eBooks - (A subset of List Building)

So, you wondered why I didn’t try to sell all the valuable information in this eBook, did you? The fact is that eBooks almost can’t be sold anymore, because every marketer and their uncle has penned at least one eBook lately and given it away!

Why would we do this? Well, it’s the same principle as Article Marketing, except that it builds more brand recognition and is much more dynamic. For instance, you’ve probably noticed an affiliate link or two throughout this PDF document. Some authors write these eBook just as a way to spread their Affiliate links alone. Some even pay a team of ghost-writers to crank out a bunch of eBooks for them to do just that, on a larger scale!

The most common use of eBooks nowadays and one that still works wonderfully for most niches outside of Internet Marketers, however, is offering a free eBook in exchange for your visitor’s eMail address. Like eBay, it’s a great source of targeted traffic. That’s it - you basically just bribe people to get on your list.

There’s nothing wrong with this tactic, it works. It’s not like you’re misleading anyone, either. Most of them came to your site to find more information, and probably would have signed up for your newsletter anyway just to find what they were looking for.

The third and lesser-known, but more effective method of using eBooks, comes from combining them with Viral Marketing… Such as the product you are reading right now.

Unless you got an advanced copy of this eBook, the Affiliate links you saw here weren’t my own. My primary objective when writing this eBook was to get visitors to my website and build up brand recognition for the Factory… Keeping control of all the affiliate links in it would have been a nice stream of income for me, but the book would not likely have gotten into your hands, as I wouldn’t be offering an incentive to other marketers to pass this around. I explain this tactic more in depth under “Viral Marketing.”

An obvious drawback is that it can be slow to get going. However, it doesn’t have to be. If your book is really good and offers a great incentive, (like I hope this one does) then more and more affiliates will send it out, and technically you could build up a huge list in no time that way.

Using JV Partners (see “Joint Ventures”) is a great way to launch your eBook for that purpose. If you can offer it to a bunch of big-list owners to send out to their lists, their main incentive will be the revenue from your affiliate links in the document they send.