Viral Marketing Tips: Ebooks

by Richard Lowe, Jr.

A great way to promote your site is to produce an electronic book. This viral marketing technique is actually very clever. You produce the book, then allow others to distribute it without charging them anything from their own sites and ezines.

So how does this work? Well, you gather together between 10 and 20 articles. Less than 10 articles is not really enough of an ebook to attract much attention, and more than 20 makes for a large download. Remember to include enough material to make an interesting book, but not so much that those people with modems cannot download it in a few minutes.

Before you can actually create your ebook, you must decide upon the format that you want to use. Personally, I prefer Adobe Acrobat for the following reasons:

- The reader is free of charge

- It is installed on a vast number of systems

- The reader is available for Windows and MacIntosh systems alike

- It is an accepted format among the user community

However, the Acrobat writer product is a bit expensive (around $200) so you may not want to purchase a copy just to create an ebook. Fortunately, the PDF file format is open standard, so other products exist which will create documents which can be read by the Adobe Acrobat reader. One of the better products is called Easy PDF, which is available for around thirty bucks.

Adobe Acrobat - http://www.internet-tips.net/Products/adobeacrobat.htm
Easy PDF - http://www.internet-tips.net/Products/easypdf.htm

Something to remember - you don't need to write all of the articles yourself. You can find suitable articles available for reprint all over the web. In fact, there are many articles available on this web site which you can use if you want. Just remember, if you use someone else's articles, follow their request for a return link (or links) and a couple of lines about their site (this is called a resource box).

Free Articles For your Web Site -
http://www.internet-tips.net/Sticky/freearticles.htm

There are also many great places to look for ideas for your articles. Just remember that there is content all over the place - use it to your advantage. Also, remember to stay ethical and honor copyrights at all times.

Writing For The Web
http://www.internet-tips.net/Sticky/writingforweb1.htm
More Places to get Ideas
http://www.internet-tips.net/Sticky/writingforweb2.htm

Okay so you've decided on your format and you've got some articles. So put together a nicely formatted ebook with a table of contents. Be sure and include hyperlinks to your web site all over - at least one per page. Also, you can include brief advertisements, links to join your newsletter and all kinds of other things. It's your ebook - do what you want.

However, remember what you are doing is creating something that you want people to put up on their web sites, send to their friends and recommend to everyone. Thus, while you want to promote your stuff, be sure it's valuable enough that people really want it. People don't recommend advertisements - they recommend content.

Now what? Advertise the heck out of your new ebook. Post it on your web site, promote it in your ezine and add a link to your email signature. You can sell it if you want - or you can just give it away.

Be sure and give everyone permission to post it, send it, copy it and sell it as much as they want. In fact, you would be wise to make the first page totally explain what you are up to. Tell people what they can do with the ebook, don't make it a secret.

Give it some time (assuming you've created a worthy ebook) and you may find it spread all over the internet. And each and every copy will have your links, your ads and your site mentioned. That can add up to a lot of traffic - for free.