Viral marketing has become a very popular method of promotion, simply because it is so effective! The goal of viral marketing is to spread information on the web, creating a viral effect and attracting more visitors to your site. But did you know that many also make money doing this?
Viral Marketing in conjunction with Free Marketing can be very powerful for your business. Is there a 15-30 page report you can give to your email subscribers? Perhaps a chapter of his book? An hour of free consultation? Whatever it is, the line has been moved on advertising so that the customer now expects free information before paying anything. But if you’re giving something away for free, how can you make money off of it? Well, there are actually two ways:
1. Affiliate Branding – A popular type of book to create is a “How to Create a Website” eBook. Most internet marketing newbies have no idea how to do it, so it’s a great topic, but the authors of the book can actually make money from affiliate commissions. If the author tells you to go to GoDaddy.com to sign up for a domain and hosting, and you click their link, they’ll get a commission for signing up! This doesn’t increase the rate he pays at all, but he’s getting paid anyway. Affiliate commissions can come from domain registration, web hosting, other information product sales, and many other places. Affiliate links are literally “marked” in the e-book and the author is credited.
2. Indirect sales: don’t get me wrong. I think the above method is a great way to make money giving someone free value, and I’ve helped many get affiliate commissions. My motto is that if I am getting value from what is being taught, the author deserves some commission. But the other way the author makes money from these e-books is through return traffic to their site. Most of the time, the author’s website is placed at the bottom of each page, so the reader is constantly reminded who gave him this information. Even if they aren’t making money from this book, they know that a certain percentage of readers will return to the site for more information.
By giving the reader “gifting rights,” the reader can gift this book to their own subscribers as an incentive to join a newsletter, thus perpetuating this viral effect. The good thing is that the author can set the legal terms of their own e-books. If he doesn’t want anyone to reveal the information, just say so in your introduction. If you want the book to spread across the Internet, say yes. Just ask your book givers to leave all their affiliate links and website links intact, so you earn money on both affiliate sales and indirect traffic to your site.
I personally give three free e-books to my newsletter subscribers, simply because they are great books that you can learn from right away, even without buying anything. This has helped my marketing a lot and as a result I get a lot more subscriptions to my newsletter.
