How Ebooks Can Increase Pageviews

With just a few simple tricks, you can turn a free or paid ebook into a fantastic tool that can increase your pageviews and even sell future ebooks to current customers. Whether you sell your ebooks or give them away, you can use them as a reliable viral tool to build pageviews over time.

1. Use footers to advertise your page. The number one rule for ebooks as marketing tools is to ensure you get a working link back to your website on every single page. The easiest and least obtrusive way to do this is by setting up a header or footer that holds that live link; it will remain live in your PDF file upon conversion.

2. Lock your ebook. The worst thing that can happen: someone else can hijack your book and insert their own links. You are unlikely to catch this without extensive and expensive research. The best fix for this is to lock, or protect, your ebook. This prevents anyone who has it from converting it back into text; they can still steal it, but they'll have to completely reformat or even retype the whole thing. With so many unprotected ebooks out there, thieves are unlikely to go to that much trouble.

3. Instead of simple downloads, require your ebooks to be mailed, or set up a system through which you email a download link to those who have registered for the book. Why? You don't have a traceable record when someone downloads your book, but if you're requiring a real email to be logged with each download, you'll be able to send followup sales letters, or let your readers know when you have updates or sequels to your ebook. Be certain that followup emails leave the recipent a way ot opt out of receiving further communication from you.

4. Require downloaders to opt into your newsletter. Especially if you give away your ebook, requiring readers to opt into a content-loaded newsletter can give you a whole new way to promote your website. (Newsletters with good readership can also sell ad space within the text of the document, creating another revenue stream - and a highly-downloaded free ebook can build that readership for you.)

5. Encourage your customers to share the ebook. People are going to give it away anyway; there are few ways to control the distribution of the ebook. Instead of worrying about it, encourage readers to share your book with others. You don't really lose anything, even if you charged for the book; it's unlikely your new readers would have found and downloaded the book without someone advising them to do so. You gain new readers, new eyeballs on your link ads, and potentially new readers to your site.

6. Don't stop with just one. Whether selling or distributing for free, your first ebook is only the first step. To keep people coming back, write more ebooks and email customers notifications when new books are done. This will keep your work fresh in their minds, and you'll have a growing audience of repeat viewers.

By the way, an ebook doesn't have to be extensive, or in many cases even visual. It's perfectly normal for a good ebook packed with information to have no more than fifty pages, or for it to consist of a one-hour audio presentation provided it is marketed as such. The only important thing is that it should have good information delivered to its reader in a concise and targeted way.