I am about to launch my first ebook and after weeks of pondering the price i have decided that i will give it away for nothing!! It is a beginners guide on web marketing, aimed at the person who wants a bit more money on the side but isn't sure how do go about getting it. Obviously getting revenue for the work making the book is the goal but rather than selling the book i plan on giving it away for nothing and instead promote offers in the book; i will offer, through my web design company, a service to build websites for a low price of say $10. I think this could be popular with beginners as they will not have to learn html to get online and face it $10 isn't much. The book at first explained exactly how people would make a well optimized affiliate type website but not i have dropped this section and will instead offer the building service for one; of course experienced web people will not need this service but the beginners will look at it. - we will also offer a management deal where for a fee of about $10 a month we will host the site, manage updates to it and keep it ticking over. It wil be the ultimate hands off for people who don't want to learn html or haven't the time. Can i have some DP users' opinions on this strategy please. Would you sell the book for say $15 and make sales that way or would you give it away for nothing and get 1000s of copies out in the market and then pick up the sales from the extra services
When I was doing MLM, I wrote an ebook and gave it away free. It massively increased my personal networks. In mlm it's important to get people to join as your referals and I did this by putting my referal links in the book. It spread far better than a paid for book ever could. I then did it again and now my blog grows by the strength of this book alone, and I earn from adsense. Viral is the ultimate way to market. You've made a good decision.
thanks for the reply; it's always good to hear feedback from people who have been there and done it before. I recall back in the day that Brad Callen used a similar idea to promote seo elite didn't he...he gave a free ebook away to tell people how to rank better in google and then when he gets to the stage on how to find out that the competitors are up to he then drops in the promotion for the paid product. I like the way he went about doing it in that he states "you can do it by hand but it's far far easier to use this tool". I guess the idea then it to over state how hard it is to do what seo elite does automatically by hand.
I was honest in my approach and said "you need to join these referral programs to make it work anyway, why not do it as a thanks for me giving you this great ebook for free!" But there is no need for the honesty. Many people make ebooks for the sole purpose of marketing, there are loads of uses: Get people to your site Get people to your affiliate links Sell something Harvest emails (get an email before you give the book) Put other people's links in the book for a fee or in exchange for a link swap etc, you get the idea.
You make more money by selling it rather than giving it away. Why? Because most people do not come back. But, try both ways anyway, to see for yourself.
good choice. in my opinion, i would never ever buy an eBook simply because i can just google any information i need
The reality is, the market is flooded with e-books of all sorts and most people are extremely skeptical. You have to have at least some level of trust established with a person in order for them to hand over their cash. What I would recommend is: Make a squeeze page with a decent graphic image for your e-book. Give it away for free in exchange for people opting in to your list. A targeted customer on an e-mail list is worth ten times the price of the single sale of your e-book.
And just about all of that is pure Grade-A shit, like a lot of the info on this board. As an author of 3 e-books and two softcover books, that's one of the reasons why I don't care that there is so much free info. out there.
i agree with the above poster; there will always be a role for the ebook on the web. The main trouble with researching for information using a search engine is that too much of it is opinion based rather than factional '"i've heard this will get you banned" "i've heard this works well" and so on, we have all seen it. Too little of the information out there comes from testing but rather from hearsay... The other aspect of finding information on the web assumes the person knows exactly what to look for in the first place. Free information is good up to a point but then you get what you pay for. The internet will never replace a college library as a source of information, it is information light. It tells you a bit about something but only a bit...
That's a pretty good way to market your web services, carl. I'd say that as long as you provide useful and proven information (which I figure you will) then you might be able to help some people get started and make some money/build your customer base, too. I see what copper12 is saying about junk info that doesn't help anyone, but at the same time I think even the 'junk' that wastes time for newbies ends up teaching them something about what it's like trying to earn money online. I know I had to plow through a lot of fantastic garbage to make my first actual physical check off Google, for instance, but I think if I'd skipped that and gotten excellent information up front and been immediately successful then I'd have blind sides, you know what I mean? It's kind of similar to the concept of 'paying your dues' not because you need to get hazed into the scene, but because if you don't wander around getting a lay of the land you just might end up screwed by some lame scam when you DO have a good deal of money to invest or a serious business at stake. Hopefully that makes some sense and I hope no one thinks I'm defending the creation of trash e-books
since i started this topic i have decided to hold back on this ebook and instead release a 2nd one i have worked on!! I will however be coming back to the orginal ebook. The 2nd ebook is again on the web and is a promotional idea for my web design companies traffic management service we are launching next week. We will basically manage the links, seo and other stuff of your website through our system for a monthly fee (about $10 i think, yet to be decided). To launch this i will again be making a free ebook but this time teaching new people who to increase their website traffic through seo, social bookmarking, backlinks etc and touching on Black Hat which i know is not everyone's cup of tea but for the kid trying to make some extra cash from a adsense site it will be of interest to them. I will model the approach here on the Brad Callen seo elite ebook idea of explaining what you need to be doing to seeing more traffic and say what a time consuming approach it is but like he then says he uses SEO Elite to speed things up that's where i will introduce the site management service. Hopefully it goes well and it will help build up a mailing list for future products and services
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the e-books need to be QUALITY, no matter what you do. I didn't think I needed to specify that.