First, read those two
- Secret Sauce: The Ultimate Growth Hacking Guide by Austen Allred and Vin Clancy
- Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
It’s the best introduction to marketing channels and how to work them. Only reading these two will make you more knowledgeable than 90% of people doing marketing out there.
And watch this one
The ex-CMO of DigitalOcean (1st marketing hire to IPO) gives an overview of how they grew. It’s almost like a practical summary of the two books:
- Growth Hacking to 1,000 Users & Beyond by Mitch Wainer
When you finish those, you’ve graduated from the high school of marketing, and you can focus on going deep.
Then go into specifics of what you are interested in
The basics of online business
- These two talks by Jason Cohen (if you like it, read his blog)
- All MicroConf videos by Patrick McKenzie (his blog)
How to think out of the box
- How to Build Products Users Love by Kevin Hale
SEO & Content
Advertising
- Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
- Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches
Copywriting
- The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman
- The Boron Letters by Gary C. Halbert and Bond Halbert
- Copythat by Sam Parr
- Hacking lifecycle emails by Patrick McKenzie (read his blog for more gold)
- Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience by Daniel Vassallo
- Viral X Blueprint by Genius Thinking
General inspiration
- Marketing Examples by Harry Dry (real-life examples of cool marketing stories)
- Ariyh by Thomas McKinlay (scientific marketing research)
I am trying to update this regularly…