In terms of online marketing, eBooks have a few advantages over traditional print marketing campaigns. Once considered a novelty, eBooks are now a cost-effective way to get your message out to a target audience, establish your brand, and entice consumers to become more involved with your business outside of simply making a purchase.
Keep in mind that when launching an eBook, you are essentially acting as your own publisher. You’ll be writing the content, or hiring someone to write effective content for you, and putting your content together as an eBook. There are plenty of eBook templates you can use to put your eBook together. Once you get passed the initial preparation phase, it’s time to launch your eBook.
Protect Your Content
Make it clear that you own your content to avoid someone, possibility a competitor, from using your content for their marketing purposes. You could either copyright your content or publish it via an attributions license, which permits people to copy and share your content as long as you are comfortable with how it’s being used.
Consider that an attributions license does makes it easier for people to share interesting parts of your content via social media and other online sources.
Note: If your content is copyrighted, clearly state this within your content. If you have specific rules for usage of your content, either mention this briefly at the bottom of the page or create a separate page disclosing your policy on sharing and reusing your eBook content.
Optimize Your eBook Metadata
While you can’t optimize your eBook content itself for search engines, you can optimize external factors such as the descriptions you use to promote it. The following types of metadata relating to your eBook should be optimized:
• Relevant tags
• Any websites, blogs or social posts referencing your eBook
• Meta description of your eBook
• File name used to upload your eBook
Let People Know About Your eBook
Once you have an eBook ready to go, you have to let people know it’s available. If you have an existing email marketing campaign, this is a perfect way to get the word out.
You could either include a link to your eBook or a link to subscribe to your blog or newsletter if you want this to be a condition for someone to get your eBook. Additional ways to get the word out about your eBook include:
• Mentioning it in as a new post in your blog
• Sending out a Tweet (grouped with a hashtag to take users to your related content)
• Placing a post on Facebook
• Creating a landing page to the specific page of your website that mentions your eBook
Now that people know about your eBook, the final step is to get people talking about it. Be active on your social networks. Rather than just posting messages and sending out tweets, actually interact with users by responding to comments in real time.
This kind of connection gets people talking and encourages more people to join the conversation. Consider guest posting on blogs related to your business or eBook topics.
Another option is to have a contest where the prize is a free copy of your eBook. The more creative you are, the better. With a little imagination and promotion, your eBook can be a highly effective marketing tool.
