John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing follows me on Twitter. He's got nearly 62 000 twitter followers and about 120 000 people signed up to his newsletter. That's serious pull.

In order to be successful in business, it is crucial to build up trust. Trust is most easily established through association - I may not know you, but if someone I know or trust recommends you then you're probably ok to work with.

After comparing the sales of books on entrepreneurship and small business in the article entitled "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries sells its way to small business and entrepreneurial success", I wanted to get a feel for the sales figures for leading generic business books.

To be honest, my expectation was that small business books would exceed the sales of more generic business books, with the exception perhaps of autobiographical books covering business personalities like the late Steve Jobs. I included the sales figures for the Kindle version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson in the attached graph, for interest's sake.

I've certainly been set straight. Not only are the bestselling generic business books outselling their small business and entrepreneurial counterparts, they're also outselling every other category of business books, like marketing, advertising, PR, eCommerce and so on. They're outselling everything except a handful of the biggest fiction titles like "The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Businesses can take off overnight. Social networks, global media, the Internet, marketing and word-of-mouth that spans the globe can drive your message to millions of people instantly. But it rarely "just happens".

If you've been marketing your startup, product or business online then you'll have seen product launches that seemed to come out of nowhere to become the hottest thing around, or videos and content that have gone viral driving millions of potential customers through to the originators - the "Charlie bit my finger" YouTube video sensation netted that family several hundred thousand dollars in revenue.

While some people luck out and ride a wave of viral/social popularity, basing your livelihood on success through blind luck is not a particularly fruitful strategy. Most people have to work hard for quite some time before they achieve a breakthrough marketing success. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to give yourself every chance of success.

Yahoo and Bing are consistently sending more highly targeted organic search traffic to my startup than Google. How is this possible?

Google dominates the search market, with about 66% of US traffic - clearly a far greater percentage of search traffic than all of the other search engines combined.

So if Google has the lion's share of the search market, why are Yahoo and Bing sending my startup, design-a-webpage.com, qualified organic search traffic for the SEO keywords and phrases that are targeted by the site? The answer could be part of a strategy to claw their way back.

Let's take a look...

Getting your small business online can be difficult, until you have found the right combination of tools. In particular, creating a professional look and feel for your webpages is crucial for building trust and reputation (both hugely important for making sales).

This post isn't going to rehash the old favorites like wordPress, Joomla or Drupal. These CMS (Content Management Systems) are fairly well known and widely used. If you're not using one of these for your website or blog then you should definitely take a look.

Instead I thought I would list the online tools, relating to web design, that I can't do without. Tools that make the every day task of adding new pages, changing the look and feel of existing page elements, and updating code so much easier.

Entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses clearly have money to spend when it comes to educating themselves with content and knowledge from leading entrepreneurs like Eric Ries, Crystal Paine and Napoleon Hill.

In my previous article in which I compared the leading titles by marketing gurus, entitled "InfoGraphic: Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the start" outsells other titles by marketing gurus", Guy's book outsold its competitors three to one over a five day period, selling an average of about 60 copies a day. The story is different when it comes to starting and running a business.

To be honest I was slightly surprised when I saw the figures in this comparison graph. It was my opinion, as an entrepreneur, that marketing products and services was more "sexy" than the day to day tasks of running a business or managing money. Clearly I was mistaken.

Internet marketing using SEO and social media help drive revenue through my eCommerce site. I help startups, entrepreneurs, small and medium sized businesses to increase sales, reduce costs and generally meet their business objectives. I write books too - my books are translated and sold all over the world. Doing this allows me the flexibility to work from my poolside.

Ok, so I do have to fly off every now and then to build a new business application, give technical advice and consult with a few corporate clients. I also have a hand in helping a few startup companies that require me to work in different places (usually in-doors in front of several computers at once), but fundamentally, this picture of me (taken this morning) shows my office space in the heart of Cape Town.

The criteria for inclusion on this list of "top new social and marketing business tools" is for the tool or service to be online (i.e. not a gadget or traditional business), related to social networking and media/marketing, and new (ish).

The tools/services also have to be either free or nearly free and offer great potential or value - something that makes you sit up and go, "Ah! That's useful.".

The idea behind this list is to help entrepreneurs, small business and startups increase their productivity, establish themselves as leaders in their industry, grow their social following, build authority and trust, drive sales and all the important goodies that go into making a success of your business.

Regardless of whether you are selling cupcakes or oil rigs, it's worth checking out how these tools can help you make important business connections, increase your online visibility and generally help you to succeed at whatever it is your doing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the nicest ways to make a living from the Internet. It doesn't require you to develop a product, manage a supply chain, or do anything else associated with a traditional business, other than promote and market products.

It's also easy to startup. All you need is to sign up to an affiliate program - the most popular one being Amazon's associate program - and start creating interesting and engaging content to encourage and convince people to make purchases.

In particular, for entrepreneurs, startups and anyone thinking of starting a small business, affiliate marketing can provide a wonderful lesson in how to harness the Internet (SEO, search, social media, PPC and more) to drive and convert traffic into sales and revenue.

Search giant Google recently launched its latest version of it's world dominating search - "Google search plus your world" (Gs+yw). Gs+yw integrates the social Google+ platform with Google search to bring you a hybrid of traditional search results mixed with personalized search results - socialized search.

The idea being that you are far more likely to want to read relevant information from someone you know than someone you don't.

Of course, Google+'s integration into Google search uses a softly, softly approach. Google+ results are only shown if you are logged in because Google+ can't tell who you are following otherwise. You are also allowed to prevent Google+ results from being included in your search results. So don't panic if you aren't yet signed up to Google+.