Need A Viral Marketing Expert's Advice Urgently

[lydia515]

Hello fellow warriors,

I'm currently involved in marketing my niche blog. I would like to give away a free e-book and would like some advice from any of you who has experience in this area.

Some questions:

1) Do I need to zip up my e-book? Is it a must?

2) My niche blog has mainly affiliate links that point to only one CB product. So should I offer a free e-book that covers similar fields or will complementary e-book do well? For example, if my niche blog is about motorcycles, should my e-book be about motorcycles or something related like motorcycle fashion?

3) Should I put up an opt-in form to grab e-mail address then point to free e-book or should I just point them to my download page? In other words, should I make it as hassle free as possible?

Please advice, fellow warriors.

Thanks so much

Lydia

[Jared Alberghini]

Hey Lydia,

OK, I'm just about to go off to get some zzz's, but I leave you with this...

Take a step back, forget all you know, and try to think like your customers would think...

Reverse your thinking... put yourself in your targeted potential customer's shoes, and you will find your answers.

Giving away a product with backlinks to you is the essential foundation to viral marketing.

P.M. me if you would like more info Lydia...

- Jared

[440Music]

I'm not an expert at marketing but I do have some advice that may help you answer your questions yourself.

If your e-book is available as a PDF I would not zip it as PDF files can be printed and downloaded straight from the web browser. If your e-book is a MSWord doc then by all means zip the file and let the downloader know the version of MSWord they need to view the e-book. If I had a MSWord doc I was giving away I would convert it to PDF as my first choice and second would be RTF (rich text format) WordPad is a rtf format word processing program. Every computer out there, including MAC, Linux and Microsoft systems have a RTF program as standard programs.

As far as the other questions are concerned I'll leave those to the other members who will be able to provide a more educated answer then I can.

TBones

[Thomas Belknap]

Lydia, your post makes it sound like you don't know what you are trying to accomplish. I don't think you have a plan, just throwing stuff together.

I would suggest sitting down and figuring out what you are trying to accomplish.

[lydia515]

Originally Posted by Thomas Belknap

Lydia, your post makes it sound like you don't know what you are trying to accomplish. I don't think you have a plan, just throwing stuff together.

I would suggest sitting down and figuring out what you are trying to accomplish.

Hi Thomas,

Maybe you're right.

I thought of just giving it away as a free e-book. So I thought since I'm doing that, I might as well collect e-mails to build my list right?

But if I were to put myself in my customer's shoes, I think without the opt-in box would make it more viral. People would just grab it.

I just thought to ask the experts' advice on what they usually do to get their e-book to be as viral as possible.

As for the topic of the e-book, I think it'd be really relevant if it was something that they want now, which is the main subject and not a complementary one. So I guess I'll stick with the main topic.

I hope I didn't leave something out.

Thanks everyone.

Lydia

[Jared Alberghini]

Originally Posted by lydia515

Hi Thomas,

Maybe you're right.

I thought of just giving it away as a free e-book. So I thought since I'm doing that, I might as well collect e-mails to build my list right?

But if I were to put myself in my customer's shoes, I think without the opt-in box would make it more viral. People would just grab it.

I just thought to ask the experts' advice on what they usually do to get their e-book to be as viral as possible.

As for the topic of the e-book, I think it'd be really relevant if it was something that they want now, which is the main subject and not a complementary one. So I guess I'll stick with the main topic.

I hope I didn't leave something out.

Thanks everyone.

Lydia

Lydia, I think you just answered your own question, and it seems to me that you are more inclined to make your e-book go viral, compared to collecting email addresses from an opt-in box.

I would suggest making your e-book download as accessible as possible... just keep it as a PDF, don't zip it, and offer it free without having to opt-in.

- Jared

[Loren Woirhaye]

Jared's right about that. You can even make a part 2
of the ebook with a link at the end of part 1 and that
way you can track how many people actually read part 1.

More work? yeah.

The viral stuff makes your brain hurt if you start to
think of the possibilities.

Collect the opt-ins on the part 2 download. In such
a credible situation you can get a lot of people to give
you a phone number and mailing address too... and calling
people is VERY POWERFUL way to find out what is
making your market tick, even if you have no big
agenda to sell on the call what you learn can be
priceless to your business.

[lydia515]

Hi Loren,

Thanks for your insight. Yes, you're right. This viral thing has a lot of possibilities.