Viral marketing, when done correctly, can produce very good results. These results can be in the form of site traffic, subscribers to your mailing list, or increased sales of your products and services.
One of the best ways to utilise a viral marketing strategy is the production of viral e-books. This is not just an ordinary e-book. These are books that can be freely passed on by someone to another person with added benefits to both parties, when these benefits are considerable, your e-book can spawn through-out the internet at an unreal rate of knots.
How does it work with viral e-books?
Aside from having an interesting topic and a wealth of information, the main purpose of the viral e-book is for containing links to the site and products the author is promoting. These links can be modified from one person to another by changing the affiliate ID in the link. These links still lead to the web site of the author but credit will also be given to the affiliate which is like a commission.
The author can allow rebranding rights of the e-book to its readers. That means the reader, who would also want to earn from the e-book by becoming an affiliate, can replace the links with his own affiliate code to earn commissions. With this incentive or reward, he will surely pass the book to more and more people. That's where the ultimate viral explosion begins.
To be able to maximize the purpose of producing the viral e-book, have an explosion of traffic and have huge numbers of subscribers, you must have the following factors in place.
- Wide distribution. There are several ways on how you can offer your e-book. You can offer it for free or for a minimal amount. If you allow rebranding, you can also charge for it and have options such as full customization or just part customization rights. Resale rights can also be offered for a certain fee.
However, if a certain amount is tagged to your e-book, its spread will be limited as not everyone is willing to spend money on these e-books. So to have the widest possible reach of your e-book, it is best to offer it for free and the rebranding rights, maybe the part customization, for free as well. Anyways, what we are after is for the e-book to reach a huge number of potential customers and get the most commission from the attached affiliate links.
- Quality affiliate links. To be able to maximize your e-book and get its full potential, it should have good and legitimate affiliate links. But how do you make the readers really click on those links?
If your e-book bombards the readers with lots of affiliate links instead of quality information, they will probably stop reading your book, delete it and forget about it. Likewise, if the links lead to affiliate products which are totally not related to the e-book's theme, topic or niche, you will just lose a good number of potential customers.
The best way to include the affiliate links in your e-book is to make them appear as natural as the other statements in your book. Try to weave them into the content in such a way that it is not obvious to the eyes of your readers. For example, when you want your readers to learn more about a certain topic discussed on your e-book, you can then mention the link as a source of additional information.
- Maximum return for all parties involved. Since you want wide distribution of your e-book, you will offer it for free as well as the rebranding rights. But how then will you benefit from it? Of course, just the fact that people will sign up as an affiliate for them to be able to rebrand the links with their own codes means that you will gain more and more subscribers to your list.
Having more and more people who would want to rebrand the links means that more chances of your e-book getting distributed to others because of the incentives these people would gain. And the more people who will get to receive your e-book, the more traffic you will get on your site.
It wouldn't really matter if you are not earning from the rebranding rights. What is more important is the increased traffic and subscribers you will get, which will eventually lead to more and more sales and success for your business.
How to Make Sure Your Viral e-Book will be Read
One of viral marketing's principles is to give away something for free. This will definitely catch the attention of a huge number of people. Free items are always the best when trying to introduce something new in the market.
Most businesses and individuals who adopt this marketing strategy have found different ways of giving away information and other things for free. One of those methods is coming up with an e-book and sending it to potential customers.
There are a lot of e-books available for download over the internet. Almost all of these can be obtained for free. But even so, it is not assured that everyone will read it, much less get it. So how do you make your own e-book popular and be read by the most number of people possible?
Tips on Producing an Effective Viral e-Book
Your main goal in producing a viral e-book is to get your product or service known to a huge number of people or to get huge traffic to your web site. But you don't have to do all the work on your own.
The way viral e-books work is to initially inform a sufficient number of your target market. Then these first-hand customers will send your e-book to their own set of friends and colleagues, so will these second-generation customers. The cycle goes on and on.
But the question is how will you make your first-generation customers send your viral e-book to other people? What should entice them in distributing it?
First of all, you have to make sure that your e-book is of good quality, informative and relevant. It should look professional and not like a compilation of links all around the pages. It should not have the first impression of being an advertisement; or-else others will think of it as a form of spam messaging.
Your e-book should also contain valuable and interesting information about something that concerns the vast majority of your target population. It should be reader friendly in such a way that the format is consistent and the words are not so technical. Remember, you do not have control as to who will get a hold of your e-book and read it.
Of course, it's not all about being interesting and informative. The most important thing that will make people distribute your e-book is when they know that they will also earn from it. It should be a mutual relationship. You should be getting something from it, as well as those who will help you pass it on to others.
This is what internet marketers usually call affiliations. Your first-generation customers are your first set of affiliates. They should be able to edit the links included in the e-book to add their affiliate ID or change the link to their affiliate URL. When the links are clicked, they will lead to your site but there is also credit given to the affiliate who sent the e-book.
With this, your site will get the traffic it needs; at the same time, your customers or affiliates also get something from it. That will give them the motivation to read through your e-book then distribute it to other people, and so starts the viral movement of your e-book.
One thing to make sure of though when you allow for rebranding or modifying the link, is to still maintain some sort of control over it. As the author of the e-book, you have the control as to what should be changed or modified. Make sure that the modification is just the affiliate ID or affiliate URL and not a totally different link which you may not have control of.
Finally, you have to keep in touch with your customers. The key to having a huge client base and maintaining it is to have a good relationship with your customers. Following them up will not harm you. It is actually a good thing to do to make sure that they read your e-book and pass it on to others, plus a fantastic medium to ask-for and gain first-hand wants, needs and desires of your customers, giving you a never ending supply of research and info to pull and make profiting products you know they already want. That is as close to guaranteed sale as you can really get.
You may also want to provide a few add-ons to your e-book. Additional information, updates and related articles to the topic you discussed in your e-book, this will continue to encourage them to spread the word about your book. Always try to give extras inside your e-book that were not mentioned when they downloaded it, juicy and meaty extras that are unexpected by your affiliates or customers are a fantastic relationship builder between you and them.
Plus by providing them with an already information packed free product that is easy to pass on, it can only go viral even faster if your e-book gives more unexpected juicy and meaty extras that have a perceived high value and can give them results in some-way towards their own efforts in their respective business/es.
Always under-promise and always over-deliver.
So before going into the nitty gritty details of writing the e-book itself, make sure that you have done these things, or at least gave a thought about them. Writing your e-book without defining your goal and coming up with a plan may be a waste of time and effort on your part since it may not be able to serve its purpose.
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