Ebook Project: Miscellaneous Marketing Ideas
Now that I have released my ebook, the majority of my time will now be taken up with marketing activities. A big chunk of that will involve the email campaign that I described a couple of days ago but when I get bored of sending email there’s lots of other interesting things I can do to try and promote the book.
File Sharing & Torrents
In the bad old days of the Internet downloading was very much a one-way affair with the majority of downloading occuring from large download sites. Now this is still a major part of the Internet and I have already started to submit my ebook to some of these places.
However, in recent years peer to peer networks have become much more common. What this means is that individual people share files from their own computer and networking software allows them to be shared over the Internet. One of the most popular of these is the Bit Torrent network. So this is one possibility that I am going to look into but I’m not sure if this will allow ‘mass’ downloading or just one or two here and there.
‘Selling’ on eBay
I was given a rather neat idea by Internet Junkie who suggested that I sell the book on eBay for 1c. This is so cheap that it is effectively free and of course the big advantage with this method is that eBay has a massive audience so all I have to do is put up and manage the auction.
The difficulty is that a traditional auction is a one-time affair so ideally I would find a way to put up multiple auctions in an automated fashion. It’s been a while since I’ve used eBay properly but I’m pretty sure there are lots of tools around to help with this. Could be the subject of an interesting tutorial…
Another eBay idea that I found recently is to buy those packs of ebooks that have resale rights then unpack each book and repack it with a copy of mine inside it as a bonus. Then re-sell the pack on eBay. It’s a clever idea but probably one I wouldn’t use as it feels somewhat spammy and like too much effort for the results.
Web 2.0 Promotion
I started this blog after taking part in the 30 Day Challenge. One thing I learned from that challenge is the power of web 2.0 sites that allow you to host your own content. For example, Squidoo, Hubpages, Scribd and so on (there’s dozens of sites like this).
What these sites allow you to do is own a little piece of the Internet on which you can create content and of course link out to a site of your choice. The way in which I would use this strategy is to take small sections of the book and turn them into articles and post one on each of these sites with a download link to the book.
What makes this strategy powerful is that many of the sites themselves carry a lot of favour with Google so they tend to rank well in the search engines. To make the most of this strategy I would need to do a little keyword research and try to work the articles around the best keywords.
If I put up some Squidoo lenses etc then I’ll post the links here so you can see how I have used them.
YouTube Videos
Now this is a strategy that I could have put to use earlier on if I have planned the book a little better but I was not in a good frame of mind when I wrote the first draft so I didn’t think of it.
In hindsight, much of the content of the book would have been suitable to video tutorials as well as in the written form. So I could have made a bunch of videos and uploaded them to YouTube tagged with approprorpiate keywords.
This strategy is just a variation of the Web 2.0 one as YouTube videos tend to rank extremely highly in Google (hmm I wonder why lol!) as long as they are well tagged. My problem though is that if I wanted to do this now I would have to start over creating a newniche site to make the videos.
Article Marketing
A standard practice with many Internet Marketers is to write a few short articles and publish them to directories such as EzineArticles and promote some kind of resource in the Author BIO box. Now that I have my own ebook to give away this is something I could do.
Similar to the Squidoo lenses I could write short articles taken from sections of the book and at the end of the article encourage the reader to read more by downloading the book for free. I think this would be a very valuable strategy to use for several reasons:
- It gets more downloads to the ebook
- Each article gets a backlink back to my blog
- It gets my name out there and makes me a bit more famous lol!
Next Steps
I’m holiday this week so at the moment all I’m doing is planning my work for next week and documenting my plans :-) Here’s my intentions for next week:
- Email relevant bloggers as per email campaign
- Write around half a dozen articles and some variations on them
- Build a Squidoo Lens, Hub Page and so on to house the articles
- Submit the articles to the top few directories
- Submit to file sharing sites
- Try and build a torrent for the book and distribute that
- I might possibly try a video tutorial and submit it to YouTube
- Setup an eBay auction and try to automate it
That lot should keep me busy. Any more idea on ways in which I could promote this ebook?
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Nick - road2blogging
January 10, 2008
I think a video tutorial would be good for promotion and people would definately link to it. I’d also contact hubpages to see if you could get the page ‘added’ to their monthly flagship hubpages, as this would create a bit more attraction to you.