Has Anyone here written an E-Book to market thier services?

[greenoak]

so right, we arent in the same marketing place, my income doesnt come from online, .my targets have to drive to my store.........i dont think its age....???.. ...most of my peers are trying hard, like i am to cash in and be effective on facebook.......
..did you realilze i could send an ad out to women between 30 and 40 who like gardening and live withnn 50 miles of me? thats pretty powerful.... thats why i would love to hear a discussion about the difference between impressions and clicks.... its a facebook decision i have to make sometimes..and im on the learning curve and guessing away like crazy.......

[RealProfitStrategies]

An ebook can work great as an introductory product to your services. Keep in mind that you still have to market the ebook to get it out to people. Does it make sense for your business to invest the time money and energy that it takes to market an ebook designed to market your services, when you could be marketing your services directly?

Two things you could consider are making a really well-put together, high quality ebook with a great sales page and selling it as a product and recruiting affiliates. Pay them a nice commission and give them plenty of affiliate tools (pre-written email copy, banner ads, articles they can use, etc.) so that they'll be motivated to promote it. This way the affiliates will handle a lot of the marketing for you, which will not only get you exposure, but you can also use this strategy to build a list of email subscribers and sell them on your services over time.

Or you could give away the ebook for free on your website as an incentive for people who sign up for your email newsletter, and then once they're on your list, you can use the emails you send them to market your services, establish credibility, etc.

[greenoak]

sounds good...im looking at it as some really good content they might be willing to pay for....and i could easily market it thru my facebook...810 fans,!!! today... and my website and blog...and our email list, over 2000 mostly actual customers....
right now im kind of worried about the production costs , like you mentioned..there would be some time, especially for t he first one....and ..my worker wants us to buy a piece of expensive software to do it right....
also im thinking about the text too....the basic stuff i want in it...so its a big learning thing right now....
i see a lot of good in the free thing.... but gettting 9.99 from 100 people sounds pretty good too!!!
im way too much of a novice to think about affiliates....but its interesting....it w ould really have to be pretty good for that!!!
ann

[vangogh]

If you're looking to create an ebook then there are no production costs. The cost is mainly in time to write the book, unless you find you need to purchases software to help design the book and turn it into a PDF. But the beauty of ebooks is the cost for each copy is essentially nothing. What kind of software is your worker wanting you to purchase. All you need to do is create a PDF and I believe Microsoft Word can export files as a PDF. If not on its own then with a free or inexpensive add on.

The idea behind affiliates is that someone like me could promote your ebook. If I send someone to your site and they buy the book you give me a percentage of the price of the sale. You would want software to set up the affiliate program since there's a lot of tracking involved. You need to know that a specific sale came to your site through my site and how many of those sales you received in a month. There are several programs that you can use to run an affiliate program and I think most will run in the $150 - $250 range. There are also a lot of decisions to make like how much of a cut your affiliates make. Too much and you don't make anything. Not enough and affiliates are less likely to want to sign up for your program.

[greenoak]

thanks vg...i will tell her that......my worker was thinking about secrutiy and talking about getting something from adobe...
i think i should keep the first one pretty simple and just go with a pdf file...i knew what the affiliate things were generally...not too interested in that so far.....
i would have production costs in paying her to do it.. her going thru our our pictures and rewriting from my outline and notes...its my idea but im not going to be doing the work..i love the idea of no production costs after that....
.ann

[vangogh]

I'm guessing she was thinking the professional version of Adobe Acrobat, which by the way you could still use. You can get a 30 day trial. If the content is completely written you should be able to format it within 30 days. It's not necessary though. Nice to have and use, but not necessary.

True about the production costs. What I meant is that all those costs go into producing copy #1 of the book. From copy #2 on there are little to no costs involved. Some, but pretty close to $0

[billbenson]

My question in using Word or similar to save as a pdf is can you include the security that pdf writer would? There are a number of free programs out there that write pdf's. Do they have the same security as adobe? Maybe they are actually better because they are less likely to be hacked as well??

[greenoak]

i think that wasa her reason bill....i dont really care about the cost if we could use it elsewhere....

[vangogh]

Why do you need the security on an ebook? I don't think it's worth trying to prevent people from sharing it if that's what you're thinking. People will find a way to share your book with or without security. They do it with physical books now and yet books still seem to sell.

How is your book going to be hacked and what would be the damage?

[greenoak]

she wants it and thinks its important, .... so im ok with buying it...i dont really have all your answers....she was reading advice about it somewhere else...
...i gather its so someone cant download it and sell it for themselves....why does anyone buy that program?
also today we are talking about putting hyperlinks in...and have it suitable for online readers and downloaders...
i have the outline started and a chart showing what pictures and text and links i want on each page....shes reading up on ebooks also so thats good....she does all the computer stuff for her church and soccer league....shes way above me...i dont understand this stuff at all...i just want the finished idea..andi wantit to be as rich and useful as possible....
ann