Promoting Your eBook
Here are four effective strategies for promoting your e-book.
Give It Away
People love free stuff. One way to get your e-book into the hands of readers is to give it away. You can give it away for free from your website or you can use it as an incentive when you customers buy from you – as a bonus or free gift.
There are also hundreds of e-book directories online where you can list your e-book so that others can download it for free. People are much more willing to download something free than to take a chance on an author they don’t know about.
If you are trying to promote a business or a product, you’ll need to make your money by recommendations or sales information in the e-book. A section about your company’s products or services will usually do the trick.
If you have a novel or a fiction book, you might try giving away a free chapter or two. Once your reader is hooked, they may be willing to pay to get the rest of the story.
Paid Advertising
E-zine advertising is an extremely effective method of promoting any products – including e-books.
For this strategy to work, you’ll want to find e-zines that have a subscriber base that closely matches your target audience. For example, if you have an e-book on dog grooming, you wouldn’t want to take out an advertisement in an e-zine that focuses on golfing.
There are e-zine directories out there that list thousands of e-zines that accept advertising. Usually the rates are very inexpensive and that allows you to try out an ad without risking a lot. Once you find out which e-zine provide the best return for your investment, you can take out bigger ads or increase the frequency of your ads.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
One of the best methods of promoting any product is through paid advertising in conjunction with search engines. Most search engines offer sponsored advertising where advertisers bid on certain keywords. When a user types that keyword into a search engine, the advertisers who bid on that keyword have their ads shown as a sponsored result.
If you are promoting a book about identity theft, you might bid on the keyword “identity theft.” Now this is a particularly active keyword and there might be a lot of competition, so you may have to bid higher. Let’s say the top bid is $.35. That means that this advertiser has bid 35 cents on the word “identity theft.” Since they are the top bid, their ad will show first every time someone searches for the word “identity theft.”
They don’t have to pay unless someone actually clicks on their ad, but the advertising budget may grow quickly depending on the keyword and how active the category is.
The great thing about pay-per-click advertising is that you can often find extremely responsive visitors who are looking for exactly the information you are providing in your e-book.
For more about pay-per-click advertising, check out Google AdWords, Overture, or FindWhat.com
Start an Affiliate Program
One of the best ways to sell your new e-book is to create an affiliate program. An affiliate program is like having a small (or large) sales force out there promoting and selling your book. You don’t have to pay them upfront. Instead, you offer a commission – usually 40% – 80% of the retail price of the book. The nice part is that you don’t have to pay your affiliates until after the sale is made and you’ve received your money from the customer.
It may sound like setting up an affiliate program is hard to do. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution. Head over to ClickBank.com and sign up. For a small fee, they’ll list your product in their database of electronic products. It will show up in the affiliate directory and you’ll suddenly have thousands of affiliate out their who could promote your e-book for you.
ClickBank handles all of the product delivery and customer service issues. You simply kick back and receive the profits.
These aren’t the only methods for promoting your e-book, but they are a good place to start. Spend some time researching promotional methods online and you’ll find a ton of other really good ideas.
