Tom Teague’s new book Online Business Success for Thought Leaders: Create Visibility for Positive Impact is a comprehensive and easy-to-understand exploration of what it takes for a business to have an online presence that includes but extends beyond one site. Web. Teague has written this book after seven years of building his own and other people’s online businesses and learning as he goes. He has made it the kind of book he wishes he had at the beginning of his entrepreneurial career, which he affectionately calls the Internet Marketing Grad School.

Before Teague began building online platforms, he spent thirty-five years as a high-performance innovative contributor and leader of information systems and software development teams at Exxon and NASA. In between, he also taught chemical engineering design at Texas A&M and Rice University, and led joint industry technical data standards efforts for several years as an independent consultant. He then became an independent entrepreneur and business owner, as well as an author. He wanted to build an online presence to promote his first book, Awaken to Choice, and decided to learn how to do it himself. Online Business Success for Thought Leaders guides us through your learning process – what advice they gave you when you started, and what was right and wrong with that advice. He’s honest about the mistakes he made, his own shortcomings, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools he used to build his online platform.

Ultimately, online business success for thought leaders reflects Teague’s discovery of how to systematically solve the puzzle of building an online business in a teachable way. Today, he teaches his processes to others, and this book contains all of his knowledge in a nutshell. Teague’s goal is to help business owners succeed not only in creating a website, but in creating greater visibility for their businesses so that they have greater opportunities to accomplish their missions.

The book is divided into four parts, each of which has three or four chapters. The parts are titled: Business Strategy Clarification, System Selection, Creating Assets Online, and Sprinting to Success. The first part may be the most important because you cannot build an online presence without knowing what you want to achieve through that presence. Teague looks at how to understand your business, engage your audience, and develop a business strategy. In part two, it guides you through selecting the types of systems you need to implement that strategy. In Parts 3 and 4, it guides you through a systematic approach to building your online platform assets step-by-step to support your trading strategy.

The book is rich in information, too much to discuss all the parts and chapters in detail here, but Teague has included a comprehensive list of all the possible tools you may want to incorporate into your trading strategy and then offers advice on how to use it. Topics include: building an email list, selling a product online, creating course content, the right platforms for blogging and vlogging, using social media, and perhaps most importantly, how to determine which of these tools you need, how you will use them, and how to bring them all together in a systematic way that will support your business in the short and long term. Overall, Teague teaches how to create a custom system that meets the unique needs of your business and drives your success.

Beyond how to use these tools, Teague devotes a lot of space to understanding the customer journey. How does your customer find you, get to know you, interact with you, and ultimately buy from you? It explains how to have conversations online and offline to build trust with your customers and help you better understand how to serve them. Also, and perhaps most importantly, explore how to decide who you want your customer to be and how to attract that type of customer.

Finally, Teague looks at how to streamline processes and not overwhelm your platform, but create a healthy balance of complexity, features, and ease of use to make your platform attractive to your customers while making their life easier.

I really appreciated all of Teague’s advice because as an author and freelance entrepreneur, I learned from scratch how to build my first website using templates in 2005. As time went by and struggled to make it do what I wanted, I could have used Business Success Online for thought leaders to help me better understand my true needs and make my sites effective I am by no means a technical person, but I found the book easy to understand and follow, and it made me rethink some aspects of how I do business. I believe that anyone who has created their own website and tried to attract customers will find this book valuable. For anyone starting out in business, this book is a must.

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