How to Create a Free eBook Giveaway in a Jiffy: Key to Building an Email List
I am not the first one or the last one you will see write or hear say that building an email list for your business is important, and the sooner you do this the better.
An email list is important because it allows you to stay connected with your readership base. Email is also the most effective and cost efficient way to directly market to your base.
One of the common ways I see online business owners, including myself, build an email list for their business, is by offering a free eBook giveaway to entice readers to sign up for their emails.
Creating an eBook is on the list of many, and rightfully so. It is an easy way to take what you already know and package it in a valuable offering, either to hand out free or to sell. eBooks are a great way to generate some passive and residual income online.
eBooks are also a good way to start experimenting with making money online without having to own your own website or blog. You can read about how here.
For most, the process to publish an eBook starts from scratch, with just an idea in mind. For some others however, the process can be quicker and easier. If you already have documented work somewhere, published or not, you can leverage what you have and package it into an eBook. Why recreate the wheel?
For example, if you have articles you have written on a specific topic, why not take those and build on them to make a book out of it? If you are a blogger, why not take some of your posts about a specific topic and chronologically arrange them into an eBook? This is exactly what many do.
Many readers ask me whether they should first focus on building content or writing an eBook. This is an interesting question because both are important. You need content to get your website going, and you also need an incentive for your readers to opt into your email list.
One way to do that is to focus on writing quality content for your website. When you have enough of it, package it into an eBook and offer it as a giveaway.
Before you do, make sure you do a spell check, read it out loud and check for context (a book readers different in its context compared to a stand alone blog post or article), run a find / search for words like “blog”, “post”, “article”, etc because you don’t want your eBook to simply be a slapstick of all your blog posts.
Make sure you read your eBook, change the tone where necessary and needed, wordsmith it all around before finalizing it. When done, prepare a table of contents and wallah you’re done.
Go to Elance and get a nice professional looking eBook cover designed for your latest masterpiece.
I’ve published well over 25,000 words on writing, publishing, marketing and profiting from an eBook. You can read about my experience here.
You can also read about my experience with a single stop eBook distribution platform that makes your eBook available for sale on several major publishing platforms here.
Do you have an eBook yet? Why not? What’s stopping you from becoming a self published author? Do you have any questions or concerns about the process?
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22 Responses to “How to Create a Free eBook Giveaway in a Jiffy: Key to Building an Email List”
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Hi Brother
Excellent website along with a excellent subject too.Your tips is very useful for me.Its really a educative topic.I truly obtain astonished to see this particular many thanks.
welcome to the blog Shan
Good tips, I have struggled with email opt ins but have not tried to incentivize the opt ins with and EBook, its something I have planned on doing. Thanks for sharing.
most welcome Jon. with saturation, I feel today it’s almost a necessity to offer something of value
I haven’t done a newsletter or given away any ebooks for free, but each year I create a new ebook of the recipes I posted over the year.
what do you do with those annual ebooks Edward?
Sell them for 99 cents.
good way to “get the word out” for exposure
Now, I have a project to create the 1st ebook for passive income and learn all articles from this website, it’s very useful. I have searched from other sites but it’s never got what I need it. Thanks a lot Sunil.
let me know if you have any questions as you get along Cipto
Tip: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT buy PLR and give it away (unless you know the author and know they product good stuff). Out of the dozen or so PLR e-books I have received for free or paid for, I could not be happy with 95% of them without spending serious time rewriting them – and in the time I took I could have written my own original ebook.
Word to the wise…
many don’t have the ability to write fluidly at will. for them, PLR are a good way to get started. I do agree that simply taking a PLR article and distributing it is not most ideal. some tweaking is needed at any level when piggy backing on someone else’s content.
I remember reading a free ebook from the now defunct blog “far beyond the stars” called “How To Create a Movement”. This book obviously took less than a week to write. It was very short but very good. I would have been happy with this book as a free give away for signing up to an email list. It was based of Derek Sivers post about leadership.
This book was well designed, well written and the idea was unique. Instead of giving away any ebook, effort and creativity matters. We should all take the time to think about how unique and helpful our free giveaways could be instead of just giving away the obvious information.
-David
most definitely David. if what you are giving is not of value, your reader may opt out shortly after. drop out rates should reveal this pretty quick
I’ve just started to create an ebook for one my website. Its not that easy as it looks like. I’ve written main content and will now hire a freelancer to do proof reading work. Lets see how things turn around at the end.
if you are writing on a new topic it can certainly be challenging, but if you are writing about a topic you know inside out, it should just be a matter of organizing thought and content, no?
I noticed you are using WordPress as your blogging service.
I am considering getting the same. Is it challenging to try?
Does one have to have any knowledge of Web-page coding to make it work?
I’d actually value your feedback!
I use Thesis. read about my article on why I use this
you dont actually show how to create an ebook…really??
Jeff, have you read the entire series? Happy to hear your thoughts on what is missing so I can add it
Well, it depends on what type of ebook you want to create, for example in my case, I created three different ebooks last year which contained only a few schemes and text.
These ebooks have no menu, but they are protected with a licence and the security program has also a few features which let the user to use an internal search engine to navigate easier through my ebooks.
Miller – I then assume that you are using these as lead magnets to your actual business? What are they priced at?