Yesterday, Amazon announced that it had signed a deal to acquire 450 titles of the U.S. children’s trade books business, of Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books.

Already, the online retailer has its own imprints for business books, romances, thrillers, science fiction and works in translation. With these children’s books, Amazon will offer titles in print as well as electronic form, taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated e-readers and tablets such as its own color Kindle Fire, the company says.

Well, although publishers are angry, and even anguished about this move (one editor at a large publishing house told me that Amazon is the “new enemy” – as any Goliath would be against the weakened Davids that the publishing houses have become), this move is to be expected. Amazon has power, and it’s doing what it can to stay at the top. And publishers need to sell their books through Amazon – at this point they have no choice. More and more consumers buy their books online. And Amazon (and to a lesser extent, BN.com) are where you go to buy books online.

Bookstores themselves no longer sell just books. They can’t afford to: They need to be more things to more people, offering toys, games, mugs – e-readers. People don’t go into bookstores just to buy books any longer; bookstores are mini-malls, now that consumers aren’t simply book-buyers but browsers. Bookstores can’t offer the wide selection of merchandise that Amazon can, but in their way they’re trying to compete.

Unfortunately, publishers can’t diversify in the same way and are stuck selling books through other outlets. They’re still trying to figure out new business models – not only how to work best with their authors, but how to compete using new forms of information distribution.

For someone who’s writing a book, or building a platform from which to reach an audience, Amazon offers yet another option, another possibility for sales. For publishers, it’s a challenge. Perhaps Amazon’s aggressive move into an area that publishers had owned for decades will prompt publishers to think more creatively  about how to sell their books, if they’re able to. It would be a good thing – Amazon is a terrific online retailer that provides wonderful service to its customers, but competition leads to innovation. And I hope publishers find a way to compete.

Some businesspeople seem to have all the luck. The right people just seem to put themselves in the path of these lucky folks, ready to introduce them to those who will give them all the business they could ever desire. Do you know any people like this? Then you should also know that it’s likely more than just luck that brings a deluge of referrals their way. These people likely have built strong Power Teams for themselves.

A Power Team is a group people of “complementary” professions. They work with the same clients, but do not take business away from each other. Great examples of these are easily found in the real estate and wedding industries. A realtor, mortgage broker, building inspector, title agency and real estate attorney all service clients looking to purchase property. A wedding planner, photographer and florist are among the many professions that cater to the bride-to-be. If these professions form a Power Team, when one person in the team gets business, he or she can refer the client to every other member in the Team.

Selecting and Cultivating

So it’s more than just luck. Successful business people have the ability to select and cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with high-quality people in strategically important business categories, and this ability is a core competency for maximum success in networking.

So how do you cultivate such relationships? It’s vital that you find out as much as possible about your Power Partners so that you can send the right kind of business their way. You need to learn what makes your Power Team partner special as a person, as well as how to recognize your partner’s best prospects.

As a result, you can be an effective “Bragging Buddy” for your partners. As a Bragging Buddy, your job is to help prospects like, trust and want to do business with your Power Team…while they are doing the same thing for you!

Here are the 10 important questions you should ask your Power Team partner, as well as some tips for helping you take full advantage of the information you gain:

1. How did you get started in your business?

This is a great icebreaker question. Sometimes knowing what motivated your networking partner to get into his or her particular business enables you to give stronger testimonials about him or her.

2. What do you enjoy most about what you do?

Telling a prospect that your networking partner loves what he or she does and why, with details and stories, is very important in helping the prospect “like” your Power Team partner.

3. What separates you or your company from the competition?

Try to use “bullet points” to illustrate to a prospect quickly and easily why you can be trusted to do a good job.

4. What advice would you give someone starting out in your business?

Asking someone for advice shows respect and is essential for building credibility with your networking partner on the road to profitability.

5. What are the coming trends in your business or industry?

If your Power Team partner has detailed information and strategies on how to profit from upcoming trends, you might learn something of value. Conversely, if your networking partner is too preoccupied with daily business to have any input here, it is an opportunity for you to help him or her with any trends you see that might affect the business. Build rapport by taking an active interest in your Power Team partner’s business.

6. What strategies have you found to be the most effective in promoting your business?

This question leads to brainstorming for each other’s business and stimulates the exchange of marketing and promotion ideas, as well as business-building in general.

7. If there were anything about your business or industry you could change, what would that be?

This question, in addition to building rapport, allows your Power Team partner to discuss business freely and provides you with the opportunity to suggest solutions or at least gain a better understanding of the challenges he or she faces.

8. What is the next big event coming up for you?

This question almost always results in referral opportunities if you follow up correctly.

9. What is your biggest challenge at the moment?

The answer will provide insight into your networking partner’s business and life to help you understand him or her more as a person, as well as possibly uncovering money on the table with referral opportunities for the Power Team.

10) What type of customers are you looking for?  How will I recognize a good prospect for you? What are some specific situations are your targeted prospects experiencing?

Okay, this is really three questions. In essence, the more vivid picture your networking partner paints of who and what he or she is looking for, the greater the probability that you will recognize the targeted prospects, give a compelling testimonial and create a money-making referral.

Called the “father of modern networking” by CNN, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author. He is the Founder and Chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization. His newest book, Networking Like a Pro, can be viewed at www.IvanMisner.com. Dr. Misner is also the Senior Partner of the Referral Institute, an international referral training company.

Be selfish with your business and grow faster than you ever thought possible.

Business selfishness is good, positive, and helps you build your client base quickly. Personal selfishness is not positive and many of us know the negative repercussions of living a lifestyle of not giving back to others. So what is being selfish in business all about? How will it help me grow? Here are a few tips.

§  Be selfish with your time. Focus part of each day and week to personal growth. How can you service your clients and offer the best products if you’re not up to date with current skills and knowledge in your industry? Keep learning and growing by attending workshops, seminars, conventions, and reading updated journals and engaging in tutorials. Only by being selfish with your time and scheduling segments of your week to improve as a professional can you stay sharp and remain competitive in the marketplace.

§  Be selfish with your product line or services. Never let your products go “stale”: Constantly try to improve them, make them more efficient and effective while keeping the cost fair and competitive. A product or service that looks the same as it did two years ago most likely is not current nor the best you can give your customers. Keep up with the evolving demand, it keeps on morphing because we, as consumers, are conditioned to seeing improvements and enhancements with everything we use and spend money on. Obsolescence is at the highest rate it has ever been and the trend is unlikely to change.

§  Be selfish with your clients. Protect your customers by keeping their contact information private and confidential. Spoil them with each “touch” by giving them the best service possible, always going beyond what you promise to deliver. Treating them like family, which is distinctly different than how you treat your prospects. This keeps your retention rate high and profitable for the long run. As you may know, it takes many more resources to get new clients than it does in keeping the ones you already have. Offer value by updating them on important industry changes or trends, package special programs for them, and give them “insider” discounts for their loyalty. Let them know they are special and they will stick with you even when the economy takes a dip.

Being selfish with your business obviously doesn’t mean not sharing; it means focusing on the key elements that are crucial to your long-term success. Set aside the secondary priorities to make sure that what you offer, who you are, and how your clients perceive you is as a genuine and caring professional.

Business selfishness will lead to success by always improving who you are and what you offer.

Lester Salvatierra is an experienced Finance Specialist with First U.S. Finance (http://www.FirstUSFinance.com). He helps small to mid-size companies lease or finance a wide variety of equipment and special projects for upgrades and expansions. He is also a networking pro and BNI Area Director in Ventura County, CA. Lester@FirstUSFinance.com Ph: 805-217-9896

As you know, in just the last couple of years, marketing has changed. The old ways – direct- and push-marketing – don’t work anymore. In fact, they work so poorly now that revenue is way down in many businesses that relied on old marketing methods.

That’s because business owners failed to understand that marketing isn’t about transactional sales. It’s about relationships.

To build a relationship today, you can’t rely on gimmicks and being someone’s marketing guru. You have to be a real leader.

It’s not just about expertise. It’s about being the Authority.

I wrote about being the Authority last week. In order to become an authority, and not merely a guru who spouts slogans, you have to be able to listen as much as you speak. You have to have a conversation – not a monologue.

My not-so-secret ambition is to replace old-school gurus, those folks who once served an idealistic society with their come-ons and such, with real, authentic leaders, with authorities like you.

Why isn’t old fashioned direct marketing working? Why doesn’t the size (of your list) matter? The simple answer? You. I value you and I value my relationship with you.

I believe you’re among today’s emerging thought leaders, people who can replace old-style slogan-spouting gurus. You’re on the way to becoming today’s authorities.

While Promote A Book Inc. and Persona Marketing Corporation offer tactical services to do the platform-building work for you, we haven’t yet created the content to help you do it yourself.

This is where my good friend Greg Habstritt comes in. As I mentioned in last week’s post, Greg just launched his Authority Formula Product. (Frankly, I’m a little envious that I didn’t create and release this product myself.)

Anyway, I’m not only a fan of Greg’s — but I use his product, too. (Those of you who want to see my Pendulum presentation should purchase the Authority Formula– the full version of Pendulum, filmed at Engage Today, is included.)

If you’re seriously interested in making a dent in this world, you need to become an Authority. And there’s actually a formula to becoming an Authority. Greg gives you that with his Authority Formula.

Most people confuse branding simply with the external imagery of their business.  Their logo.  Their website.  Their tagline.  Their company name.  All these things are important but they are all, or at least should be, extensions of what is going on inside the business.

The mistake comes from branding your company from the outside-in vs. from the inside-out.

What do I mean by that?

When a company gets started and they want to get their name out.  What are some of the first things they think about? They start worrying about business cards, pamphlets, one sheets, etc.  Then they realize they need a logo to go on all these things and make them look professional.

They may get all of this information in place and then they realize they need a website because they went to a book publishing workshop with my friend Michael Drew and he told them that if they don’t have a website they don’t have a business.  So now they panic and rush out and find their brother in law who studied web development at a community college for two years.  Website?  Check.

During this whole process, not once did the business owner really take the time to consider the following as it pertains to their brand:

Mission, Vision and Values:  I don’t care what business you are in.  You have to articulate where you are going, why you exist and what you care about.  These terms were bastardized in the mid-to-late nineties but when done right these are powerful tools.

Your audience:  Before you create visuals for your company take some time to consider who is going to care about what you do and then craft visuals around the people that you want to do business with.

The client experience:  How are people going to interact with you and your company? Will there be many levels?  Online or offline?  Are your relationships going to be quick and shallow or slow and deep?  You need to spend some time to create the client experience process around your business.  Nothing kills a companies’ credibility faster than getting people excited about your business and then failing to deliver on your customer’s expectations.

Your team:  What type of people are you going to have on your team?  What skills do they need to have?  Put together a team that’s going to deliver on your mission and values.  Don’t skimp on this area.

In the end your brand is promise of what people can expect when they do business with you.  To be able to effectively deliver you must have clarity, high performing team as well as well thought out systems and processes.  You don’t want to sell people a car that has the body of a Ferrari with a Pinto engine.  That’s bad for your brand.

How have you experienced this either in your business or with someone else’s?

When you start a business, you have a lot of things to worry about.  At the forefront of those worries is finding a way to make money as fast as you can. With cash flow being a huge concern, I find it odd that so many start ups treat their cash flow so casually.

The first thing that I want in my business is certainty. Is my business going to work?  Do people want what I am selling?  Am I different enough to stand out?  This is paramount.  In most cases, no logo, pamphlet or fancy website is going to change that.

Putting together a proper brand identity takes time.  Chances are the best way to understand your brand is going to be through market research, case studies and just plain old experience.  You can’t get these things overnight.

Besides concerns about cash flow,  business owners have to concern themselves with the finite resource of time.  Everyone has the same amount of time in their day. Rich people don’t have more.  Poor people don’t have less.  The difference between successful people and people who aren’t there yet is in how they manage their time.

The point is that people waste a lot of time and money branding a business that:

A.     They don’t even know will work.

B.     If it does work, it won’t look like they thought it would.  It just never does.

Branding is important but waiting may be the best thing that you can do. Get some traction in your business first and get some clarity around what your business really is and how it creates value in the marketplace.  Then go out and create the powerful visuals that help to reinforce what your company is all about.

So I’m standing at the bank yesterday, and it definitely has that FLAMmy feel to it that just makes me want to scream to wake everyone up.  As a manager in the financial services industry, we had a strict rule about making people feel like they were walking into a morgue, we just didn’t do it.  We wanted people to feel like they were walking into an energized operation that was excited to see their customers and do business with them.

What you get today, and what I experienced yesterday, is the same old bank.  Cold.  Unfriendly.  Apathetic.  Oh, you’re depositing money?  So? You want a loan?  Eh.

In today’s world of banking, it’s not held in nearly the same esteem as it has been in the past.  This is one particular industry that has been damaged severely by the housing crisis here in America and badly needs to reinvent itself. So who’s going to do it?

One industry that has been a partner in banking innovation has been the mobile device industry.  The mobile device industry is making it to where you don’t have to experience FLAM inside a bank office because, if they have it their way, you won’t ever have to visit a bank again.

Mobile devices are partnering with banks like USAA, who deal with the military, to allow depositors to deposit checks by taking a picture of their checks and send them to the bank for deposit.  With the proliferation of mobile apps, there figures to be more and more opportunities for banks to be more efficient with the way they interact with their client base.

Big problems require big solutions.  The American bank is just one of the seriously antiquated examples that exist in today’s market.  Where does FLAM exist in your field? What old practices need to go away for more user friendly, intuitive designs?  Take a look at your platform and ask yourself where you can make the biggest impact on society.

To help identify your elite clients, think of the concept of Pareto’s Law.  The law states that 80% of effects  stem from 20% of causes.  This principle has also shown to be true for business; typically 80% of our business comes from 20% of our customers (your elite).

Knowing this is one thing.  How we deal with it is another.  Typically, how we treat our elite clients is by taking them for granted. They are low maintenance and provide a lot of value.  Conversely we tend to spend a lot of time with the customers who complain a lot, never appreciate what you do, and demand a lot of our time.  Ironically, these customers have spent very little on your product or service.

Rather than spend time with your problem clients, shift your focus.  This is done by first firing customers who just don’t seem to have an appreciation for what you do, or at the very least, calling them to inform them that the relationship will be different.  Then take that energy and focus it where it needs to be, your elite clients.

If you are not sure who your elite clients are, here are some questions to help you with that, as well developing the key relationships that you already know about:

• List 5 business relationships or clients that you believe offer the most untapped potential, along with your first step or plan of action to turn that potential into production.
• Describe your ideal client.
• What areas/sources of your business is generating the majority of my profits?
• From what areas/sources do most of your “headaches” in business come from?
• What kind of people have you attracted and enjoyed working with up to date?
• Which clients do you find that you have developed a relationship with beyond business?

These are just some of the questions to help you uncover a niche or specific group of clients that you can start focusing your relationship efforts on.  When you identify these key client relationships, you can create opportunities for maximum impact and with less effort.  Identify these elite customers as soon as possible.

How have you been able to identify key relationships in your business?  What were the results?

I talked recently about having the ability to gain more clarity when you know yourself on a deeper level.  The reason this is so important is that when you are building a platform for a book or a platform for a business, there is a progression of steps that need to be considered and followed and they should be followed in a particular order.

Here are some issues that self discovery will help you overcome when taking that first step in business:

Sometimes when we get caught up in analyzing a situation, it also keeps us from moving forward. Self discovery will tell you that you have that tendency and can create the conversation in your mind on what to do to keep that from happening.

Speed of implementation may also be an issue for you.  If this is the case, then knowing yourself will allow you to overcome this so that it is not a limitation on building your platform.  I don’t know how many times I hear someone say how much better or smarter they are than a particular thought leader (insert your own here).  Maybe you are, but guess what?  They have a product/service and you don’t.  It’s because they got it done.

Preparation is where most business and thought leaders fail or succeed.  How do you know if a book idea, marketing strategy, or business is a good idea for you?  By understanding yourself enough before getting into these ventures so that you can discern between good ideas and bad ones.  What are your values?  What do you bring to the table?  Are you an analyzer? A motivator?  A creator?  Know it up front and then be it.

Take a look at the steps needed to implement your business or platform and then ask yourself one question:  What do I know about me? If you can’t answer that question, stop right there and make sure you can answer it.  You will save yourself some time and money.

What do you know about you?

Here are 5 effective ways to make more sales this holiday season. (And anyone who tells you this won’t work should watch this great video clip.)

1. Tell their husband that Santa sent you (or wife, or Three Kings, please substitute freely in this post!). If someone has been dreaming of buying your coaching package all year, you can probably see who they’re married to on Facebook. Most of us would like to buy our spouse the perfect gift, so if you send a sweet email to them letting them know that they’re longing for what your offering (and even offer them a special bonus or discount), you’re providing a great service!

2. Use Facebook events to let people know about a sale, or do and distribute a daily video that highlights something you sell, or …the options are limitless. Technology can be your friend. Use what it does to support you. Here’s a horrible analogy, but technology can be like a wild horse. You get to decide if you use it to help you or if you stay afraid of it.

3. Get creative! Tweet a different discount for each day of Chanukah, Kwanza, or a Special Solstice Sale.

4. Be generous! Give part of your proceeds to a charity and share that in social media. Those who buy from you will feel even better.

5. Let folks know if you are increasing your prices for 2011. Give them one last chance to buy at your current prices before you do!

It’s not the normal economy, and it shouldn’t be business as usual. There are a multitude of ways to make more this holiday season. The key to social media sales is always knowing what your financial goal is, and keeping your finger on the pulse of what you’re doing to make sure people are buying. The brilliance of social media is that you can try a multitude of things and easily discard what doesn’t work.

I love brainstorming new ideas, so if you’re stuck on this one, let me know and I’ll gift you a free night in my Q & A.

Happy Holidays!