Luckily you don’t have to convince Barnes and Noble to put your book on a prominent shelf. You have the Internet at your disposal, and the Internet is the place where ebooks are purchased 99 percent of the time. The remainder of ebooks are sold at conferences and the like by CD-ROM (which incidentally should be packaged with great cover art and delivered in a shiny crystal case).

Get a presence on the web

First things first. You’ll need some web space for your book. You can either pay a host or you can get free hosting service. I recommend you pay (for an inexpensive web host at least), and I’ll tell you why.

Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It is, also, a powerful way to generate traffic to your website.

Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.

Now let’s look at using an E-book to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an E-book… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

E-books are the future and the future is now. The printed word on paper and bound into books used to be the only way information was given and received. They were great, you could take them with you and put them on shelves and they do still exist and will continue to for the foreseeable future but the time of the E-book has arrived.

The marketing E-book is a slightly different animal from just an E-book. Marketing E-books contain text, images, links to web pages and navigation controls. The marketing E-book has become a very important part of marketing on the Internet.

With a marketing E-book you can present your story in an effective way and include links to your web sales pages. Your E-book can become your best salesman.

First, your E-book needs to be interesting and informative. It always has links back to your web site and to your sales page.

An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your message by willing participants.

This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site.

Using viral E-books as a marketing method is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s even quicker if you use rebrandable E-books that have been written by others. Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search. You will find many rebrandable E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business. One method of distributing the E-book is to offer it to visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family it will promote your business for you.

It is a well known and widely accepted fact, that E-books….FREE E-books…are one of the best weapons in a viral marketing campaign arsenal.  Here are four good reasons why this is true today and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future:

1.    E-books are cheap to produce and don’t take long to set up. If you have articles that you have already written about the subject you are promoting, you can simply combine these articles into an E-book.  If, on the other hand, writing isn’t your forte, you can use rebrandable E-books that have been produced by others.  Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search for “rebrandable E-books”.  You will get a lot of hits and have many to choose from.  One way to distribute these E-books to visitors to your website is to give them as a free gift for subscribing to your newsletter. If your E-book contains material that people will want to share with their friends and family, they will pass it along to them… they will pass it along to others…and you will make money.

2.    E-books are capable of reaching a large audience.  The only limiting factor is the enthusiasm or the participants.  Therefore, it is absolutely vital that your E-book contain something that people will want to share like timely information or humor.  Remember that people like to know something that the rest of the world needs to know. They will pass along something that makes them look like they are in-the-know.

Those of us who regularly shop on line are familiar with the array of free gifts, free bonuses and just plain freebies that are offered to a visitor to a website to encourage them to buy. How could you collect, select and offer free gifts, which will be valued as much as the original merchandise that is being purchased, put these gifts together and add them to your E-book? There are just three steps to do that very thing. They are:

1.    Identify your key words in each chapter of your E-book. Now, type those words into your favorite search engine. You are looking for free E-books on the same subject in more depth, by a greater expert than you are, or by someone who gives a new and fresh angle to the topic. Add a link to the free E-book in each chapter of your E-book.

2.    Research the Internet for related free gifts. Now you are looking for things that you could give as free gifts in your E-book that will make it more appealing and give it more pass-along appeal to your readers. For example: If you are selling gardening supplies, find a planting guide on the web that can be downloaded and include that as a gift in your E-book.

These are fiery hot topics that are sure to be on the rise. You can pull any one of these to use for your first ebook. Then come back and pull another topic for your next ebook.

Using the latest electronics. We are a society obsessed with having the latest and greatest technology. Do an ebook on iPods, email/camera cell phones, wireless Internet, digital TV, or any combination of these items.

Home improvement. There’s so much of a craze in this area that do-it-yourself (DIY) stores are on every corner of major cities. If you haven’t been to a Home Depot or Lowe’s lately, then you are one of the few. Sure, apartment dwellers and young students aren’t in this market, but people with homes and money to afford them are in this market. In fact, some cable TV services offer entire channels dedicated to home improvement.

Especially of current interest are in-home automation systems. DIY home improvers are eager to learn about and buy things that will make their home lives more relaxing, high-tech, or fun. Create a book to teach them how to make their lights come on for them before they get home from their jobs, or how to press a button to adjust window blinds, music, or temperature. Or how Bill Gates’ house works. Or how to add automation to an existing home, or how to build-in automation when a house is constructed.

Identity theft prevention. Especially because ebooks are marketed on the Internet, this is a great topic. This is because people who purchase over the Internet are concerned that their credit card numbers will not be seen by others or misused in any way. Even away from the computer though, consumers are on-edge about identity theft. Today, people are shredding their receipts, removing their personal information from the face of their checks, and cautiously covering themselves when they type in passwords at public terminals or ATMs. Microchips are being installed on ID cards. People are worried. Tap into this with an ebook!

Safety. Along the same lines as worrying about identity theft, people are worried about their safety from other things like crime, chemical warfare attack, and natural disasters. Watch the evening news tonight, and you will be able to list at least twenty things that people are afraid of. When you talk about safety, you are speaking their language. Titles along the lines of be prepared for any natural disaster would go over well, as would those like never be a crime victim again, how to defend yourself in a parking lot, or prevent sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Outsource Ebook Writing

You can outsource more than just rote writing to a ghostwriter. In fact, ghostwriters can be hired to research your topic fully on the Internet or elsewhere. They can then translate your or their research into organized sections and create palatable, conversational paragraphs for your readers. They can interview people that you designate or that they seek out for the ebook.

They can separate the ebook-worthy material from non-ebook-worthy material for inclusion with an eye on what readers are interested in and what you have hired them to write about. In other words, good ghostwriters will stay on the topic as they write and not veer off into irrelevant tangents. It’s actually an art form in itself to be able to insert quips and images that are designed to hold a reader’s interest while quickly and smoothly getting back on track to deliver the information promised by the title and table of contents.

Speaking of the table of contents, an experienced ghostwriter can review rough notes from you and propose a title and table of contents. Ghostwriters can start from notes, organize the material into an outline, generate a table of contents, research and add filling text, make boring information flow like an entertaining conversation, and more. They can basically start with whatever you’ve got to start with and get you from there to a completed ebook.

Where to find great writers

When you hire for a writer for your ebook, what you are doing is enlisting the services of a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter is a writer who publishes under someone else’s name, with the consent of both parties.

Traditionally, ghostwriters have been and are still today hired by celebrities to write autobiographies when the celebrities are not talented writers. Ghostwriters also sometimes create works for well-known authors, such as Tom Clancy. This practice is done for business reasons, because the author’s name alone will sell the books, no matter who actually wrote them.

Ghostwriters may also write for book series’ that don’t actually have a real-person author. An example of a series written this way is the Hardy Boys series you may remember from your youth. The Hardy Boys cover author, Franklin W. Dixon, does not actually exist. Many romance novel series’ have also been created in this way, where the author name on the cover represents any number or variety of commissioned writers.

Create a great sales letter for your book

The web page for your ebook should contain a sales letter that is immediately visible. In fact, your web page really doesn’t need to contain much else, unless you choose to use additional pages for other uses.

Here are the components of a great sales letter.

1. a catchy headline.
2. a list of amazing benefits for the reader. Tell visitors what problems your ebook solves or how it will improve their lives.
3. testimonials. Quotes from people who have read the book or from people who know you and are willing to write something great about you for your site.