Internet Marketing Hints And Tips » E-book

Six Ideas for Viral Marketing

Gary Knox — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:31:32 +0000

Here are six ideas that can be used to assist you in commencing your viral marketing campaign:

Buy the branding rights to a viral E-book. Permit people to give away your free E-book to their visitors. Then, their visitors will likewise give it away. This will just continue to circulate your ad all across the Internet.
If you have the ability to establish a forum or other bulletin board, you truly have an outstanding tool. Allow people to utilise your online discussion board for their own website. Some people do not have one. Just ensure that your banner advert is displayed at the top of the board.
Do you have a knack for web design? Produce some templates, graphics, etc. and upload them to your site. Then, permit people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Simply include your advert on them or require people to link directly to your web site. Make certain that you include a link back to your web site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice in tact.
Publish an E-book. Provide for people to place an advert in your free E-book if, in exchange, they give away the E-book to their web visitors or E-zine subscribers.
Compose articles that relate to your product or service. Allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zine, newsletter, magazine or E-books. Ensure that your resource box is displayed at the bottom of each article. The resource box should include a link to your website as well as details of the reprint options.
You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license permitting you to distribute the product for free to other people. Search for those products that provide “branding rights”. That is where you are able to include your own name, website, and contact information.

If you follow through with any of the above tips you are almost certain to see an increase in your client base.

Should you give your mini e-book away?

Gary Knox — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:11:34 +0000

There is a lot of discussion in the mini e-book niche marketing community about whether to give mini e-books away for free. Many say this leads people to believe they are of low or no value, and to overlook the information – others say its a great way to build trust, your list, and your reputation as a guru.

A great example of the latter school of thought is Jimmy D Brown – he’s built his reputation and empire in the fact that he gives away e-books, which, he says, leads to a higher yield in sales, more significant profits and of course, more sign ups. These sign ups are already interested in what he’s got to say, and know what quality his information actually is, so they are more inclined to purchase from him again.

So the value of mini e-books is not ‘free’ in fact, it saves YOU money, by bringing in lots of pre qualified leads that want to know more about the niche you are promoting and working in. Which, in turn should lead to more sales for you.

Having said that, there are certain things that you must do – simply placing an e-book out there for free does not guarantee viral traffic.

There are two very important aspects to giving away a mini e-book that you have to consider – you have to find partners to either promote or help you give your product away, and you have to have a solid ‘capture’ page for any leads that download your e-book, and a means of delivering the product after they’ve signed up. By ensuring your mechanisms and promotional avenues are strong and operational, any mini e-book you give away will eventually bring sales straight back to your door.

How to make your ebook “user friendly”

Gary Knox — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:00:21 +0000

Here is the third part of the series on how to write an e-book. Enjoy!

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging. Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photo, graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning the pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible information, and they break up the density of the page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone. Reader’s respond to the feeling that you are having a conversation with them. Break up the length and structure of your sentences so you do not hypnotize your readers to sleep. Sentences that are all the same length and structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a day. Read books and magazines about the process of writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The art of writing is a lifetime process; the more you write (and read), the better your writing will become. The better your writing becomes, the bigger your sales figures.

In an ebook that is read on the screen, be aware that you must give your reader’s eye a break. You can do this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white space is usually referred to as “negative space.” Reader’s eyes need to rest in the cool white oasises you create on your page. If your page is too dense, your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes begin to tear.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that’s easy on the eyes, and stick to that font family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your readers out before they’ve gotten past your introduction. Use at least one and a half line spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on the screen, but small enough so that the whole page can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to experiment with this to find the right combination.

Of course, don’t forget to run a spell and grammar check. You are judged by something as minor as correct punctuation, so don’t mess up a great book by tossing out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences together with commas. (By the way, that’s called a “comma splice.”)

Last of all, create an index and a bibliography. That’s it! You’ve written a book! Now all you have to do is publish your ebook online, and wait for download request from your website visitors.

After You Have Written Your E-Book

Gary Knox — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:06:41 +0000

Getting your ebook out is going to be your focus once you’ve finished writing it, just as it is with print books. People will hesitate to buy any book from an author they’ve never heard of. Wouldn’t you?

The answer is simple: give it away! You will see profits in the form of promoting your own business and getting your name out. You will find affiliates who will ask you to place their links within your ebook, and these affiliates will in turn go out and make your name known. Almost every single famous ebook author has started out this way.

Another powerful tool to attract people to your ebook is to make it interactive. Invent something for them to do within the book rather than just producing pages that contain static text. Let your readers fill out questionnaires, forms, even crossword puzzles geared to testing their knowledge on a particular subject. Have your readers hit a link that will allow them to recommend your book to their friends and associates. Or include an actual order form so at the end of their reading journey, they can eagerly buy your product.

When people interact with books, they become a part of the world of that book. The fact is just as true for books in print as it is for ebooks.

That’s why ebooks are so essential. Not only do they provide a forum for people to learn and make sense of their own thoughts, but they can also serve to promote your business at the same time.

Hiring Ghostwriters To Write Your E-Book

Gary Knox — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:05:01 +0000

Ghostwriters are a great option when you’ve got multiple projects on, or you simply don’t enjoy writing much. You can simply give them an outline, notes, or a complete template to your hired ghostwriter or ghostwriters, and then await your finished product. It may need light editing to get it to a ‘perfect’ state, but professional ghostwriters, though possibly expensive, can add another professional element to your projects.

Before you hire a ghostwriter or ghostwriters, you’ll need to find some sites to submit your briefs to, and gather bids – or find a ghostwriter that’s worked with someone you trust. Word of mouth recommendations are infinitely less risky, but without knowing that a book is actually ghost written, you may never actually find out which books are ghost written, which makes gathering recommendations for ghostwriters tricky.

The other method – gathering bids on sites, requires that you use freelance bidding sites, such as guru.com, getafreelancer.com or e-lance.com. You’ll need to have a detailed and open project outline to submit to these sites, giving details of what you need, and what time frame you have. These sites allow you to set a budget, but one problem you may encounter is that not every freelancer you hire through these sites are particularly professional or will stick to their bids.

Such issues range from uppping the cost of their bid, to using ‘borrowed’ content, or plagurising from other sources, or even reselling your project to others – so you’ll need to make it explicitly clear what you expect of your freelance ghostwriters.

Its a good idea to take advantage of any escrow service these sites use, or find another site that offers this service – most freelancing sites also offer a ratings system, where you can check your prospective freelancers ratings and past work quality – which may also give you the opportunity to choose between bids.

Hiring ghostwriters to create e-books is relatively straightforward, as long as you take care to lay out your goals and needs clearly.

Three Steps to Find “Freebies” to Add to Your E-book

Gary Knox — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:06:03 +0000

Those of us who on a regular basis shop on line are acquainted with the array of free gifts, free bonuses and just plain freebies that are offered to a visitor to a website to encourage them to purchase a product or service. How could you collect, select and offer free gifts, which will be valued as much as the original merchandise that is being purchased, put these gifts together and add them to your E-book?

There are just three steps to do that very thing. They are:

1. Identify your key words in each chapter of your E-book. Now, type those words into your favorite search engine. You are looking for free E-books on the same subject in more depth, by a greater expert than you are, or by someone who gives a new and fresh angle to the topic. Add a link to the free E-book in each chapter of your E-book.

2. Research the Internet for related free gifts. Now you are looking for things that you could give as free gifts in your E-book that will make it more appealing and give it more pass-along appeal to your readers. For instance: If you are selling gardening supplies, find a planting guide on the web that can be downloaded and include that as a gift in your E-book.

3. Download the freebies. Visit the freebies pages on those web sites. Most sites have freebies and encourage you to distribute them.

Give your reader the best that you can offer. Give them your book, additional reading material and free gifts to boot. Everybody loves a bargain!

Start Viral Marketing Campaigns Using E-books

Gary Knox — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:25:59 +0000

Viral Marketing sounds as though it is something bad but it is actually something very good. What it is, is a very powerful method to of generating traffic to your website.

Just think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get ill and share their germs with everybody they know and the next thing anyone knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to propagate your marketing message around because they want to.

Now let us look at employing an E-book to begin your viral marketing campaign. First you produce an E-book… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and lets say that you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

Before you know it the E-book is spreading across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free E-book.

Make sure that you let people know that they have your permission to forward the E-book around the Internet. When you create the E-book, you have the right to give people certain rights. Among those rights could be that you permit them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away.

You can either write the E-book yourself, use private label content or you could hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are many ways to create an E-book. Once you have your E-book written, use software to create your E-book.

Have Your Own Voice Through Creating Special Reports

Gary Knox — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:49:59 +0000

You are in all likelihood looking for additional revenue streams to keep your business solid and secure in this contracting economy and unsettled world. Creating specialised content for sale is one of the fastest, most reliable methods of earning extra income fast. Publishing a “white paper” or a special report, is a great way to set yourself up as an expert in your field or niche, and share valuable information with your prospects.

You may already have most of the elements for an e-book or special report in your files or archives. Ascertain which ingredients make customers willing to pay you for material available from other sources, and what elements you should include in your marketing copy to spark their interest in purchasing now.

Here are the steps to take when writing your special report:

Have your end goal in mind before you begin.
Do you want to discover a way to increase sales, whilst reducing your cost to acquire those sales?
Who are you attempting to impress and what is important to them?
What distribution method will be best?
How many people do you want to impact with this report?
Make certain the layout of your special report looks pleasing, and is very easy to read.
Bear in mind that it is essentially salesmanship in print.
Keep your facts accurate, very brief and pertinent. The more compact your information, the more valuable and more likely to hold the interest of your reader.
Compose an attention getting headline. 95% of your readers will decide if they will read your special report based entirely on your headline, so make it great and make it benefit driven.

Get it on the web. When emailing others, include your white paper URL in your signature line of your Email or include the URL when promoting your special report on Email discussion lists.

What an E-book Can Do for You

Gary Knox — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:53:26 +0000

An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the dispersion of your message by willing participants.

This was the fundamental principle that was employed by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends promoted the free email site.

Utilising viral E-books as a marketing method is inexpensive. It does not take long to establish and it is even quicker if you use rebrandable E-books that have been scripted by others. Simply use your favourite search engine and do a web search. You will find several rebrandable E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business. One process of dispensing the E-book is to offer it to visitors of your website in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family it will promote your business for you.

E-books are capable of achieving a large audience and are limited only by the enthusiasm of the participants.

E-books are reasonably easy to produce. It is possible to produce your own E-books by combining articles that you have written or have acquired from public domain sources, such as directories.

A common approach is to employ material that has Private Label Rights, including articles and reports that have been written specifically for that purpose, for the particular niche that interests you. Employing a portion of a larger work that you have prepared such as the first few chapters of a large E-book could also be used as a viral E-book. This serves not only to provide some basic information but also to pique the interest of the reader about the rest of the book.