Top 20 Startup, Small Business and Entrepreneurship Books of 2012

11. Outsmarting Google: SEO Secrets to Winning New Business (Que Biz-Tech), by Evan Bailyn and Bradley Bailyn

If you aren’t at or near the top of Google searches, you won’t be found. Your company might as well not exist. But many common Google “search optimization” techniques don’t work–or even make things worse. Learn the real, gritty, up-to-the-minute tactics that helped Evan Bailyn attract more than 50,000,000 visitors last year without spending a dime on advertising!

12. Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, by Michael Hyatt

To be successful in the market today, you must possess two strategic assets: a compelling product and a meaningful platform. This step-by-step guide takes readers behind the scenes, into the new world of social media success. Hyatt shows you what best-selling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to win customers in today’s crowded marketplace.

13. Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services, by Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki, CEO of garage.com and former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, Inc., presents his manifesto for world-changing innovation, using his battle-tested lessons to help revolutionaries become visionaries.

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14. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O’Reilly)), by Ash Maurya

We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail–not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.

15. Screw Business As Usual, by Richard Branson

Richard Branson, one of the world’s most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it’s time to turn capitalism upside down-to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities and the planet. Branson suggests, “Doing the right thing can be profitable. I will show how this works step by step… It’s the core message of this book. I often say, ‘Have fun and the money will come.’ I still believe that, but now I am saying, ‘Do good, have fun and the money will come.’”