Free Books

Marketing Your First E-Book With No Budget

How do you market your work?

You write a book.

You take a sample chapter or an article and submits this information to top web sites that may be interested in the your subject area.

Offering content for web visitors greatly enhances the value of the already popular web sites. Almost all of the web site content managers will jump for the opportunity to give their web visitors more reasons to come back to their web sites.

The sample chapters and articles are given in exchange for links back to your web site.

If you can propose just four or five new article postings each day for just five days per week, you can achieve tremendous success in selling your e-books.

This is a great technique used by authors that have to work a regular job for a living. The authors can create and deliver their proposals by e-mail. They don't have to make business contacts during working hours. By working just a few hours each night and on weekends, each author can drive thousands of readers to his own web site within just a few months.

Once the article is posted to a web site it will stay in a particular location for a while and then will be "archived" for new subscribers to read later on.

The article will include links back to the author's web site and will be referenced by major search engines.

This gives you a major boost in popularity.

A great benefit of this type of selling is the fact that no words are spoken. No sales skills are needed.

If the e-book is prices at only $10 per book and each contact for the month sells one book per contact, you will sell over $1000 in volume the very first month of book selling!

You will receive up to 100% of the sales totals based on the arrangements made with the web site owners.

For this example let us assume that you earn $500 clear profit for the first month of selling e-books.

How much did you have to spend in marketing the e-book?

Zero!

You did not have to make banners, bookmarks or other marketing materials.

You did not have to make a single phone call.

In the second month, if you execute the same marketing strategy, another 100 e-book sellers or book referring web sites will be added to your sales force.

Again, if each e-book publisher only sells one book, you have $500 plus another $500 from the original web sites that are selling or referring your book from their archived web locations.

If you keep up this pace and the book selling web sites are only sending one new book buyer each month, you will keep $39,000 the first year.

If you add a second book, the total could be $78,000 or more.

Also, remember you will receive around 100% of what is selling from your web site.

We are not factoring in you working more than two or three hours per day. We are not factoring in the fact that you can set up an affiliate program like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble and bring potentially thousands of potential book-sellers to link over to your web site and send you business.

The example is based on each of your web site content contacts. Each of the contacts has your sample chapter or article sending you just one customer each month!

You are adding hundreds of sales people each month that are working 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. There are no product or territory restrictions.

You may wish to go back and send each contact two or three articles thus doubling or tripling your e-book sales.

You still haven't spent any money!

Show this model to insurance sales professionals.

Watch how huge their eyes become when they listen to your e-book-marketing plan!

How else can I market my e-book without spending any money?

1. Affiliate programs are great. Rather than marketing your personal web site you get others to market for you. Each time an affiliate send someone to your site and they buy your e-book the affiliate earns a commission on the sale. You set the commission rate and you decide how often you pay the commissions.
2. Contact discussion lists on the Internet and offer a free chapter of your e-book to the list manager. Copy and paste the sample chapter of your e-book and send this to the list manager. This is an effective technique I personally learned from Angela Adair-Hoy the author of How to Write, Publish and Sell e-books. (Buy it, Angela has great information) You can find the URLs of the discussion lists in Chapter Seven of this book.
3. Conduct a search on Yahoo, the famous search directory. Look up the topic area of your e-book. Put yourself in your reader's shoes. What kind of information would they be looking for that your book is a perfect fit?
1. For example, if you have written a Southwestern Style Cookbook, who would be interested? Would people that are vacationing to Arizona or New Mexico be interested in southwestern style cooking? These people may be interested in Cowboy Poetry, or travel information.
2. Lets assume they enter search words like, cooking then Arizona or New Mexico. Your job is to search using the same words. Take the first 10 search returns and send an offer to the webmasters at each web site. Offer to send the webmasters free articles or free chapters that will be posted on the web sites. Top web sites usually offer free content to their visitors. In exchange for posting your free chapter, tell the webmasters you will provide content with the consideration that you receive a bi-line that tells webs visitors where they can purchase your e-books. Most webmasters will respond favorably to your offer.
4. Look up e-zines that fit your e-book genre. An e-zine is a newsletter that all the great web sites offer to their visitors. E-zine editors are ALWAYS looking for articles.
5. E-mail a proposal to the e-zine editor and offer to submit an article or free chapter of your e-book.
6. You may even offer the e-zine editor non-exclusive serial rights to post a chapter for each issue in exchange for an advertisement in the e-zine.
7. You will offer the free information in exchange for links to your e-book store or your unique e-book Internet URL.
8. Contact your local newspaper and give them a similar offer.
9. Contact the editors of association newsletters that focus on your subject area. Make the newsletter editors the same offer. Association members have computers. They have the ability to purchase and read your e-books.
10. Ask about speaking to the group on your topic. In exchange for speaking have handouts ready that include complete ordering instructions on how each member can order your e-book from your web site or other e-book order fulfilling web sites.
11. Offer to teach a class based on your e-book at a community college. Make your e-book the required textbook. Print it out and put it into a binder. Set a price and get it into the college bookstore.
1. Read everything you can on marketing books and e-books over the Internet. Create a marketing plan and do at least 3 e-book marketing activities each day.
1. Always believe in yourself. Your efforts will pay off with persistence. As you talk to other people about your newly published e-book, your friends, co-workers and relatives will give you valuable insights on other free e-book selling opportunities.

Raymond Laubert is the owner of several web-based businesses including Home Based Business Library and RD-Webhosting. Ray’s business focus is on providing home based business owners with the information and support they need to succeed on the web. To that end he is installing a home based business library membership site that will have over 1000 articles in text and pdf formats covering a wide range of topics and lots of software available to help the home based business owner. The library will be online soon and it’s launch will be announced in his Home Based Business Newsletter.