When was the last time you sat down and read an honest-to-goodness business book?

Not the ebook-of-the-week, promising to reveal the "real" secret behind Guru X's success, but a book about running a "real" business?

It's easy to get caught up in all the latest ebooks and other internet marketing products, but the fact is there are hundreds, probably thousands of books that will give you real information about how to run a business instead of tricks that may or may not work past next week.

I try to read at least 3 or 4 books every month so I'm going to start a semi-regular feature on the blog - the book of the week (or month, depending on how hectic my schedule gets!)

This week, the book I'm going to recommend is Influence by Robert Cialdini.

This book gets into the psychology behind why people do the things they do, with all kinds of interesting case studies from the real world.

If you've studied internet business to any degree, some of what's in Influence may sound familiar.

For example, the term "social proof" has been getting used a lot in internet marketing circles lately. This is one of the things that Cialdini covers in his book, in much greater detail than anything I've seen in the IM world.

Influence isn't written specifically for marketers, but there are a lot of great lessons that we can use to improve our marketing results.

Whether you sell your own products, promote affiliate offers or even just create Adsense sites, the information in this book can make a huge difference in the results you're getting.

And best of all? It's less than $13 on Amazon at the time I write this. When was the last time you bought an ebook for less than $15 that had some really valuable information in it?