this book. Once I get an online business going, I think the library will have to ban me from checking out this book. I’ll either have to memorize it or splurge and buy myself a copy. (Amazon’s got it for just over $10 at the moment, so I imagine it would be worth the investment.)

Guerrilla PR Wired
Michael Levine

I think this is the first book about business and finance that I actually thought was not really worth my time in reading it. Maybe I normally just make good choices about which books look interesting and educational. This book was certainly not either of those.

Guerrilla PR Wired tries to capitalize on the Guerrilla name (as in Guerrilla Marketing and Guerilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business by Jay Conrad Levinson), but it is completely unrelated. The only thing “guerrilla” about it is Levine calling people with small businesses “guerrillas”, just as Levinson does. When I read “guerrilla”, I assumed it was part of THE guerrilla franchise and was fooled into reading it.

This book is very outdated and too simple to really be much use in public relations or online marketing. It’s expected that a book on online marketing will go out of date within a few years after its printing, but I learned things about the ancient version of the internet that I had no idea existed. Additionally, its simplified view of public relations doesn’t give the reader with much information to actually put together a PR campaign and execute one.

Although, as a person who had no idea what public relations were and what they intended to accomplish, I figure this book at least gave me the jist of the idea. One of the most useful things I learned was to pitch your news releases to local weekly publications. Then, larger publications can become interested in the story and then they might publish it….hence, big follows small.

So overall, there are probably better books to get you started in PR online and offline. Let me know if you have any suggested ones for me to read!