Marketing Your Ebook By Giving It Away For Free

One of the best marketing methods for ebooks is to give it away for free. Don’t stop reading. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. If you give away your ebook, then people can give it away to their friends who can give it away to their friends. It’ll spread like a virus.

This is a little scary because you just spent time doing research and writing your book. And of course, the main reason for writing an ebook is to make money, so how are you supposed to make money from it if you give it away for free?

The first way to make money if you give your ebook away is to use your ebook to build your marketing list. If you talk to any business person anywhere, they will tell you that the most important thing you can do in marketing is to build a client list. If you have a client list, you can build a rapport with them. Then they will buy things from you over and over again. That client list is worth its weight in gold.

To build your list, you need to have a sales page to advertise your ebook exactly as if you were selling it. Place an opt-in form on your website. The opt-in form would ask people to type in their name and email address. In order to be able to download your ebook, they must agree to receive future emails from you. This process can be simplified by using an autoresponder service like Aweber.

A second way to make money from a free ebook is to use it to market relevant affiliate products. The affiliate links would actually be embedded within the ebook. You could go to Clickbank, Amazon, or another affiliate site and get affiliate links for products that are associated with your topic. Let’s say that you are writing an ebook about muscle building. When you get to the chapter where you’re writing about improving your abs, you can include an affiliate link to one or more of the products about improving your abs. When someone reads your ebook, they follow the link to the affiliate site. When they purchase that product, you receive a commission from the sale.

If you use this second method and you’re able to completely let go, you can allow people to give it to anyone they choose with the stipulation that the affiliate links remain in place. Those people, in turn, can give it to their friends and clients. This allows the book to spread far and wide across the world wide web. It will continue to earn you money for a long time.

The third way to make money by giving away your ebook is to use it as a tool for marketing another product or service. Let’s say that you wrote an ebook about Backpacking Locations in California. If you wrote a second ebook about the benefits of various brands of backpacks, you could offer it as a free bonus when someone buys the first book. More people will buy the first book because they are getting the second book free.

Fourth, include links back to your website(s) in several places throughout the book. If people come and visit your websites, you have another opportunity to make money. They might click on the Adsense ads on your site. They could purchase other ebooks you’ve written. They can also purchase other products through affiliate links on your website.

After reading this article, I hope you aren’t so afraid to give your ebook away for free. It might be the best marketing decision you ever make.