What’s The Best Free Ebook…
Posted on | October 27, 2008 | No Comments
…That You Have Ever Read?
I’m curious to find out how many people make use of the many free ebooks that are scattered around the Internet these days – and once they’ve dowloaded these free ebooks, how many people actually find them to be useful?
Many top marketers will give away free ebooks in an effort to promote new products, or alternatively to promote other products. They achieve this by providing plenty of links to the product they are selling or the affiliate product they are promoting.
But, and this is my question to you, is this technique dead?
I mean, I certainly see the value in providing information for free in order to show how useful and paid for information might be, however are many would be customers now ignoring these ebooks with the belief that most of the time they are low value and merely a sales ploy?
I for one am happy to download a free ebook here and there in an effort to expand my knowledge, and in truth if the information is helpful then I would be more inclined to buy the related product.
The one thing I will admit however is that sometimes these books just smack of being nothing more than an additional hook to try to make me buy something.
The number of times you read a fancily titled ‘Free Report’ only to discover that it asks more questions than it answers can be a little bit frustrating, so what about you?
Do you find yourself shying away from these free ebooks in an effort to only get information that you know should be good (by paying for it), or do you still believe that there is quality out there which can be had for nothing?
And if you are planning to give away a free ebook, do you have plans to actually provide some information that is useful to the reader rather than merely wrapping a sales pitch up in a different cover?
Here’s a couple of things I would suggest you do to make your free ebook more successful…
- Provide real value: Give the user something that they can use, don’t just slap together any old content and label it up as a free ebook with a random value of $47. Most people will very quickly decide for themselves if they agree with your assessment of content value, and if they don’t agree then they are even less likely to trust that your ‘megadeal worth $X,XXX’ is truly worth it.
- Use real content: If you can take part of the contents from your larger product and give it away without compromising the quality or desirability of the complete product, then why not do that. This allows the reader to evaluate your style of writing, the type of information you can provide and determine if it is up their alley or not.
- Limit the number of links: Don’t simply stuff the content of the free ebook with your affiliate links to a few dozen products that you are trying to promote. If you do want to promote a number of products then maybe utilise a ‘related information/products’ section that points the reader to more information that they can use to be successful.
- Do it professionally: There is nothing worse than downloading a free ebook and opening it up to try and read it only to discover that it’s poorly laid out, the font is hard to read or it lacks any type of layout formatting. Remember, if you make a poor impression with your free content it is unlikely that people will believe your paid for content is any good (even if it is the best thing since sliced bread)
So, hopefully these quick tips will help you ensure your free ebooks are more successful in the future, or maybe it will also convince you that you can still get quality content when it’s free.
Stay tuned, I’ll be giving a way a free ebook in a future post which I’m sure you’ll be dying to read, especially as I think the content is useful and should give you a good intro into the wider content that the author is offering.
All the best.
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