It may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the best marketing tactics out there is actually to give your hard earned work away. This makes more sense once you look at all of internet marketing, by blogging I am giving away my knowledge free of charge in hopes that people buy stuff from my 7 advertising blocks, and with an ebook the story is much the same.
Giving away an ebook works great for three main reasons, the most important of which is that it can be used to gain opt-in subscribers. The next most important is that it can also be used as a tool to gain a few affiliate sales, when I write an ebook I typically inject in a few affiliate links so I can make a couple bucks off it. Lastly, I use ebooks as a way to show others that I am an authority within my own niche, which happens to be internet marketing (probably the best niche to write ebooks for). Due to this combination of factors, writing ebooks is extremely profitable especially when done correctly.
So why exactly do I need to give away an ebook in order to see these benefits? Well, you don’t necessarily, I have my own ClickBank ebook (you can see the advertisement for “The Seven Day Millionaire” to your right), but that doesn’t stop me from writing less in-depth ebooks to give out as well. The main reason for giving it away is quite simply because you will make more money as a result of people reading your content then you would if you were to sell your product. When I write a 10 page ebook, I am mostly trying to get people to join an automated follow-up series of emails with an occassional broadcast tossed in.
If you read my recent post about how “the money is in the list” you would be aware that there is a great deal
of money to be made by gaining opt-in subscribers through an autoresponder such as Aweber. I have done it in the past with other websites, and the reason why I have decided to write this post is that I am at it again. This time I have started writing an ebook on creating a blog, from the web hosting aspects to gaining traffic and links and monetizing it correctly. The tentative title is “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”, for which I spent a couple minutes throwing together a quick image in Photoshop (I’m not an artist, but it works well enough for me). I am hoping to finish writing it within 2 weeks and make it easily accessible from this website.
Actually creating an ebook is quite easy (excluding the content), I would recommend downloading Open Office and simply writing out your content in their equivalent to Microsoft Word. In my opinion, Open Office Writer is a superior product to Word, and another great thing about it is that it allows you to convert your documents into a .PDF format with a click of a button, rather than paying a couple hundred dollars to do so with Adobe Professional. Another Adobe product, Photoshop, is more or less essential for creating the graphics unless you want to pay out a good deal of money to a designer or for over priced software. A little graphics skills will allow you to make a decent looking ebook relatively quickly.
As for the format of the ebook, I typically follow the format below:
- Title
- License (in which I allow people to redistribute my book, but not to modify it)
- Table of Contents
- Content
- Resource Section (important as this is how you make money off affiliate links)
Once you take these steps, simply stick your new ebook up on a couple forums in your signatures, threads, etc. as well as putting it prominently on your blog and you are all set to make money while increasing your reputation. Go get them you esteemed author, you!
I was tempted to give my latest ebook away. In the end I decided to sell it at a low price. If it goes wrong and I don’t make any sales I guess I can give it away at a later date.