Today, free e-books are a dime a dozen.
Too many people are creating free e-books that tell you the same thing. Worse,
most of them are trying to sell you something or are just trying to make you click
on their affiliate links so they can make money off you.
Most free e-books contain articles you've seen dozens of times on other web sites
or on popular article announcement lists.
And unless an e-book has something very unique and valuable to offer, it will
be no different from the thousands of free e-books already available for download.
In a way, the novelty of free e-books has worn off.
More than year ago, I was creating one free e-book after another. They were great
giveaways and they did drive traffic to my sites.
But that was a time when free e-books were not yet heavily used as viral marketing
tools.
Sure, there were already hundreds of free e-books in circulation back then. However,
take a look at the many e-zines and web sites today. What's the most common thing
they offer?
A free e-book.
Creating and offering free e-books is now too common.
Many will still continue to create free e-books, but most of these e-books won't
have an edge anymore.
So, while everyone else is creating free e-books left and right, take a different
approach.
Create a free e-mail workshop, and let it distinguish your business, e-zine or
web site from the rest.
What's an e-mail workshop? It's a type of e-learning method. Instead of encompassing
a wide area of study or learning, it is focused on a specific skill, and is aimed
for a specific group of people.
Consider the advantages of creating an e-mail workshop instead of an e-book to
promote yourself, your business, your e-zine or your site:
- You don't need an e-book compiler in order to share information or knowledge
with others.
- You don't need to buy the expensive Adobe Acrobat program to create e-mail
workshops.
- Your target audience won't need to have certain programs installed in their
computers before they can read your e-book (e.g. Acrobat Reader, MS Reader, IE 4.0
or higher for browser-dependent e-books). Present your information in e-mail workshop
format - best if in plain text - and you're guaranteed they'd be able to read it
straight from their e-mail clients.
- You don't need to set aside precious megabytes on your site to store your e-book.
- You don't need to worry about the amount of bandwidth that will be used up
each time someone downloads your free e-book from your site.
- With an e-mail workshop, you'll be able to really track the people who took
it. What does it matter if your tracker says 1,000 people downloaded your free e-book
but you don't have a way to contact them? (And you won't ever know if they took
up one of your paid offers in the future.) You only have numbers with free e-books.
But what you really need are concrete leads - e-mail addresses - so you can spend
most of your marketing efforts on people who are in your niche.
Create a free e-mail workshop instead of a free e-book and you'll have something
people will refer back to again and again. They'll only need to open their e-mail
clients and click on your message.
And this is why you're better off creating a free e-mail workshop than a free
e-book!
