Chapter 3: The Ingenious Twist
3.1 The Affiliate Problem
For every 10 affiliates who initially show an interest in distributing your free book maybe just one will actually do it.
Just 1 out of 10.
Why ?
What's the problem ?
Why don't affiliates rush to rebrand free useful books so they can cash in on this very effective way to sell a product ?
Well consider what an affiliate needs to do to promote a PAID product.
He simply plugs his affiliate-id into a link, for example in the case of ClickBank
http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net
But in order to promote a free book he needs to carry out the following steps
For example take my free book Forum Marketing SuperTips. If you were to promote it using your own separate branded copy at your site you can't expect your readers to download it just by saying 'heres a good book about how to profit from forum postings' and give them a download link. Ideally you would want them to see the very same write-up I have used at my site - just the way an affiliate link works for a paid product.
Isn't it easier just to give out an affiliate link ?
Of course it is.
And that's why you can get hundreds of affiliates but few of them will bother to rebrand a book.
But there's even more bad news. Many affiliates may not even own a web site. We've just ruled out a huge army of newbies - beginners taking their first steps in Internet marketing and sensibly starting out on the affiliate route.
If only rebranding was as simple as providing an affiliate link.
Well it can be. Read on . . .
3.2 The Solution
There are actually two solutions which I have developed.
1) On the fly ebook rebranding.
This means that when a visitor requests an ebook at a site a rebranded version is instantly generated.
This is only feasible with PDF files not EXE files. Because of the technical difficulty of rebranding existing complex PDF files such solutions are currently rare and expensive.
However you will find in the Tools section in Chapter 4 a product, Super Rebrander, which will allow you to create a PDF ebook from an HTML file and perform on the fly rebranding.
It uses a restricted set of HTML tags which means you do not have the full set of Adobe features but this is offset by having all-in-one the triple functions of PDF creation, rebranding and on the fly processing - allowing your affiliate to simply promote one link.
2) The ClickBank 'cookie' solution.
Technically the solution is to get the affiliate cookie on the customer's computer at the time of download. You don't need to make any change to the book itself which means that you can use this method for both PDF books and EXE books.
The only limitation is that you can only allow 'rebranding' of products in your ClickBank account, which should be sufficient for your purpose.
This solution is described in more detail in the book Viral Marketing SuperTips
3.3 Even Better
Apart from leaving your affiliate with no further work to do (as regards producing a rebranded book and making it accessible at his site) there are two more great benefits for YOU.
* There is only one version of the book - the one at your site. You don't have the situation where different rebranded versions are available at different sites.
* Once a rebranded book is produced with the old method it is out of your control, the rebrander can market it in any way possible. With this method readers must come to YOUR site to obtain the book and you can obtain their contact details for list building.
3.4 Conclusion
We have shown a strategy that can be used to sell any product using fundamental pillars of Internet marketing - techniques which will never become obsolete.
These include
– preselling with good free information (an ebook)
– using the viral nature of article distribution
– using the power of affiliate marketing
– capturing contact details and applying follow up campaigns
At each step of the way we have introduced a multiplying effect which increases these 3 factors exponentially
* conversion
* traffic
* affiliate promotion
Specifically, if you want to see the detail of what we did.
That rounds up the strategy - I hope you will agree that I have kept my promise, providing valuable information for free and I have not even asked for your name !
In the next chapter we supply the tools to help you carry out this strategy.
Whether you decide to use them or not don't forget to read Chapter 5 - it's unmissable.