Reddit mentions of Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...Create a Mass of Raving Fans...and Take Any Business to the Next Level

Would love to add anyone on Goodreads if you use it too :) [Add me](https://www.goodreads.com/thedoerco
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• Tested Advertising Method
  
• Ogilvy on Advertising
  
• How to Change Minds is a sales book, but it's got an easy to understand framework to understand how people make decisions that I have found useful for marketing
  
• The Ask Method Gives some great jumping off points on how to ask questions for marketing research, and how to organize that information to make decisions about your marketing and your product
  
• Positioning and Repositioning by the amazing marketing strategist Jack Trout of Disney and Coke, are good foundation reads if you don't know anything about marketing. If you know what a USP is, skip Positioning but I did like Repositioning. I did like Positioning as a refresher of a variety of different concepts that I have read more detailed individual books on.
  
• Integrated Marketing Communications to learn about more broadly how to make all of your marketing communications work together towards a common business goal. The book itself is about using marketing campaigns across different channels (tv, radio, print, online) in a coordinated effort, but it will help you understand how to use email, social, paid ads, and other marketing systems you develop together.
  
  Second Influence. Getting Everything You Can is good if you are basic in marketing, I would not recommend it for people who are more advanced.
  
  If you don't know what a "business goal" is, you need to read this:
  
  
• Scaling Up Every marketer should understand the processes that drive growth in businesses, because you are trying to manipulate those levers with marketing. You can also reverse engineer your prospect's business and explain the gains of your services in the terms of processes that drive their revenue when you're pitching them, too.

I like your idea of the 1 pager to grab email addresses. Is there a piece of information you could turn into a white paper to sweeten the audience building effort?

It's going to be hard to test tiered pricing with a 'coming soon' - but once you have an email list put together you will be in a good position to get feedback from people who could actually buy your product. Maybe check out Ask by Levesque.

As for speed - one way to test your offer would be buy some targeted traffic from Facebook and see how many leads it results in.

Rawrtherapy - Good question.

A few things. You currently have a cold list so you need to see the level of engagement and what their issues are. Hiring epicshoelace sounds like a good start ;).

Start simple. Say, "Hi. We haven't chatted in a while. I wanted to get back in touch. What's the number 1 thing your struggling with in (whatever industry your business is in)."

See how many people respond. 10% would be an excellent number if you got that much.

Then collect the responses and see if there are buckets of issues. Now you have information for your next product or service you can offer them.

Ryan Levesque has a book specifically on this topic. I haven't used it myself but it's worth checking out.

As a way of background I have newsletter where I share proven case studies of successful entrepreneurs. A lot of them are people who have built online lists. If you’re interested let me know and I can PM you the link to the newsletter or if you have any questions.

I don't have any experience in this but heard that "Ask" is a good book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Ask-Counterintuitive-Discover-Customers-Business/dp/1939447720/