Producing a viral e-book can be the most important aspect to determine your business’ success. Most people consider it the number one internet marketing strategy at the present time. Most businesses, especially online, have adopted this technique and used it to their advantage.

A viral e-book is a book that can be downloaded over the internet and most of the time, free. This e-book is also one that can be freely given away by readers after they have finished reading it. It is termed viral because of the fact that people would be willing to give it away to others for the benefit of the author.

What would make readers give it away?

As a consumer, what makes you recommend a product or suggest a service to your friends or relatives? Or what makes you do otherwise?

When you buy a product or use the service of a certain shop or establishment and are happy with your experience as a customer, you are most likely to tell your friends and relatives about it. People have this instinct to share what made them happy and feel good for others to experience the same thing.

Likewise, if you are dissatisfied with something, you will also tell others about the bad experience to warn them. This attitude of consumers is well-known to marketers and uses it to their advantage. And this is basically how viral marketing and your viral e-book works.

If your e-book is something that is really interesting and contains several information a person can benefit from, there is a high probability that the reader will pass it on to others who he thinks will be interested as well. It is similar to chain emails that contain jokes and funny stories that are continuously being passed around over the internet.

Another thing that will make your readers pass the e-book to others, and perhaps the most effective, is through affiliate links. If you make your reader be someone like a business affiliate, that would encourage him more to pass it on because he knows he will also benefit from it.

Let’s say you go into a membership shop and buys something. When you are already in the check-out counter, the saleslady tells you that if you bring in a friend next time who also becomes a member, you will receive $50 gift certificate. Wow! That will surely encourage you to invite someone to become a member, wouldn’t it?

The same concept can be applied in your e-book to make it more “viral“. You can give rights to the readers to include their affiliate IDs in your link. That would mean more sales to you because these people would register under you as an affiliate, at the same time make them earn with the affiliate commissions of your program.

However, there are things to be considered to make sure that you still have some control of those links that will be modified. There might be others who may place a totally different link which is not in any way related to your e-book. That will just ruin the process.

You should put clear instructions as to how these people can distribute your e-book with their affiliate links in it. There should also be an agreement in black and white to prevent some legal issues that may arise.

Also, make sure to control the amount of links in your e-book. Something that looks like a compilation of tons of affiliate links will discourage readers in proceeding with your e-book. It is also best to place the links in such a way that is not too obvious to the eyes of the readers. Try to sneak them in a clean way within the statements of your e-book.

Always remember, when you are trying to produce your e-book, your main goal is for it to reach the most number of potential customers in a short time and with a little effort on your part. So make use of your readers to help you achieve this goal. Utilize them wisely and give fair rewards to better entice them in passing your e-book on to others. Anyways, this is one of the principles of viral marketing.