Category Archives: Top Tips

Collection of our best tips and tricks

Best Books to help grow your side business with Instagram

Entrepreneur, Leadership, Learning, Top Books, Top Tips, , , , , , , , , , ,

This month we are stepping into the world of side hustles. Last week we showcased a number of top books focussing on your business making the transition from side hustle to real life business. You can read that here. 

Today, we are diving into the world of Instagram. Instagram is a super efficient marketing tool especially when have a side businesses to launch, or if you have made the decision to amp up your marketing game. 

Here’s our top picks for the titles that will offer you guidance. 

Capture your style by Aimee Song

With 3 million Instagram fans and counting, Aimee Song knows a thing or two about taking the perfect Instagram photo. In Capture Your Style, Song reveals the secrets behind creating the ultimate feed and breaks down the technical and editorial essentials for creating an account that will draw thousands of followers to earn you likes and brand attention. Organised by lifestyle categories, including fashion, travel, food, decor and more, the book presents the best apps and filters for processing photos, improving your voice and capturing your story on Instagram. There is also how-to information for propping and styling food and fashion photos. Whether you’re launching a career or simply sharing a gorgeous meal with your friends, Capture Your Style empowers you to become a master mobile photographer and shows you how to turn everyday moments into Instagold.

Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk

In his 2009 international bestseller, Crush It!, Gary insisted that a vibrant personal brand was one of the primary paths to entrepreneurial success. In Crushing It!, Gary explains why that’s even more true today, offering his unique perspective on what has changed and what remains timeless. He also shares stories from other entrepreneurs who have grown wealthier, and not just financially, than they ever imagined possible by following Crush It! principles. The secret to their success (and Gary’s) has everything to do with their understanding of social media platforms and their willingness to do whatever it takes to make these tools work to their utmost potential. Crushing It! is a state-of-the-art guide to building your own path to professional and financial success, but it’s not about getting rich. It’s a blueprint for living life on your own terms.

Styling for Instagram by Leela Cyd

Instagram is a rich source of inspiration and aspiration. It’s easy to set up an account, but to really master it, and gain a significant following, you need two things: a strong personal brand and an aspirational style that people will want to emulate. This book will help you achieve both. Written by renowned Instagram expert and photographer Leela Cyd, this book is packed with beautiful images as well as her sage advice for certain Instagram success. With sections on creating the perfect composition, finding the unique angle, and capturing scenes and places, this book covers all you need to know about getting the shots that work.

Instastyle by Tessa Barton

Instagram is the place where trends break, tastes are made, and brands are launched. Plus it’s packed with insightful analytics and handy business tools to help you elevate your social media presence to the next level. Create, connect with others, and share the way you see the world! Whether your passion is fitness, fashion, food, or anything in between, you can turn that passion into a business, inspire others, and meet amazing people. Learn from Tezza and her friends how to tell compelling visual stories on the fastest growing social media platform, with topics including photography tips, brand engagement strategies, and advice for finding management. InstaStyle is a must-have guide for a booming industry, full of beautiful imagery and easily understood guides to help you achieve your Instagram goals. You’ll learn how you can create an immediately recognisable grid aesthetic and showcase your life while remaining true to your personal brand. With contributions from successful influencers, you’ll be inspired to curate category-specific content to share with the Insta-universe.

Read this if you want to be instagram famous by Henry Carroll

So you’ve got an Instagram account, you’re posting pictures, but your follower count has flatlined. Read This If You Want to Be Instagram Famous holds the answers to fixing up your feed and finding thousands of new followers. Packed with the essential secrets of the hottest Instagrammers around, the book features tips covering photographic techniques, captioning, codes of conduct, kit and managing your account. Put the advice into practice and soon you too will be hailed as an Instagram icon.

Let us know in the comments if you have any other titles you think we should share. Nest week we’re sharing our top picks when using youtube for business.

Enjoy!

Need Textbooks?

Hacks, Students, Textbooks, Top Tips, , , , , , , , ,

Everyone needs a little life hack…especially if it can save you money. This article is an oldie but a goodie and still super relevant to uni students. Did you know you can buy both new and second hand books through booko? Click here for details.

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/03/how-to-buy-university-textbooks-in-australia-for-less/

The best way to use Booko & Bricko/Popz… a guide for clever people

Booko, Christmas, Community, Gifts, Top Tips, , , , ,

We’re not really ones to blow our own trumpet but you guys have been telling us that the best way to buy cheap books online is to search through Booko – we’re rapt, of course, and couldn’t agree more. Thousands of people a day are using Booko to find the best price for books and DVDs – and that’s just here in Australia, not even counting the other 22 countries we are in.

In its infancy, Booko was just a web page with a series of small programs collecting prices and calculating delivery costs for a handful of online book shops, to find the cheapest supplier of books. The overarching objective was to find both new and second-hand books online for the best price possible and when shops which offered free shipping could be added, it made the page even better.

Fast forward 10 years and we have people in 23 countries using Booko every day to find the best price for new and used books, DVDs and board games. To cater for our LEGO loving users, the family has grown to include Bricko, and Popz.deals for those collecting Pop! Vinyls.  That’s a lot of clever people finding lots of good prices. 

Here are the best ways to use Booko to make sure you remain one of those clever people. The same features are included on Bricko and Popz.deals. 

Create an account 

We treat data very seriously at Booko and want to give you ultimate control of all of your data too. Creating an account allows you to make wish lists, set price alerts and view your search history along with deleting said history, and disabling Booko from keeping track of your history altogether. Just so you know, we don’t actually use your history for anything at all; it’s housed just for your entertainment and reading pleasure.

We have tweaked the account function to give you more control. You can now export your data or delete your account and data altogether. Just click on the user icon in the top left of the screen when you have logged into Booko.

Make Lists

Once you have created an account, you can set up lists to keep track of the products you’re interested in. 

Want to know how much the 5 books you’re buying as Christmas presents will cost? Booko will take your list, find the shop that sells the whole lot for the best price and calculate shipping for the entire list.

What’s best is you can have multiple lists and even download and email them to people. There’s nothing like giving someone a nudge as to what they may like to buy you for your birthday, or Christmas…or ‘just because’.

The list feature allows you to check the prices for used books as well as new, if you wish. 

Set Price Alerts

Booko / Bricko / Popz has a price alert feature (which is a super handy set-and-forget tool) that emails you as soon as the price of a product falls below the current price, or a price specified by you.

To set an alert, you need to be logged into your account (because we need to know which email to send the notifications to). Just click the ‘Add an Alert’ button directly below the product image on the left side of the page. Nominate a price you are happy to pay, type in your email and the Alert is set. Now all you need to do is wait for the Good News email!

The alert function is really handy when you are shopping and have a little extra time up your sleeve (like getting on top of Christmas shopping early, or buying textbooks for courses next semester). You can have multiple alerts on a product, too. 

With our latest round of updates, you can also now specify a separate price alert for new and used books. This function is loved by many of the students that use Booko…because let’s be honest, not all courses ask for a brand new textbook…nor do they need one. Academic textbooks can be breathtakingly expensive – a single title can be over a hundred dollars, so imagine how much your entire reading list will cost! Booko is great for searching for specialist or academic texts. All you need to do is type a book’s ISBN into the main search box (this ensures you are searching for the correct edition) and away you go. Booko can find most books, whether they are e-Books, Reference books, Fiction or Non-Fiction. And since Booko can locate used copies, you may be able to save even more by buying second-hand!

If you fancy a little more detail have a look at this blog post.

Buy for friends and family overseas

If you want to purchase something as a gift, Booko has some clever functionality where you can purchase in the local currency and the gift gets shipped directly to the recipient…saving you on both gift wrapping and postage! 

Here’s what you do: Jump online to Booko / Bricko / Popz. In the top right hand corner, there will be a flag (it’s usually your local country flag). Click on this and all the countries that Booko works with will appear. Simply select the country that you want to send a book to and then keep using Booko the way you normally do. When you choose a different country, both the shipping charges and times are specific to that country (so it’s easy to make sure your gift will make it in time). 

Click here for a detailed How-To guide.

Finally, shopping clever means being one step ahead. Did you know we now have a newsletter? It’s super low volume and we don’t email you every week, or even every month, just when we have something exciting to share. You can click here to subscribe (oh and you can unsubscribe at any time, it’s okay we won’t bug you or make you feel guilty, we know inboxes can get a little overwhelming). 

You can also follow us on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

Enjoy!

Books for girls that don’t include unicorns, glitter and fairies.

Blog, Children, Fiction, Top Tips, , , ,

It’s a wonderful feeling when you see a child read a book from cover to cover by themselves and we know the best way to encourage this is to fill their bookshelves with fun and exciting books to read, but sometimes finding those books, especially titles that empower young girls, can be difficult…especially is she isn’t into unicorns, glitter and fairies!

It’s with this in mind that we have found a selection of our favourite titles for girls that are ready to dive into the world of books on their own…and there’s not a pink pony in sight!

 

Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls broke records as the most-funded original book in crowdfunding history, and has since become a bestseller in 30 languages. Challenging gender stereotypes, Good Night Stories profiles 100 women – scientists, athletes, politicians – who have contributed to public life. It further celebrates women by highlighting the work of the two authors and 60 illustrators, who produced this striking and colourful volume. Written in the style of fairytales, Good Night Stories is not just for bedtime or for girls – it is inspirational for all children. Adult readers can also enjoy it as a sampler offering ideas for further reading. Volume 2 is available here.

 

Heidi Hecklebeck 10 Book Collection by Wanda Coven

Heidi Heckelbeck has a special secret: she’s a witch! But that doesn’t mean she gets to skip school, so during her time at Brewster Elementary, she enjoys perfectly normal, day-to-day activities, just like any kid. Of course, when the occasion calls for it, she sometimes pulls out her Book of Spells to see if she can give things a little nudge. With fun stories, easy-to-read language, and engaging pictures, this early chapter book series is sure to be a hit.

 

Violet Makerel’s Outside the Box Set by Anna Branford

Violet Mackerel is a little girl with big ideas and a lot of theories! Whether she’s knitting an unusual project, digging for fossils, feeding ladybugs, or even getting her tonsils out, she has a theory for everything and a can-do, empathetic spirit that helps her turn theory into practice. This box set includes four of Violet’s outside-the-box stories, which are sure to be a hit with children who are ready for early, picture-heavy chapter books.

 

 

 

Amelia Bedelia 10 Book Box Set by Herman Parish

For years children have giggled at literal-minded Amelia Bedelia’s misunderstandings. Now, in this 10-book series, Amelia gets imagined as a young girl whose adventures with family and friends get thrown off by her little slips, whether she’s saving money for a bike, going on a road trip, or adding a four-legged furry family member. Fortunately, good-natured Amelia is always able to straighten things out in the end! The end of each book includes a “two ways to say it” section that provides a guide to the idioms in the story, so it’s a great option for building kids’ repertoire of sayings.

 

 

Lotta on Troublemaker Street  by Astrid Lindgren

Poor Lotta is having a very bad day. First, she wakes up mad because in her dream her older brother and sister were mean to her. Then, Mother expects her to wear a sweater that “scratches and tickles.” Madder than ever, Lotta decides to run away and find a new place to live. After all, everyone at her house is mean, so she won’t miss her family at all, or will she? Children will giggle as they recognise their own bad days in Lotta’s story. Written by Astrid Lindgren, the fabulous author of Pippi Longstocking, this book shows that there’s an exciting story lurking in even the most ordinary days.

 

 

 

 

 

Nancy Drew and The Clue Crew Collection by Carolyn Keene

For girls who aren’t quite ready for the original Nancy Drew books, Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew is the perfect solution. These early chapter books reimagine Nancy as an third grade student solving mysteries around her community. Children will love following along with the mysteries and trying to put together the clues with Nancy, George, and Bess.

 

Enjoy!

Re-engaging with the classics

Blog, Children, Fiction, Top Books, Top Tips, , , , ,

Literary classics have a bit of a PR problem – while they have stood the test of time because of their brilliant plotting, excellent writing and timeless messages, their longevity can also mean archaic language and a fusty image.  If you love the classics, but don’t know how to introduce them to your young readers, Booko can show you how.  Here are classic literature ideas for young readers – from babies all the way to young adults.

1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up edited by Julia Eccleshare

Everyone loves a list, and this one is great fun to browse as well as a fantastic reference.   These 1001 titles have been chosen by Julia Eccleshare, a writer, reviewer and editor who has worked with children’s literature for almost 40 years.  It’s a good overview of the best children’s books from across the ages and around the world, including translated titles.  The books are grouped by reading age, and there are reviews of favourite books written by beloved authors including Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Philip Pullman.  Leave this book lying around and everyone will want a turn flicking through.  For those with teen readers, pair it with it’s grown-up cousin, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited by Peter Boxall.

Little Miss Shelley: Frankenstein – an Anatomy Primer by Jennifer Adams

The super-cute BabyLit series enables discerning parents to introduce babies to their favourite literary characters! The sturdy board book format is perfect for little hands (and mouths); the artwork is stylish, colourful and fun; and each title matches a classic story to a related concept.  The latest titles include Frankenstein (about anatomy) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (about fairies). There’s also Jane Eyre  (counting), Jungle Book  (animals) and many more.

 

The Oxford Treasury of Fairy Tales retold by Geraldine McCaughrean

The Oxford Treasury of Fairy Tales is a classic example of a book gift that can be enjoyed for years to come.  It is a bumper edition of twenty stories, ranging from Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, to The Dancing Princesses and Tamlin.   Pastel illustrations in jewel tones add a vibrant yet dreamy quality. These beloved stories have been retold in hypnotic, poetic language by the award-winning Geraldine McCaughrean – her style makes these stories seem ancient and fresh all at once.  If myths and legends are more your style, Geraldine McCaughrean has also done excellent retellings of Greek Myths and Roman Myths, with illustrations by Emma Chichester-Clark.

Kristy’s Great Idea by Ann M. Martin and Raina Telgemeier

Add a superstar comic artist to a beloved series and you get a modern classic ready to engage with new (and old) readers. Raina Telgemeier has amply demonstrated her ability to depict tween/teen relationships in bestselling graphic novels such as Smile and Sisters; The Baby-Sitters Club was a hugely-successful series, now celebrated for its girl-power message and its efforts in highlighting issues such as divorce, chronic illness and racism.  This full-colour graphic novel edition of Kristy’s Great Idea is gorgeous to look at, and introduces readers to how the series begins.  Books 1-4 are also available as a box set, while the original novels have also been republished.

 

Burning Maze (The Trials fo Apollo Book 3) by Rick Riordan

Burning Maze is the latest instalment in the Trials of Apollo series, where Apollo finds himself stranded in the body of a teenage New Yorker, as punishment for angering his father Zeus.   To return to Olympus, Apollo has to complete five impossible tasks – without access to his godly powers.  In Burning Maze, it’s two down, three to go.  Rick Riordan has won many fans with his action-packed adventures firmly rooted in Greek / Roman / Egyptian / Norse mythologies. Not only does he achieve the seamless blending of modern fantasy with ancient mythology, he has also updated the deities in witty ways.  For other modern updates for middle-grade readers, try Four Children and It by Jacqueline Wilson.

 

 

Hamlet by John Marsden

The challenge in making Classics appeal to teens is how to minimise the daunting reputation of the historical language while letting their gripping plots – full of love, grief, angst – shine.  The solution (particularly for Shakespeare’s works) lies in re-imagining these stories in vivid, modern prose.  While John Marsden’s terrific version of Hamlet stays close to the original, he views Hamlet as a teenager – young, vulnerable and relatable.  Other retellings give fresh perspectives through the eyes of a different / minor character – such as I am Juliet by Jackie French, Ophelia by Lisa Klein, or The Secret Diary of Lydia Bennet by Natasha Farrant.