Best Books for Starting an Online Business: 45 CEO Picks

Gary Vaynerchuk explains how he used Twitter, Facebook and a video camera to grow his family wine shop, and argues that the internet lets a hobby become a living. Garrett Moon says it made a difference before he became an entrepreneur.

The founders of 37signals explain how a team of seven launched Basecamp and other web applications with no funding or debt by keeping things simple and making contrarian choices. Joan Boixados recommends it to developers who bootstrap.

Jeff Walker sets out the Product Launch Formula he built selling online from his basement, a sequence that builds anticipation before a digital product goes on sale. Michael Hyatt says he used it to create a seven-figure business.

Chris Smith starts from the fact that buyers now meet a company online first, then shows how to capture cheaper web leads, qualify them and close more of them by phone. Dan Stewart says it lifted his team’s close rate from 55% to 76%.

Ryan Holiday explains how Dropbox, Airbnb and Twitter grew without ads or press releases, using cheap methods they could test, measure and scale, and reworking the product until it spreads. Sean Ellis says it makes the growth hacker mindset usable.

Gary Vaynerchuk revisits his case for the personal brand with stories of founders who built businesses online, then breaks down YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, podcasts and other platforms one by one. Julian Samarjiev wanted its tactics for building a business on digital platforms.

Joe Pulizzi argues that a business wins customers by publishing material they want instead of interrupting them, and he walks through choosing a niche, building an audience by social media and email and measuring results. David Meerman Scott endorses its approach.

Ryan Levesque, an online marketer, builds sales funnels from survey answers, arguing that tailored messages beat one-size-fits-all online selling. Jules Schroeder sees asking people what they want as the quickest route to launching a new business.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg organize their advice on online marketing around five stages of building a website, from planning and site structure to messaging and a clear statement of value. Raluca Radu and Robert Hajnal both recommend it.

HubSpot’s Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah argue that businesses should stop interrupting prospects and attract them instead through search rankings, a company blog and social networks, measuring what works. Irina Nica calls it the basics for anyone building a SaaS product.

Gary Vaynerchuk uses a boxing image for social media marketing, with patient jabs that build goodwill and a right hook that asks for the sale, tailored to each platform and to mobile. Jeremy Boudinet says it shaped his view of marketing and sales.

Emily Ross and Angus Holland profile fifty profitable web businesses, from collegehumor.com to netaporter.com, and ask their founders how they avoided becoming a dot-com flop. Yaro Starak liked its short founding stories of sites he already used.

Brad Geddes goes past the basics of pay-per-click advertising on Google, covering keyword research, ad writing, quality scores, bidding, remarketing and testing landing pages, so a business can run paid search at scale. Raluca Radu recommends it from her digital marketing work.

Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar explain how to test landing pages, sales copy and site structure so that more visitors buy or subscribe, and they supply more than 250 ideas worth testing. Raluca Radu puts it on her list.

Jeremy Wright shows how a company blog gives even a small business a direct line to customers and a voice as a thought leader without a large budget. Mircea Scarlatescu credits it with changing the course of his online business.

Dan Norris grew his WordPress support company past a million Australian dollars a year while spending almost nothing on ads, and he uses that case to show how content marketing can carry an online business. Vincenzo Ruggiero recommends it.

Ryan Deiss and Russ Henneberry cover search, content, influencer and social media marketing, and explain how a lead magnet and regular follow-up turn web visitors into paying customers. Haris Siddique picked it up to learn how to build digital campaigns.

Russell Brunson, co-founder of ClickFunnels, treats weak web traffic and low conversion as funnel problems and supplies scripts and frameworks for turning online visitors into leads and buyers. Ali Abdaal recommends his work to anyone growing a business.

Dorie Clark draws on consultants, podcasters, bloggers and online marketers to show how professionals can go independent by monetizing what they know, extending their reach online and building several income streams. Marvin Liao recommends it.

David Viney explains how a business can lift its pages in Google’s unpaid results and hold them there, noting that searchers skip sponsored links, with case studies for large and small firms. Robert Hajnal lists it for growing a business.

Peep Laja’s guide to conversion optimization starts from the business goal a website has to serve and plans the design around it, using research and experiments to turn more visitors into leads or buyers. Raluca Radu puts it on her list.

Scott Fox, an e-business consultant, walks through starting and growing an internet company, drawing on interviews with small family-run online businesses and ending with exercises and an action plan for finding a business idea.

Matthew Paulson, whose MarketBeat newsletter reaches close to half a million investors, lays out a slow, niche-first plan for an internet company built on information products and little starting money. Rob Walling calls it a detailed blueprint for beginners.

Carrie Green, who launched an online business at 20, speaks to women who want to start one, covering vision, doubt, audience, brand and building a following of subscribers. Stacey Minton found it encouraging and full of ideas.

Rob Walling writes for developers who want to launch a web or software product without investors, and he concentrates on the marketing they tend to avoid: picking an idea, testing it and reaching customers. Turgay Birand praises its practical tactics.

Nicolas Cole, once the most-read writer on Quora, explains where to publish instead of a personal blog, how virality works and how online writing can grow into newsletters, books and a company. Ali Abdaal calls it his top pick for writing online.

David Meerman Scott shows how a business can skip costly advertising and reach buyers directly through blogs, online video, social networks and news releases, with case studies for small and large organizations. Kyrylo Taranenko points to its cases on going viral.

Shama Hyder holds that social platforms call for a different approach than older marketing, and she covers each major platform and how a company can take part in conversations there to win customers. Ionut Danifeld says it got him started in digital marketing.

Avinash Kaushik’s framework covers building an analytics strategy, measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, running experiments and listening to customers, so that an online business makes decisions on data. Raluca Radu recommends it with his earlier book.

Avinash Kaushik sets out week-by-week programs for building a web analytics practice, from core metrics and site search to SEO, pay-per-click and email campaigns, and urges looking beyond clickstream data. Raluca Radu puts it on her list.

Pat Flynn, who earns his living online through podcasts and niche sites, sets out a five-stage process for testing a business idea on a small slice of the market before spending real time and money. Vincent Pugliese recommends it.

Chris Goward shows how structured experiments on headlines, images, buttons and navigation turn more website visitors into customers, and how to pick tests, run them and read the results. Raluca Radu, who works in digital marketing, recommends it.

Four search practitioners, Rand Fishkin among them, explain how search engines rank pages and how to plan, run and measure an SEO campaign, from basic tactics to staffing a team. Tony Hsieh calls SEO a core need for online businesses.

Tim Ferriss’s manual is mainly about lifestyle design rather than online business, but its lessons from his supplement company, from cutting workload to handing tasks to overseas virtual assistants, shape many remote founders. Ramit Sethi says it changed his life.

Nir Eyal’s Hook Model explains how digital products from Twitter to Pinterest bring users back out of habit rather than through advertising, written as the guide he wanted as a founder. Matt Mullenweg calls it a blueprint for the next products.

Brad Stone’s history of Amazon follows the online bookseller through the dot-com bust to Prime and Amazon Web Services. It is a company biography, not a manual, and Alan Pierce reads it for what it shows about the path of e-commerce.

Steve Krug’s short guide is about web usability, built on the idea that a site should let people do what they came for with no effort, a principle any online business depends on. Tracy Osborn calls it key for anyone learning to build websites.

Ryan Holiday describes how he fed stories to small blogs so they climbed to larger outlets, and what happens when such manipulation works or backfires. Robert Hajnal read it for ideas on the online marketing of his own project.

Chris Anderson argues that the internet’s unlimited shelf space lets many low-demand products together rival the hits, and he draws rules for doing business in that economy. Michael Herrmann says entrepreneurs need to use the niches it describes.

Duncan Clark, an early adviser to Alibaba, tells how its founder went from a small flat and early failures to an e-commerce empire, set against China’s economic change. Erik Cheong admires how a modest English teacher built it.

Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown describe the growth hacking method behind Airbnb, Pinterest and LinkedIn, with cross-functional teams running quick tests on acquiring and keeping customers. Eric Ries and Nir Eyal both endorse it.

Gary Vaynerchuk expands on questions from his show, covering Twitter, personal branding and launching a small business alongside hiring and health. Robert Katai reads it after Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as a second step in social media.

Pat Flynn is mainly concerned with turning followers and customers into superfans who promote a business, through a series of memorable moments, an approach he says fits anyone from a new YouTuber upward. Amy Porterfield endorses it.

Adam Cohen, given full access to eBay, follows how Pierre Omidyar’s clunky 1995 website grew into a passionate online community that beat better-funded rivals. Yaro Starak likes its story of a company that began as one person’s small idea.

Chris Ducker writes for small business owners and online entrepreneurs who try to do every job alone, showing how to choose tasks to delegate and recruit, train and manage virtual assistants. John Lee Dumas and Pat Flynn both endorse it.