One of viral marketing’s principles is to give away something for free. This will definitely catch the attention of a huge number of people. Free items are always the best when trying to introduce something new in the market.

Most businesses and individuals who adopt this marketing strategy have found different ways of giving away information and other things for free. One of those methods is coming up with an e-book and sending it to potential customers.

There are a lot of e-books available for download over the internet. Almost all of these can be obtained for free. But even so, it is not assured that everyone will read it, much less get it. So how do you make your own e-book popular and be read by the most number of people possible?

Tips on Producing an Effective Viral e-Book

Your main goal in producing a viral e-book is to get your product or service known to a huge number of people or to get huge traffic to your web site. But you don’t have to do all the work on your own.

The way viral e-books work is to initially inform a sufficient number of your target market. Then these first-hand customers will send your e-book to their own set of friends and colleagues, so will these second-generation customers. The cycle goes on and on.

But the question is how will you make your first-generation customers send your viral e-book to other people? What should entice them in distributing it?

First of all, you have to make sure that your e-book is of good quality. It should look professional and not like compilation of links all around the pages. It should not have the first impression of being an advertisement; else others will think of it as a form of spam messaging.

Your e-book should also contain valuable and interesting information about something that concerns the vast majority of your target population. It should be reader friendly in such a way that the format is consistent and the words are not so technical. Remember, you do not have control as to who will get a hold of your e-book and read it.

Of course, it’s not all about being interesting and informative. The most important thing that will make people distribute your e-book is when they know that they will also earn from it. It should be a mutual relationship. You should be getting something from it, as well as those who will help you pass it on to others.

This is what internet marketers usually call affiliations. Your first-generation customers are your first set of affiliates. They should be able to edit the links included in the e-book to add their affiliate ID or change the link to their affiliate URL. When the links are clicked, they will lead to your site but there is also credit given to the affiliate who sent the e-book.

With this, your site will get the traffic it needs; at the same time, your customers or affiliates also get something from it. That will give them the motivation to read through your e-book then distribute it to other people.

One thing to make sure though when you allow for rebranding or modifying the link is still maintain some sort of control over it. As the author of the e-book, you have the control as to what should be changed or modified. Make sure that the modification is just the affiliate ID or affiliate URL and not a totally different link which you may not have control of.

Finally, you have to keep in touch with your customers. The key to having a huge client base and maintaining it is to have a good relationship with your customers. Following them up will not harm you. It is actually a good thing to do to make sure that they read your e-book and pass it on to others.

You may also want to provide a few add-ons to your e-book. Additional information, updates and related articles to the topic you discussed on your e-book will continue to encourage them to spread the word about your book.

So before going into the nitty gritty details of writing the e-book itself, make sure that you have done these things, or at least gave a thought about them. Writing your e-book without defining your goal and coming up with a plan may be a waste of time and effort on your part since it may not be able to serve its purpose.