Before you embark on this project, it's important to understand possibilities out there. Start being aware of incentive items you might see and understand how they are used. Many are offered as consumer gifts or incentives while others are used as training tools or morale boosters for employees.

Some examples of premium sales might be:

Books offered at yearly company sales meetings Books offered to consumers at a discount (consumers are usually asked to send in product UPC's to qualify for these specials) Books offered to new customers at financial institutions Books offered to new home buyers Books offered to new magazine subscribers

To determine market segment you want to go after, study your book first for obvious clues. If you've mentioned or recommended companies or products in your book, those will be first tier you'll want to go after. Next, think about message of your book and how it aligns with particular companies within that industry. Company web sites and ads will offer great clues when trying to match a company or organization up with your book.

If you're going after magazine subscriber bonus segment, you'll have a bit more flexibility. Generally, if book fits reader demographic and aligns itself with message of magazine, it will be considered. For example, you might offer a home organization book to Good Housekeeping or a fitness book to Self or Redbook. Before you approach these magazines, read them for about three months so you get a good sense of what they're about and who their audience is.

If you're going after a particular market and are trying to locate companies within that industry, try doing a Boolean search in Google. Your search should look like this: "your industry and companies." Another resource is http://www.thomasregister.com. This site will link you to companies nationally and internationally within your industry.

In my case I was a bit of both. I knew what to do but did not fully understand how to do it.

A very important and potent line of defence against bad decisions and a line of offence to implement good decisions is a board of wise advisors. Here I am talking about a more informal advisory board, so your lawyer and accountant should not be automatically included. They are specialists, whereas you are seeking people from different areas of business, so they can offer you a very wide range of perspectives.

These people are not partners in your business in any shape of form, but outsiders. That is important because they can bring you more value than many internal partners could. These advisors have extensive experience in a broad range of – not necessary business – skills, who can give your unbiased advice and call you on your bullshit when you are about to blindly walk into a manhole or straight under a speeding steamroller.

However there is a little problem about how most service professionals select their advisors. The first problem is that most have no advisors besides their accountants and lawyers. The problem here is that you cannot run a firm by staring at numbers all time, but this is exactly what most accountants do. The other problem is that both lawyers and accountants are pretty risk, sales and marketing-allergic folks. You will not be able to do anything innovative because they will caution you all time.

Let us look at a large company that once set out to be a great professional service firm: AT&T. Who was on board of directors? All right, it is called board of directors, but they are basically advisors too.

So, who are on AT&T’s board: A retired oil executive, an economic consultant, a retired ex-CEO of a textile company, at that time chairman of troubled Kodak, a retired ex-Caterpillar executive, a relationship consultant, a law professor and a former CEO of CBS who was dumped for poor performance.

Nobody on board of a technology company had technical expertise to innovate or marketing expertise to take new innovative services to market.

The sad fact is that most business owners stuff their advisory boards with friends, relatives, their former teachers, their kids’ teachers, dogs, cats and parrots.

Here is a Line-Up I Can Imagine as a Good Advisory Board:

* A financial specialist (this must be more than a plain accountant)

* A talent specialist. You need this expertise if you plan to hire people in future or if you already have some people working at your firm. Someone who knows how to attract great talents and how to keep them

* A marketing specialist. It is important that you can actually sell your services. This is vital. So many service professionals are diabolical at marketing. They just want to sell, but are not willing to market their services.

* A specialist in daily operations.

* A specialist in office and administration issues

* A your own business coach.