Free Viral Ebooks as a Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re new to the idea of free viral ebooks, viral marketing or to ebook publishing, this is definitely a combination of two powerful forces on the Internet that can help you generate a sizable income for yourself without having to do much effort. Let’s look at both components and how they can combine to be one of the best tactics available to generate a steady cash flow.

What is Viral Marketing?

Basically, viral marketing is the passage of a message from one person to another and so on until that message has reached thousands or even millions of people. You could think of it as comparable to a great word of mouth campaign offline, for example. The idea is to create a desirable marketing message that people will find interesting enough to share with others. That’s the trick to the whole process. Then as the message is shared you are gaining greater exposure and more potential customers. Plus, you don’t have to pay anything for viral marketing except for some initial launching costs to get the message to those first people. After that, the message spreads on its own out of your control.

How Ebook Publishing & Viral Marketing Combine

The combination of these two forces creates the idea of free viral ebooks. These are ebooks you create and offer for free to people. The ebooks are then passed around among different people via email. While the idea of free ebooks being distributed to potentially millions of people may seem like lost income, the reality is the ebook is going to contain the important marketing message you want to send to others.

Adding the Marketing Message

When you are going to be creating free viral ebooks, you need to incorporate the marketing message into the content. And you don’t necessarily need to be subtle. However, you should realize that simply adding a link to your site at the bottom of every page isn’t going to be sufficient. You’ll need to incorporate those links into the content and choose specific links to particular pages of your site that will be the most helpful to your readers or the most likely to turn them into customers.

Because the books are going to be read on the user's computer, the links can be clicked on while they are reading and can bring them right to the page on your site where you wanted to take them. For example, if you sell scrapbooking supplies your ebook might be an introduction to the materials one needs for a scrapbook. In each chapter, you might include a link back to the page on your site that shows the products you’ve been discussing. That improves the chances that the reader is going to purchase the supplies from you or, at the very least, is going to pay a visit to your site.

Other Ways of Spreading the Message

If you’re looking for another way to earn money via free viral ebooks, there is another approach that can be effective in ebook publishing for some topics. Basically, you create an ebook on a desirable topic then sell link space in the ebook to advertisers. You handle the distribution of the ebook to readers and receive a payment either based on a flat upfront advertising rate or a price per books downloaded.

A good example of how this can work is with a wedding planning ebook. Think about all of the different aspects of wedding planning that would need to be covered and you can get a pretty good idea of what types of chapters you might have. You could then sell space to vendors who sell dresses, wedding favors, flowers, stationery, etc. Their links would be placed in the appropriate sections of the book where they could be accessed by a highly targeted audience. The benefits of this approach for the vendors should be clear.

You can also benefit because of the income you can generate by selling the link space. Plus, there’s no reason not to provide links back to your own site or to require downloaders to provide their email addresses or other contact information before gaining access to the free book. That means you can be gathering information on a targeted audience which can be used effectively for future marketing measures while you are simultaneously earning money from vendors who want to reach that specific audience.

The one drawback to this method of ebook publishing is that it won’t work with every topic.

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