Writing an e-book sounds like an incredibly daunting prospect - right? I can understand why you might think that. After all, books are hundreds of pages long – where would you find the time to do that? And just as importantly what on earth would you write about?
So first of all, let’s clarify one thing - e-books do not need to be hundreds of pages long. In fact most tend to be somewhere between 40 and 120 pages in length. However even so, you are forgetting about many other options. For example, you could write a report, you could write a guide or you could even gather up a number of your already written articles and turn them in to a book. You could even trawl back through all of your archived posts and turn them in to a book. You have lots of options. And if you choose to go for a report or a guide, then it is perfectly acceptable if it is only 6 pages long! People do not expect e-books to be the chunky books that they would find on their book shelves at home.
So, now that the length is no longer putting you off you have a few choices. You can either write your e-book from scratch, pull it together from your old posts and articles or you can choose to go down the route of PLR. We will explore PLR in more detail a little later but to begin with let’s assume you are starting from scratch or using your own work. The key thing to consider is to make sure that you are writing something that people will want to read. A perfect example of that is this book. I am sharing my traffic secrets within this book because I know that is one of the things that people struggle with most in this industry and are therefore likely to want to read about.
Now remember that you are going to be giving this away for free. If you want to write e-books to sell later, than you can do that, but for the purposes of this technique you will be giving your book away for free. This means that you need to make sure that you get the balance right. Of course the content has to be good quality. If you put a poor quality product out there it is going to undermine you, your brand and your credibility. You want to avoid this at all costs! However, equally you need to put a time limit on this. You really shouldn’t be spending more than half a day on this so plan on 4-5 hours max. Anything beyond that and other things that you should be doing are going to start to suffer.
Remember when you are writing your book that it’s ok to be yourself. Yes, you need to present a professional approach but no it doesn’t have to be written with the finesse of an experienced author. I don’t know about you but the books and guides that I enjoy reading most are ones where I really feel like the writer is talking to me. So feel free to be yourself and where possible have a conversation with your reader in the way that you would if they were there in front of you.
So once you’ve pulled your book together there are two things that you need to do. The first is to create an e-book cover. There are lots of options out there, including outsourcing this task for very small sums of money, but if you want to maintain control of this process then you can use an online tool to do it yourself. There are plenty of different sites to choose from – just try typing ebook covers in to Google and it will show you thousands of results. One that I have used recently is myecovermaker.com. It’s free to join and design your cover then costs you approximately $4 to download it without the watermark. Not much to pay when you consider how much more professional this can make your product look.
Before you go ahead and distribute your book you may want to think about copyright. You automatically get the copyright of your own material but if anyone did copy it and you found out, the burden of proof would fall to you to prove that you had this material first. That is the bit that can be tricky to prove. There are companies who will copyright online for a relatively small fee. They keep a record of the material and submission date and provide this as legal evidence should someone try to copy your work in future. Whether or not this is something that you feel you need for your product is completely up to you. You also want to consider whether you are going to allow people to distribute your product or sell it. Again, this is completely your choice. However as long as you have plenty of links back to your site and you stipulate that the document must remain unchanged if distributed, allowing other people to distribute your work can get it seen by far more people who may then be tempted to come back to your site to learn more about you.
So once you have made your decision around copyright and distribution and added a note to the front of your book to this effect you are ready to distribute it. You can do this yourself by having a capture page on your website, but this will obviously only distribute it to the traffic you are currently getting. Another option is to market your free book via your social networking sites, and encourage people to come to your blog to sign up and download it. The final and most powerful option is to distribute your book via free e-book sites and this is where most of your traffic is going to come from.
There are lots of sites out there that you can upload your book to so feel free to check them all out. However the ones that I have found to be most successful in generating traffic are:
free-ebooks.netgetfreeebooks.com
e-library.net
I would recommend that you upload your free book to all of these sites. Ensure that you have plenty of clear links throughout your book encouraging people to come back to your site and you’ll be surprised by how much extra traffic this can bring you. Some of the sites do have a criteria as to the number of pages your e-book needs to be in order to be classified as an e-book. If you don’t meet this criteria you can still upload your work as a report which will still be effective in terms of driving traffic to your site.
And the best thing about this marketing method is that it is ongoing. For as long as your book remains available on that site, traffic will continue to pour in to your blog on the back of it. Getting one new e-book out a month could make a vast difference to the amount of traffic you’re getting. Just remember to ensure that all of your e-books have clear links back to your site so people know where to go to get more of the same quality information and learn more about you.