eBooks - (A subset of List Building)

So, you wondered why I didn’t try to sell all the valuable
information in this eBook, did you? The fact is that eBooks
almost can’t be sold anymore, because every marketer and
their uncle has penned at least one eBook lately and given it away!
Why would we do this? Well, it’s the same principle as Article Marketing, except
that it builds more brand recognition and is much more dynamic. For instance,
you’ve probably noticed an affiliate link or two throughout this PDF document.
Some authors write these eBook just as a way to spread their Affiliate links
alone. Some even pay a team of ghost-writers to crank out a bunch of eBooks for
them to do just that, on a larger scale!
The most common use of eBooks nowadays and one that still works wonderfully
for most niches outside of Internet Marketers is offering a free eBook in
exchange for your visitor’s eMail address. Like eBay, it’s a great source of
targeted traffic. That’s it - you basically just bribe people to get on your list.
There’s nothing wrong with this tactic, it works. It’s not like you’re misleading
anyone, either. Most of them came to your site to find more information, and
probably would have signed up for your newsletter anyway just to find what they
were looking for.
The third and lesser-known, but more effective method of using eBooks, comes
from combining them with Viral Marketing… Such as the product you are reading
right now.
Unless you got an advanced copy of this eBook, many of the Affiliate links you
saw here weren’t my own. My primary objective when writing this eBook was to
get visitors to my website and build up brand recognition for Surefire Success…
Keeping control of all the affiliate links in it would have been a nice stream of
income for me, but the book would not likely have gotten into your hands, as I
wouldn’t be offering an incentive to other marketers to pass this around. I explain
this tactic more in depth under “Viral Marketing.”
An obvious drawback is that it can be slow to get going. However, it doesn’t have
to be. If your book is really good and offers a great incentive, (like I hope this one
does) then more and more affiliates will send it out, and technically you could
build up a huge list in no time that way.
Using JV Partners (see “Joint Ventures”) is a great way to launch your eBook for
that purpose. If you can offer it to a bunch of big-list owners to send out to their
lists, their main incentive will be the revenue from your affiliate links in the
document they send.
Also, don’t be discouraged at all from making an ebook because it seems hard to
write or compile one. I understand that most people don’t have a PDF writer
software, so they think that making an eBook will cost them money or even be
something difficult to learn. –Nothing could be further from the truth though!
PDFs are so well integrated into the business world now, that there are dozens of
ways to make your MS-Word document into a PDF document, and it will look and
work just as good as it would if you composed it with expensive Adobe software.
I even made a film showing you just how to do it:
How to Convert an MS Word Doc Into a PDF for Free
I hope that helps… Now all you have to do is start writing.