How to market an eBook?

I haven’t written an ebook myself, although I’m working on it. But I recently got a question from Viola Olah asking: Do you know of good avenues to market your e-book? In this post I will talk about ebook marketing and ways to market your ebook.

So you’ve written an ebook. Congratulations! It’s most likely going to be a PDF file that you now have to put in front of those that are looking for it. Here’s a number of things you can do to market your ebook.

Is your ebook search engine friendly?

Make sure your PDF is optimized for search engines. Google indexes PDF files and often displays PDF files for relevant terms in SERPs. Just as any other page PDFs have meta fields. Make sure those fields are complete with descriptive meta that includes your target terms. Read more on this in my SEO for PDFs article.

Is it easy to locate by people and search engines?

Depending on how you want to distribute the book (free or for email address collection) you will host your PDF file on your server. If you’re giving it out for free, make sure it’s easily accessible on your website by both people and search engines. For people, make a call-out / banner in your site’s  sidebar to show you’ve got the book. For search engines, put the file into an easy to understand site directory (i.e. /files/your-marketing-ebook.pdf).

Is your ebook a part of ebook directories?

There are numerous ebook directories on the web that collect and help distribute ebooks. Make sure your ebook is part of those directories (full ebook if you share for free OR partial sample if you want to sell it or get people’s email addresses for it). For example you can create an account and ebook with Scribd or SlideShare (I’m pretty sure they do PDFs and ebooks too).

Will your reader be able to read your ebook?

Think about how people will view your ebook. For example, they may use Abode Digital Edition or a simple PDF reader like Adobe Reader. There are other ways to look at ebooks (iPad for example), but make sure your ebook is built for those devices / software solutions and the reader has great experience reading your ebook. For example, make sure that a proper table of contents is created.

In many ways ebook marketing should be very similar to marketing any other page on your website. These are some of the common creative ways to market things online:

1. Find a forum on the topic of your ebook and engage in conversations, mentioning your ebook every once in a while
2. Get a list of blogs on the topic, follow the blog, join the conversations in the comments to posts
3. Distribute parts of your ebook through article directories. Sneak preview of a chapter is free.
4. Distribute your ebook through ebook directories. Start with a list of free ebook directories. Check the eBook Freeway too.
5. Make your ebook a part of your online persona, spread the info across all your social media properties.
6. Get your book reviewed by a blog in your industry. Make sure your ebook is included in a list of resources on other people’s sites. Here’s a great example from Marketo.

I’m sure you’ll be able to find more strategies by searching Google for [ebook marketing strategies] or even [creative ebook marketing strategies]. But whatever you do, make sure you keep in mind these things: your product (what you sell, and why you sell it), your audience (who they are and why they would want to get you ebook) and places where you audience is online (what sites, blogs, forums, communities they frequent).