I am very excited to share with you this interview with Shel Horowitz. He is the award-winning author of Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Shel Horowitz is awaiting publication of his eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

As a copywriter/marketing and publishing consultant, Shel helps authors, publishers, and entrepreneurs with marketing plans, book jackets, website copy, press releases, etc. He also turns unpublished writers into published authors, step by step.

Shel’s been featured in many major media, including repeat appearances in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and elsewhere. An expert on affordable, ethical, and effective marketing, he’s been using social media marketing all the way back to 1995, and since 1996, it has brought in the majority of his income. Shel speaks frequently on social media, book publishing, frugal and ethical marketing, and business success through ethics and Green principles. He’s the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

Biana: What inspired you to write your book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First?

Shel: Reading the news in the early part of this decade, when it was filled with scandal after scandal–Enron, WorldCom, and all the rest–I had an insight that the frugal marketing methods I’d been advocating for years were also highly ethical, and that success was actually *easier* for ethical businesses than for crooked ones.

Biana: How did the principles of putting people first when you market change the way you market your own business?

Shel: Well, I’ve always put people first ever since I started my business in 1981, but when I started actively talking about it, being public about it, I started to attract a much better class of client. At that time, the bulk of my business was people coming in for a one or two quick jobs, like a press release and a back cover for a book, and then they’d be gone. I still do those kinds of things, but I’ve found that more of my clients want to stay with me a while. They want to hear what I have to say about their overall marketing strategy, and hire me to carry out many more pieces of that strategy. Sometimes, they actually want me to produce their book, start to finish. This has built a nice floor in my business, because I don’t have to be in constant marketing mode when I have steady clients.

Biana: Can you give our readers your top three tips to help them transform the way they do marketing, based on your principles?

Shel:

* Follow the “Magic triangle” of honesty, integrity, and quality
* Build partner relationships with other ethical businesses that already reach your best prospects, and let them open doors for you
* When you have high standards of ethics and a cooperative attitude, you can turn customers, suppliers, industry experts, and even competitors into ambassadors for you

Biana: What’s next for you? What are you going to be working on in 2010?

Shel: It’s going to be a big year for me. First, my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, will be coming out–it expands on the concepts in Principled Profit to really see the business world through an eco-oriented lens, and unlike the self-published Principled Profit, it will have the support of a major publisher.

Biana: Please tell us more about your book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and how the readers can purchase it.

Shel: Principled Profit may have been the first book to really look at all of these issues together. Most business ethics books are all about being ethical because it’s the right thing to do and it keeps you out of jail. That’s true, but it’s a only a little piece of the whole story. I chose to slice it differently: the focus is that business ethics is a roadmap for business success. when you look through that lens, amazing things are possible, and Principled Profit really goes through that piece by piece, with examples ranging from solopreneurs to the Fortune 100. the book won an Apex Award for best book in the marketing/PR field, was republished in Mexico and India, was endorsed by more than 80 entrepreneurs form Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield and MarketingSherpa founder Anne Holland on down–and I think this book has begun to make a difference in the way the business world is starting to think.

Through the end of the year (or until I run out of books), I’ve cut the price substantially from the original $17.50: $11.95 for single copies, and lower prices as you buy more. A whole case is just $4 per book, or $2.50 per copy (that’s 86 percent off the list price) if you buy out the stock. It makes a great holiday gift for sales and customer service people, customers, and entrepreneur friends.

Here’s the link: <https://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters/2009/11/04/a-life-changing-11-95-gift-for-the-entrepreneurs-in-your-life/>

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.