This is a powerful fantasy driving many marketers, but they often have no idea how to actually make their e-book go viral – or how to motivate the readers to connect back to the author.

The seeds of the problem are present in the little fantasy I described a few sentences back – no thought has been given to what motivates people to pass along an e-book and what motivates them to visit the author’s website afterward? Why do they pass an e-book along…

The short answer is: SELF-INTEREST!

WIIFM: What’s In It For Me?

What makes a report go viral is building in a compelling reason for the user to pass it along.  This can be as simple as wanting to appear trendy by being the first to pass around some cool new thing, or the hope of making money with little effort by re-branding the affiliate links in an e-book someone else wrote and passing it on to earn an affiliate commission or two from future readers.

To go viral, an e-book needs to provide an overwhelming “perceived benefit” to the reader to share it with someone else. The action required to make an e-book go viral must happen long before any benefit is experienced by the reader. You have to get them to ’see the potential’ of sharing the e-book before they feel it.

Inside the text of your e-book, you must sell the benefit of passing along the e-book as well as deliver content this is valuable to the reader in its own right.

Do not expect your readers to know how to share your e-book (or even to think of the idea on their own.) Tell the reader exactly how to pass on the e-book and why they should pass it on to others. Break it down step by step so they don’t have to guess what to do next.

You can motivate people to pass along an e-book by:

- Providing amazing content they want to share
- Paying them to share it (either money or some item of value)
- Allowing them to rebrand it and embed their own affiliate links using software like
Viral PDF
- Etc.

How Do You Turn Readers Into Visitors and Customers?

Now that your readers have a strong reason to pass along your e-book and a clear idea of how to do it, you need to make sure that it produces results for your business. There’s no sense in creating a wildly popular viral e-book if it does not bring in new prospects or generate revenue.

The way you make this work out in your favor is to embed an offer inside the report for your own product/service/website and give the reader something valuable (related to the topic) which has to be downloaded from your site.

An example:

Put together a report on the critical elements of a successful sales letter. Within the report mention the importance of having a professionally designed sales page template so that readers don’t reject your message before they even read it because it looks unprofessional.

Then, offer to give them a free professionally designed sales page template to use on all their sales pages as a free gift for joining your copywriting mailing list.

A similar tactic is to offer Part I of a report as your viral report and then send them to your site to get Part II. Mike Filsaime famously ‘leaked’ a chapter of his ‘Butterfly Marketing Manuscript’ which provided a copy of the full table of contents and a snippet of the content before and after the ‘leaked’ chapter. The content of that free chapter was so amazing, people wanted to get a copy of the full report – and they went in droves to the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript website to buy a full copy (editorial note: this is an excellent resource for understanding viral marketing online.)

Dr. Mani from the Warrior Forum promoted a free e-book on using free e-books in your marketing. The author offers some great advice (and models it too) in the subject and I highly recommend it (I printed out a copy and have been scribbling notes all over it as I plan out future viral marketing reports and e-books.)

http://www.GiveawayYourFreeEbook.com

Questions, comments, or success stories? Leave a comment below and let us know what you are thinking.

Publishing a ebook seems like such a simple process (the mechanics are not that complicated) and they are blinded by dollar signs as they fantasize about how they will spend all the money that they earn from selling their ebook.

Within minutes of deciding to publishing an ebook, wannabe digital authors are busy writing about their favorite hobby or whatever great idea they dream up that they’re convinced will be the ticket to easy street.

After weeks of work preparing the ebook and learning how to create a website to offer it for sale, they sit back and wait for the money to star rolling in.

And they wait, and wait, and wait!

Very often nothing happens at all and they quit in disgust and claim that “the ebook publishing business is a scam and it doesn’t really work.” Or, they earn a few dollars, but not nearly enough to be worth all the effort.

You and I know that the reality is that those wannabes don’t understand who buys ebooks, why they buy them, or what makes them willing to pay top dollar for an ebook. In short, they haven’t done their homework first and researched the marketplace.

There is a wide range of information that sells well on the Internet and some very simple ways to do research to determine niche markets were strong potential exists. But, there’s one specific style of the book that sells well all the time and commands high prices.

9-1-1 ebooks

When we stop and think about it, the primary benefits of buying ebooks online is immediate access to useful and well researched information. People in the middle of an emergency need to instantly solve their problem.

9-1-1 ebooks solve the kinds of emergency problems that people desperately need help with. Tony Shepherd and Alexis Dawes both write extensively in their own ebook products about how to quickly identify 9-1-1 problems that can be solved with simple ebooks.

There isn’t room in this article to explain the full process of identifying topics, researching, writing, and formatting ebooks, and marketing and selling them (Tony and Alexis both do a phenomenal job of that in their ebooks.) But I will steer you in the right direction. There are also other articles that cover those subjects on this site, so look through the article list in the side navigation.

To identify a profitable topic, look and see what kinds of problems people around you are struggling with. Soothing colicky babies, repairing holes in drywall, stopping a leaky sink, resolving a credit card dispute, avoiding foreclosure, the list goes on.

If you can imagine a desperate person searching the Internet for help, you have a potential product.

So, try a 9-1-1 product and see if your ebook business soars.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Desperate Buyers Only, by Alexis Dawes
Double Genius, by Tony Shepherd

Blogs, RSS feeds, tell-a-friend scripts, download directories, Facebook pages, Squidoo Lenses, MySpace pages, bookmarking sites, and dozens of other resources make it easy to spread your message.

“One Into A Million” is a special report that will show you how to leverage the Internet to create powerful marketing promotions.

Download your free copy right now:

The term ‘infoprenuer’ has been coined to describe people who sell information based products like ebooks. In order to get started selling online you need 3 things: a website that promotes your product, a method of receiving payments, and a method to deliver the product to your customer after payment.

How To Create Your Website

Your promotional website should not be a complicated site. It should be a one page HTML document that is focused on selling your product (you’ve probably encountered many of these ’salespage’ style sites on the web.) The content will consist of a headline to catch people’s attention, a short story to hook them and get them reading, a bullet list of the major benefits they will get from buying your product, testimonials from previous customers and reviewers, and a ‘call to action’ (otherwise known as the sales pitch.) Most people include a P.S. or two that summarizes the major benefits and repeats the call to action.

You don’t need any fancy software to make this page. There is an excellent free software package called Kompozer that will help you design the webpage.

In order for people to find and access your salespage, you will need a server to ‘host’ it on and a domain name. There are dozens of companies that will help you with domain name registration and hosting if you don’t already have this taken care of. The total cost should be under $10US per month. I use and recommend 2 companies: HostGator Web Hosting and 1&1 Web Hosting.

How To Accept Payments Online

Your salespage will have an order button on it for customers to click and purchase your ebook. This will link to some kind of online payment processor. Large businesses have accounts with a bank called ‘merchant accounts.’ These accounts allow them to accept credit card payments from customers.

Unfortunately, merchant accounts are expensive and can be difficult to setup for new businesses. Luckily, there is a very popular online alternative… Paypal.
A PayPal Premier or Business account can be setup easily by almost anyone. There are no monthly charges for a Premier account and PayPal charges a small transaction fee for every payment the process (merchant accounts have large monthly fees and transaction fees as well!) With a PayPal Premier or Business account, you will be able to accept credit card payments, electronic checks, and direct PayPal transfers from other members. It is the easiest way to get started accepting payments online.

PayPal includes tools on their merchant services area where you can create a ‘Buy Now’ button to place on your salespage. The form is very easy to use. Simply fill in all of the details about your product. Make sure that the ‘button encryption’ option is set to yes. If it is not, anyone with basic web skills can view the source code for your salespage and change the purchase price or simply steal the link to your download page without paying. Even worse, search engines will eventually find and index your download page.

At the bottom of the page is a link to “Add More Options.” Click this and look for the section labeled “Customize Your Buyer’s Experience.” There is an option here to enter a URL for people to be forwarded to after they make a successful payment. The link you put here is for the download page where the customer will get their product which leads us to…

How To Deliver Your Ebook

The last step in your ebook selling process is to deliver the product file to customers after they pay. The simplest approach is just to create a simple HTML page that has a short thank you message on it and a link for downloading the product. A common practice to keep people from finding this page is to give it a name that has lots of random characters in it to make it hard to guess and place it in a directory that has a similar hard to guess name. The download file should be placed in the same folder or a special sub-folder (also with a hard to guess name.)

If you choose this low-tech approach, make sure to put a blank file named ‘index.htm’ in each folder and also include ‘no-index’ tags in the header of the HTML of the download page and never link directly to the download page from anywhere online except from PayPal. These steps will reduce the chances of non-paying people downloading your product and search engines from indexing your download page and product links. But, if someone does find the page, this offers no protection from theft.

There are some more sophisticated software solutions available that will verify payment information before allowing access to download pages and files and will create a unique link to the product that hides its true location on your server and expires after a certain length of time or number of downloads. They might also include tools for running an affiliate program. DLGuard, Digital Product Guard Download System, and Download Defender XT are some of the more popular options for download protection.

These software solutions will cost you money and take some expertise (your own or someone you hire) to set everything up. But, in the long run, they will protect you as your business grows.

Using a Hosted Shopping Cart To Sell Ebooks

A third option for delivering your products is to use a hosted shopping cart program. This is the approach I use in my business.

There are a number of services at wildly different pricing structures that can handle this task. I use a company called E-junkie that is very inexpensive and offers almost every option I need to run a highly automated online business. They have a free one week trial and they don’t have any transaction fees to cut into your profits.

ClickBank, PayDotCom, and PayLoadz are other popular shopping cart options. The fee structures vary with each service.

Take Action and Get Started Now Selling Your Ebook

The most important decision you can make for your online business is to decide to start and take action. If you have to start small and cheap – do it. Use free tools and low tech solutions and take the money you earn and invest in better technology. If you wait for everything to be perfect, you will never start.

I recommend using Paypal and E-junkie to take payments and deliver products. The monthly fees are tiny and the technical skills required to deliver a secure product are low. E-junkie will make the buttons, send the thank-you emails, create the secure download pages and deliver the products. They even have tools for running an affiliate program.

Take action and have a profitable day!

Andrew Seltz is the author of “Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie,” an illustrated step-by-step guide to setting up your ebook business fast.

Get Started Selling with E-Junkie Today…

There is only one way to climb a mountain: step by step.

Now think of writing your profitable E-Book in the same light. You must create it step by step, and one day, you will take that last step and find yourself standing on the summit with your head in the clouds.

The first thing you have to do, as if you actually were a mountain climber, is to get organized. Instead of climbing gear, however, you must organize your thoughts. There are some steps you should take before you begin. Once you’ve gone through the following list, you will be ready to actually begin writing your E-Book.

Beginning Steps to Writing a Profitable E-Book

First, figure out your E-Book’s working title. Jot down a few different titles, and eventually, you’ll find that one that will grow on you. Titles help you to focus your writing on your topic; they guide you in anticipating and answering your reader’s queries. Many non-fiction books also have subtitles. Aim for clarity in your titles, but cleverness always helps to sell books as long as it’s not too cute.

Next, write out a thesis statement. Your thesis is a sentence or two stating exactly what problem you are addressing and how your book will solve that problem. All chapters spring forth from your thesis statement. Once you’ve got your thesis statement fine-tuned, you’ve built your foundation. From that foundation, your book will grow, chapter by chapter.

Your thesis will keep you focused while you write your E-Book. Remember: all chapters must support your thesis statement. If they don’t, they don’t belong in your book. For example, your thesis statement could read: We’ve all experienced insomnia at times in our lives, but there are twenty proven techniques and methods to give you back a good night’s sleep.

Once you have your thesis, before you start to write, make sure there is a good reason to write your book. Ask yourself some questions:

• Does your book present useful information and is that information currently relevant?

• Will you book positively affect the lives of your readers?

• Is your book dynamic and will it keep the reader’s attention?

• Does you book answer questions that are meaningful and significant?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you can feel confident about the profit potential of your E-Book.

Another important step is to figure out who your target audience is. It is this group of people you will be writing to, and this group will dictate many elements of your book, such as style, tone, diction, and even length. Figure out the age range of your readers, their general gender, what they are most interested in, and even the socio-economic group they primarily come from. Are they people who read fashion magazines or book reviews? Do they write letters in longhand or spend hours every day online. The more you can pin down your target audience, the easier it will be to write your book for them.

Next, make a list of the reasons you are writing your E-Book. Do you want to promote your business? Do you want to bring quality traffic to your website? Do you want to enhance your reputation?

Then write down your goals in terms of publishing. Do you want to sell it as a product on your website and generate huge profits, or do you want to offer it as a free gift for filling out a survey or for ordering a product? Do you want to use the chapters to create an e-course, or use your E-Book to attract affiliates around the world? The more you know upfront, the easier the actual writing will be.

Decide on the format of your chapters. In non-fiction, keep the format from chapter to chapter fairly consistent. Perhaps you plan to use an introduction to your chapter topic, and then divide it into four subhead topics. Or you may plan to divide it into five parts, each one beginning with a relevant anecdote.

How to make your E-Book “user friendly”

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging. Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos, graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning the pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible information, and they break up the density of the page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader’s respond to the feeling that you are having a conversation with them. Break up the length and structure of your sentences so you don’t hypnotize your readers into sleep. Sentences that are all the same length and structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a day. Read books and magazines about the process of writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The art of writing is a lifetime process; the more you write (and read), the better your writing will become. The better your writing becomes, the bigger your sales figures.

In an E-Book that is read on the screen, be aware that you must give your reader’s eye a break. You can do this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white space is usually referred to as “negative space.” Reader’s eyes need to rest in the cool white oasis you create on your page. If your page is too dense, your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes begin to tear.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that’s easy on the eyes, and stick to that font family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your readers out before they’ve gotten past your introduction. Use at least one and a half line spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on the screen, but small enough so that the whole page can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to experiment with this to find the right combination.

Of course, don’t forget to run a spell and grammar check. You are judged by something as minor as correct punctuation, so don’t mess up a great book by tossing out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences together with commas. (By the way, that’s called a “comma splice.”)

Last of all: create an index and a bibliography. That’s it! You’ve written a book! Now all you have to do is compile and publish your E-Book online, and wait for download request from your website visitors!

To speed the process and maintain a high quality product, I built an ebook template in Open Office that I use for all of my ebooks. Open Office is a free office suite software package that includes a first-rate word processor. This word processor also has a high quality PDF exporter built into the software which creates beautiful ebooks for your business. It is my favorite software to use.

The basic settings I modify for my ebook template are the fonts, the font sizes, the line spacing, a page header, a page footer, and a few other bits of ‘boilerplate’ content. I also like to put a border around the pages to dress it up a bit.

Font Settings For Ebooks

Font size for my ebooks is set to 14pt and the line spacing to 1.5 or 2. It’s important to remember that many people will be reading the content from the screen and a larger font is easier on the eyes. The increased line spacing also helps with on screen readability. These settings also look pretty good when printed, so it is a good compromise.

For fonts, I use a sans-serif font for the headings and titles and usually pick Times Roman or Bookman for the body copy.

Layout and Design for Ebooks

Next comes the header and footer for all of the main pages. The header usually contains the name of the ebook and the footer has a promo teaser on the left and the page number on the right. Some people like to include copyright information at the bottom of every page as well. I also like to separate the header and footer from the main text with a divider line.

Standard Content for Ebooks

Finally, I create some boilerplate legal pages, an index page, a resource page and an about the author page to round everything out. These might get modified from book to book, but they are always present in every book so it saves time to have them as part of my template file.

Putting It All Together

If you want to see an example of my template in action, here is a recent free report I created using it:

How I Made My First $100 Online

It took a little while to figure out the nuances of creating page styles in OpenOffice, but now this it’s done and I’ve built the framework for my ebooks, I just cut and paste content into my template. Working this way easily saves 1 to 2 hours on every single project.

Your e-book will probably be delivered in PDF format and you could simply upload this file and be done with it. But, you have an opportunity to re-enforce your customer’s purchasing decision, encourage consumption or usage of the product, and cross-promote other products. You can also slip in some unannounced bonuses too. The way you do this is to include several files into one single ZIP archive file for delivery.

Typically, I create a document labeled ‘Read_First’ which thanks the customer for purchase, recommends the next steps the customer should take to benefit from the product, states the rights that the customer has purchased to the product (this is particularly important when selling resale rights products or permitting others to giveaway your viral ebook), and usually includes a promotion as well. If you want to encourage customers to sign up for an email list, one good strategy is to offer an unannounced bonus and require them to sign up in order to get the download link for the bonus. The ‘Read_First’ file is the perfect place to announce the bonus.

Creating a ‘Read_First’ file is even more important when you are selling resale products that you have purchase the rights to distribute. Many resale products do not allow you to modify the content of the e-book, so you do not have the opportunity to add your own links inside. The addition of this extra file inside the ZIP file you deliver to your customer is your chance to build your business beyond a single sale.

If you would like to see an example of a download package for a resale product, check out www.InfoProductSeminar.com. This site promotes a resale product I purchased the rights to sell. Feel free to read over the sales page (its not my best work), but what I really want you to see is the exit pop-up and the product package I deliver with the free sample.

When you try to leave the sales page without purchasing, a pop-up window appears offering a free sample download – in exchange for your email address. Once you download that free sample audio, unzip the file and you will find a ‘Read_First’ PDF file and the audio MP3 file (the seminar is one of my favorites – I hope you listen to the first hour.) The ‘Read_First’ PDF file includes a special offer to purchase the rest of the seminar audios at an amazing discount that is designed to be so tempting that no one could resist purchasing.

Let’s review what happens here. I tempted a visitor who wasn’t prepared to buy with a free sample. And got his name email address in exchange. This gives me an opportunity to contact the visitor in the future with other information and offers. Then, inside the distribution package, I included a special offer in the ‘Read_First’ file designed to entice an order for the full audio seminar package. The ‘customer’ can sample the product, decide if it is right for them, and then take advantage of my special discount offer.

I could have easily used the ‘Read_First’ file to promote another product or encourage prospects to visit a specific website. The key element involved is to make sure to include some type of promotion and not to offer more than one (the more options you give the less likely your customer will take any action.)

It’s worth going through the sequence on this website just to see everything in action. (For anyone who might purchase the full set of audio files – they are excellent – you will see the E-junkie e-commerce system in action – including the use of discount codes. And, you will experience how fast the download speeds are for large files. E-junkie is the primary e-commerce solution I use in my own business.)

If you are not ready to invest in theTraffic Manifesto and kick your promotion into overdrive, here are a few time-tested ways to get people to your site. Most are free (but take time and effort) and others might cost a few dollars.

1. Visit related forums and include a link to your sales page in your signature. Then, start contributing to the forums and people will follow your link. A similar tactic is to leave comments on relevant blog articles and link back to your site. Don’t spam the blogs and forums, contribute valuable information to the discussion. Otherwise, this tactic can backfire. Visit BigBoards.com to get a huge list of discussion forums covering hundreds of topics.
2. Another tried and true method is to write a number of keyword targeted articles of 350-800 words and submit them to article directories like www.goarticles.com and www.ezinearticles.com with links back to your website in the author’s resource box after the article.
3. Create a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign using Adwords, Yahoo Search Advertising, or Microsoft Adcenter to send traffic to your sales page. For more help planning a PPC campaign, study the XXX guide.
4. Distribute a Press Release about your newly released product. There are a number of sites on the web dedicated to circulating press releases. You can use these to generate traffic by writing press releases. Sites like www.PRWeb.com and www.PRLeap.com will let you post a free release on their sites which will also get syndicated around the web. They also offer a paid service that guarantees your release will be listed on the major search engines too, but this is not required to get some traffic.
5. Squidoo.com is one of the fastest and easiest ways to get ranked in the search engines for your chosen keywords/niche. Google loves Squidoo and quickly indexes new pages on the site. So, pick a few target keywords and build a Lens around each one. Include links to relevant resources (including pages on your own site – of course!) Then, people who find your Lens will also discover the links to your site and many will follow through and become visitors to your website. You Can Master the Power of Squidoo 100 Times Faster When a Seasoned Master Shows You What To Do…
6. Create a topical video and release it on the major video sites like www.YouTube.com and www.Revver.com, or www.FreeIQ.com.
7. Place online classified ads at sites like www.USFreeads.com or www.CraigsList.com.

There are dozens of options for driving traffic to your new ebook. This list barely scratches the surface of the traffic techniques available. The most important thing to do is develop a specific strategy for promoting your site and create a written plan of action. Otherwise, you will spend hours chasing after traffic here and there without building any momentum or the ability to evaluate your success.
I highly recommend the 30 Day Traffic Plan that is included with The Traffic Manifesto. It will lead you through every step of the process and create the traffic momentum you need. You can use the time you would have spent creating a promotional plan implementing this proven process.

If you choose to go it alone, make sure you do every step on the list above (number 3 is optional if you want to stick with free options.)

Ebooks are small, so they can readily be downloaded by clients without placing excessive demands on a server. There are many services available, such as E-junkie, PayDotCom, Clickbank, and others designed to handle the order processing aspects of selling ebooks. Services like E-junkie will even deliver the file from their servers.

When delivering the ebooks from your own server, it is important to take steps to prevent people from sharing the link to your download page. Software like DL Guard will protect your download pages and your download links.

When you are just starting out, it is likely you will use PayPal to process your payments. Later you might move on to a full fledged merchant account for your business.

Services like E-junkie and PayDotCom interface with PayPal. Payments are processed there and order tracking and delivery are handled on the site.

Ebooks are easy to produce using free tools, easy to deliver on your own website or through digital product payment and delivery services, and can command a very high price. That makes them one of the best products to sell online.

They discuss how she sets up her sites, how the books are produced (she doesn’t write them herself), how she generates traffic, and how she writes the sales page copy to convert visits to sales. Her website also gives a thorough breakdown of her process: www.AndrewandDaryl.com. The site includes links to sample survey pages, a spreadsheet for calculating the profitability of an idea, and active e-book sales pages (surprise – not one of them is about online marketing!)

This approach follows the same process championed by Frank Kern and Ed Dale in their Underachiever Series seminar. Andrew and Daryl are both students of Ed Dale, so they probably picked up more than a few pointers from him.

This is a great bit of educational material. Listening to it inspired me to test a new product idea I had. I wrote about how I did the market test and my results.