11.2 Viral Marketing through ebooks

Viral Marketing can be performed in several ways. Many of these different forms of viral marketing have enjoyed enormous success over the years. Viral marketing has been applied to emails and the World Wide web alike. Another proven technique is the use of Ebooks as a powerful tool for Viral Marketing.

Ebooks (aka Eelctronic books) are self-contained "executable" files of HTML. This HTML may be a web site you've created or HTML you've specifically prepared to be compiled into a downloadable .exe file for distribution. When downloaded, this file will self install on your client’s desktop.

An ebook basically is a packaged offline web site that allows authors a great deal of flexibility in presentation of content. Ebooks can be downloaded from your website and stored and read offline at any time. An ebooks come with user friendly navigation tools that lets the reader skip to any page or search for any keyword within the ebook.

Ebooks can be completely interactive with the Internet and can contain live links, graphics, forms, JavaScript, embedded video, audio, animation and more. Hyperlinks and internal search engines enhance navigation, allowing the reader to find items of interest quickly and easily. Ebooks combine the functionality and purpose of physical books along with complex software.

Ebooks will play a very important role in viral marketing over the next few years, no matter what the product or service offered by a company is. How can your business benefit from the ebooks direction especially in terms of viral marketing? Read on to find out.

Why are ebooks an effective viral marketing tool?

Here’s how viral marketing with ebooks works. First of all, it is essential that your ebook contains interesting information. It is very difficult to market something if it is of no use. Readers of your ebook should get to learn something from the ebook. In this sense it is very similar to a physical book. A reader would throw away a book after reading a page or two if he/she finds it to be boring and dull. The same is the case for ebooks. No one would want to download your ebook if it is not rich in content. In other words, your ebook should have some useful information that the reader wants.

To use ebooks effectively as a viral marketing tool they should be offered to visitors of your website for free. The production and distribution costs of an ebook are generally very small. This is what makes it an effective tool for viral marketing.

The ebook would have the layout and feel of your business service or product, which would familiarize readers with your brand. The ebook you create would have a message promoting your website and a link to it. This will bring back the reader to your website and create an opportunity for more business. Thus, ebooks can contain advertisements or links to your website that would persuade the reader to come back to your website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have some message about your business and a link to your website that would interest the reader and encourage him to visit your website by clicking on that link.

How does Viral Marketing come into the picture here?  How do you ensure that ebooks can be given to more and more readers and in turn generate traffic for your website? A very simple way of doing this is to allow other visitors to your website to either download your ebook for free or sell at a very nominal rate and then allow them to sell the ebook to their customers. Be sure to include hyperlinks to your web site all over - at least one in every two pages. Also, you can include brief advertisements and all kinds of other things. The advantage of such a strategy is explained in the above paragraph.

Your customer can either upload the ebook on his/her website or offer it individually to his/her friends through email in the form of an executable file. Note that ebooks can be created in the form of executables (.exe) with the help of various software. These software(s) are explained later.

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