Do you think that giving away your eBook instead of selling it separately will generate you more business in the long run? I do, and that is why I am going to show you how to do just that in this article.

How do you make money by giving away your eBook?

It’s simple

You can use it as a viral marketing tool. It provides you an opportunity to give something to other people to increase the number of visitors coming to your website.

By providing an eBook to other people and giving it away for free, it creates a viral marketing mechanism that brings you business. It can be used as a great viral marketing tool.

Secondly, giving away your eBook can help generate leads to increase the number of people on your list or improve your database. Use the free eBook as an incentive for people to sign up for your list or provide you information for your database.

You won’t be able to get people’s names and emails easily anymore. In today’s age people are swamped with junk mail and have therefore become very protective with who and where they give away their information to.

In order to get that information out of people you have to win them over by giving them something they want or need. An eBook can work as an incentive for them to give you their email address, name, or whatever piece of information you are looking for because they are getting something out of it.

To go along with that strategy, here is another tip. When people are collecting email addresses and names, often they will have a section on their main website where people can submit that information. Once they have submitted the information many people give the download for their free eBook on the next page.

The problem with that is somebody can give you a bogus name and a bogus E-mail address that doesn’t lead anywhere, and they get the reward for doing that.

From my point of view that is not a way to gain respect. I don’t like to do that to people because I want to be respected in return. It is my goal in business to be as transparent as I can be.

Instead of providing them with the download right away, I send them to a thank you page that basically just says, “Thank you. The information for where you can download the free eBook has been sent directly to the email address you provided.”

Now the people who gave a real email and name will get rewarded for their honesty. An auto responder will send them an email immediately which will have a link where they can go and download the eBook.

Although you may look like your building up a database with a lot of names and email, if half of them are leading to false emails it is useless. You should really think about this concept because it won’t do you any good building up a database that is full of bogus information. You want to be sure you have set up measures to weed out people who would leave false information so your database and your business is protected.

Lets go back to how to give away your eBook. Research can be a powerful mechanism you can use to learn key information that would help your business. By using your eBook as a reward, you could put it at the end of a survey, so people will actually fill it out.

Asking your market is the best way to find out what new products or service they want, or how they feel about a new product you may have launched. One of my mentors, Alex Mandossian, has taught me so much in regards to marketing and he is known to use Ask Campaigns. Basically, this is when you learn what your market wants just by asking them.

Here is an example of how Alex uses this. He is able to bring in some of the biggest names in business and put together high-level teleseminars. Some of the people he has done them with are Brian Tracy, Harv Ecker, Mark Victor Hansen and Bob Allen. These teleseminars are with the who’s who in business. You name it, he has probably done one with them.

I know that he is setting up teleseminars right now with people like Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong and Steve Jobs of Apple.

For every teleseminar, he goes through the same steps to ensure the people paying for the call are satisfied. Alex gets them to submit their burning questions for the expert so he has a pile of material when he goes to do the call that evening.

By doing this, he knows exactly what people are wanting to know and he doesn’t even have to create any questions himself.

It is as easy as that. You can use this strategy. By providing an eBook at the end of the survey it will entice people to complete it and in return you will gain some really great market research.

Often times are like, Yeah, a survey. I don’t want to bother doing it. But if there’s a great reward at the end of the tunnel, they’re going to do it. So it’s a great way for you to conduct market research by providing a valuable E-book to give away at the end of the survey.

The other bonus from doing this is you will get information about what your clients really want. From this you can generate more products and services to fit those needs and generate more business.

You can now see there are many different way to give away something creatively to generate more business in the future. Put your thinking caps on and ask yourself what might be other ways this is possible.

May ideas come to you when you need them the most!