What Are the Most Effective Ways to Promote My E-Book?

            Well, you’ve finally written your e-book and got it up on your website. Now what? Unless you tell people about it, no one will know, and you will not be able to sell any. Now even if you’re planning to use your e-book as a giveaway, you still need to let people know about it. That is what promotion is all about. You can promote online as well as offline, but with an e-book as opposed to a hard copy book, most of your promotional efforts will be online.

            You may have put up a new website or a sales page and set up your e-commerce so that you are ready to take orders for your e-book. Now, you must promote the site! Without qualified traffic, nothing will happen. You have to employ strategies that will drive traffic to your website, sales page, Amazon, or wherever you are selling your e-book. Observe what other Internet marketers are doing to sell their e-books and info-products and follow the winners. Here are a few strategies to get you started:
 

• Speaking: you can participate in virtual conferences, hold your own teleclasses and webinars or be interviewed on someone else’s teleclass or webinar; people will perceive you as an expert and want to buy your e-book to learn more from you
• Writing: get your articles written as excerpts from your e-book and distribute them all over the Internet, wherever you can submit articles; also see if you can get a regular column on a website that your target market goes to; also write a monthly e-zine and send it out to everyone on your mailing list; join some Yahoo groups or forums and post valuable tips; post comments on other people’s blogs and set up your own blog.
• Networking: join a few social networking sites like Linked-In, Ryze, Twitter, and Facebook; there are so many these days, so take a few hours to investigate where your target market hangs out and post a few profiles
• Promotion: send out press releases to the free and fee PR sites; there are tons of them and they may catch the attention of a journalist who will do a story on you
• Direct mail: you must build a list for e-mail blasts and you must keep in touch with your list; it’s the way people build the know, like, and trust factor with you and then they will buy your products.
• Advertising: a lot of new Internet marketers selling e-books and other info-products often start out advertising with Google adwords or pay-per-click with a limited budget to see if it’s right for your product and your market; you can also buy ads in e-zines that your target market reads
• Affiliates: if your e-book starts selling and you think it will continue to grow, you may want to create an affiliate program where you offer to sign up other people who are affiliates that will sell your e-book and any other info-products you create for a commission. You can really expand your reach through this marketing method.
• Joint Ventures: share your e-mail list with others; swap bonus offers and endorsements; see how others can help you and you can help them; create win-win relationships.
• Directories: there are numerous e-book directories where you can list your e-book for free; do a Google search and get your e-book listed!