Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Marketing Your Career is a handbook targeted to professionals and business people who’d like to understand how to better promote themselves and manage their own career development. Seasoned managers, experienced professionals or those new to the business world can all benefit from the techniques discussed in this book.

Q: What is the book about?
A: The book assembles a collection of simple, succinct marketing methods and techniques to help business professionals more effectively promote themselves and manage their own career development. It helps professionals start to think of themselves in terms of their own product features and benefits, and teaches them how to properly package and promote those features so that they can help their target markets solve problems. Topics covered include how to understand the market and your position, developing a personal brand, strategies to upgrade your offering, and how to build and execute a good career marketing campaign. The book also discusses ways to market your career inside your existing organization and to external audiences, and how to use, and not use the web to promote yourself.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: Linda Popky is a veteran marketer, as well as a successful consultant, speaker, author and educator. Her company, L2M Associates, helps organizations dramatically improve their bottom line by more effectively leveraging their investment in marketing programs, processes, and people. She is the president of Women in Consulting (WIC), a collaborative organization of seasoned business professionals in more than 30 consulting specialties, a member of the Society for the Advancement of Consulting (SAC), and on the faculty of the Integrated Marketing Program at San Francisco State University’s College of Extended Learning.

Linda believes that businesses today do not place enough focus on proper development of people as a key factor for successful creation and execution of key programs and initiatives. This book combines her extensive knowledge of applied marketing concepts with her long experience developing professionals as both a manager and a mentor, and draws on her consulting experience in organizations from startups to Fortune 100 companies as well.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: Many career-oriented books focus on how to make the job seeker look good. This book, based on Linda’s popular workshop entitled “Marketing Product YOU,” asks the reader to consider instead how their unique set of features and benefits can help a potential employer succeed. Linda takes a novel approach to professional development: getting people to apply the same basic marketing principles that make products and services successful to their own work situations and careers. Whether you are selling toothpaste, coffee or yourself, what’s important are the benefits that meet the buyer’s wants and needs—-not the features the seller thinks are cool or exciting.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: You don’t need to be a marketing professional to benefit from this book. The marketing concepts are straightforward and easy to grasp, and the book is concise and succinct. Readers will learn why being good at what you do isn’t enough to get you noticed and promoted, and why it’s so important to develop a unique value proposition to differentiate yourself from others in the job market.

“This is a splendid example of just how these practices can work to promote careers across functions and industries. It’s an easy read, high energy, and full of tools that, used properly, can truly set you apart from your competition,” said Carol Emerson, Vice President Career Management at Right Management.

According to Karolo Aparicio, Development Director of International Rivers in Berkeley, California, “I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for a job or looking to move up in their current job.”

This is the first in a series of handbooks entitled the Leverage2Market Mastery Series. The Leverage2Market Model focuses on five key elements: Products: the goods or services being marketed; Programs: the marketing initiatives being created and delivered; Processes: the way initiatives are delivered; People: those who deliver the initiatives; and Positioning, the key messages to be delivered in a campaign.

Marketing Your Career: Positioning, Packaging, and Promoting Yourself for Success is available immediately from Amazon.com and from the publisher, Woodside Business Press, at www.woodsidebusinesspress.com, as specialty business press dedicated to publishing books on stimulating and thought-provoking business and marketing-related topics.