Free Books

eBooks, a Cornerstone of Marketing Success

The arena of eBook (electronic book) publishing, actually of electronic publishing in general is a booming one. The market is ever expanding and the number of new products being introduced is increasing at an exponential rate. Electronic books are also becoming more accepted and understood. This means that the market is maturing and potential purchasers are far less wary than they were of such 'virtual' products. After all, you can download an electronic book to your hard drive, save it to a DVD or CD for safe keeping you can even up-load to your phone or PDA or you can (horror of horrors), print it out on paper at home.

This acceptance of electronic media by end users is what's driving the boom i eBook publishing and sales.

So, how do you get yourself a slice of this lucrative (and growing) market?

There are two main ways here. Firstly you can create your own document. This means researching a market area, writing your ideas into your favourite text-editing application and then turning that document into an electronic book of some form. It can be as easy as writing everything in MS Word and then exporting or saving your final document in PDF format. PDF stands for 'Portable Document Format' and is a standard originated by Adobe corporation for the free exchange of documents over the internet. As long as you have Adobe's free 'Adobe Reader' software on your system you can read PDF documents. PDFs also allow you to lock your documents so that they are still readable but the content cannot be copied or altered in any way without a password or permission. Very important if you want to protect your intellectual property rights.

If you are more serious about creating electronic documents then you may want to splash-out on professional quality page layout applications such as Quark Express or Adobe's In Design. These are expensive but they are worth it in terms of how the final document behaves and feels. These are the applications to go for if you want a truly professional look and feel for your final product.

Once you have your document written and exported in PDF format then you have a real product that you can sell or give away... Give away? I hear you ask in horror. Yes, give away... Remember you're in the area of internet marketing now and you've probably heard of something called 'Viral Marketing'. Here you embed links to your products and sites within the electronic document you've just generated. You then give away the eBook to subscribers to your newsletter, for example or you give it away to site that allow cheap or free eBook downloads. This way the information about your site and products is disseminated through the document you've just written. This is a very cheap form of advertising that can be very effective.

If you have written a large eBook, possibly a novel, an analysis of a marketing area, a recipe book construction manual or any kind of document that you think has a large and lucrative market then you will want to think about selling this product of yours for a profit. You can obviously create a 'splash page' on your website and place sales copy there. But if no-one knows about the product you're attempting to sell your sales will be disappointing at best. This is where certain eBook sales sites can help. Many of these sites offer free advertising on their sites. Usually for the cost of a link to the site you can upload information about your electronic product as well as a link back to your sales page. This means that your eBook gets seen by people who are looking for such products and you get a link back to your site (always good for Google ranking). Of course you will still need to market your product by the usual methods such as PPC advertising.

Many eBook sales sites also allow you to upload your product to their sites. They either ask for an insertion fee or they ask for a profit sharing system where part of the proceeds from any sale made on their site goes to them and part goes to you (some ask for both). This can bee good for you as these large sites have more advertising muscle than you do.

But what if you think that your product is truly golden? Is there any way to have your cake and eat it? Well, one possibility is to set-up your own store selling electronic products. There are many scripts and cheap versions of such stores available on the internet and the best of these can have your up and running within a few minutes. For the most part these are database-driven sites that allow you to add hundreds of eBooks, information products and software products to your site (you can obtain such products cheaply on the internet or eBay, look for 'private label rihts' or 'resell rights' products). As well as adding your own products and services to the store you can PLR and resell rights products available from the web. You can also buy eBooks and products with full resale rights from various other electronic product repositories. Buying on eBay can also be used to cheaply to fill your store. Remember you only need to buy a product once, but you can sell it many times. This way you keep 100% of your profits and you have a residual income from all the other products that you're selling.

Even if you're not into the production and dissemination of information/software-based production the setting-up a small store on your website (even if you're almost give away your products) remains a good way of gaining a residual income for yourself. After all it's one more connection in your 'multiple streams of income' marketing strategy and anything that gives you an additional income (especially at low cost) is very welcome in this arena.