By John Eberhard

One effective method of marketing for certain types of businesses is to create and offer a “free ebook.”

This ebook will usually be 2,000-3,000 words long and written on a topic related to one of your company’s products or services. It should be useful information, not specifically just selling your products. You can put a sales pitch for your product or service at the end of the ebook. It is usually mocked up attractively with nice graphics and pictures, then converted to PDF format.

The idea is that you offer this ebook for free, and since it on the topic of your product or service, everyone who requests it will theoretically be a prospect for your products or services. You are not asking them to buy something right away, so there is lower resistance, and you put that person on your mailing list. It is a way of building up your email list.

Then you build what is called an autoresponder series, which is a series of 5-15 emails that go out to the person on a timer after he fills out your form. The first one goes out right away when the person fills out the form, and has a link for him to download the ebook. You upload the ebook somewhere online, then your email has a link to download it. You do not have the ebook be an attachment to the email, as email attachments tend to be viewed suspiciously today.

Then you set up the autoresponder series so there is a 2-3 day wait in between each email. The rest of the emails can include more helpful information, but you definitely want some or all of them to be sales oriented. They should sell your product or service.

Some of the types of emails you can include in your autoresponder series could be:

• More helpful articles on the topic
• Testimonials from your customers or clients
• Links to your videos on the topic, including product or service videos, or testimonial videos
• Emails offering the product or service, offering a consultation or “strategy call,” or offering a special price on the product or service

If you send out a regular email newsletter, all these people who download your ebook get added to the list for the newsletter too.

This ebook marketing method tends to work well with high ticket items, and especially a product or service or topic that is not well understood.

When I was working with a nutritional training company a couple years ago, I wrote a couple ebooks on the topic of the training the company delivered, and these were generating about 100 responses per month. These people then received autoresponder emails selling them the introductory seminars for the training.

I have used this method effectively for many years for various companies. For one company that does insurance claims, I wrote an ebook and this got promoted. Then the largest trade magazine in the industry heard about it and decided to run it as a lead article in their magazine.

If you would like more information on how ebooks could work for your business, contact us at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.