Charging for an e-book vs. Viral Marketing

[scott]

[Tam]

[BalloonTwister]

...what's in it for the person distributing it?

Warning: this is kinda long (most of my replies are), but I think it has good info for Scott and for anyone interested in viral marketing...

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To go viral, you've got to give them a good reason to WANT to pass it on to others...and for them to pass it on in turn, and so on.

In some cases--and I think yours might be one of them--sites might consider your book worth while simply to offer as a free download even if it doesn't yield income:

- directly (by selling it and "keeping 100% of the profit" as the sales pages say for products with resale rights)

- or indirectly (by using a branding program and password you'd provide to insert one or more ads or change many of the affiliate links to theirs).

After all, the current wisdom is "give them some free stuff" to attract them, gain trust and keep 'em coming back.

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If you're trying to go viral by letting the people who get it from you change cetain fields within the book, consider this: what's in it for the first generation if those in the second generation can just change the same fields to their own ads or AP links?

If gen1 includes the branding tool and password, they probably lose the benefit, unless its for affiliate programs and the gen2's sign under them before changing the links. Any gen1 ads would be wiped by gen2...

And if they don't include the tool, gen2 has little reason to pass it on. Dead end.

As Tam mentioned above (sorry, not sure how to use the cool quote function), one good option may be to give the first few chapters free, then charge for the rest.

To expand on that, they'd download the whole ebook and be able to read up to chapter 3 but chapters 4 through whatever would be password protected. You'd then sell them the password.

You could do this either by simply revealling it on the Thank You page your payment processor sends them to after completing the trasaction...or by email.

And if you go that way, don't forget to "bait the hook" with references in the free portion to good bits in the paid part. And the last page in the free section should be, more or less, a sales page with "click here for instant access to my best secrets/this list of must have info/ or whatever...

Some food for thought.

[scott]

[koanwrangler]