eBooks: Path To Home Business Riches?

by Rick Carbone

Can an eBook be a path to success for your online home business? It depends on several factors. First though it’s important to understand today’s value of an eBook on the Internet market.

Not that long ago you could write an eBook on a popular target and provided that you knew how to advertise your ebook you could make a lot of money. The Internet was still evolving, nasty viruses were around but not as commonplace as today and there was a lot more disposable income to spend on making it to the Internet big time. The plain truth was that if you had a halfway decent idea and had the resources to write an interesting story, people were buying digital information products as if they were not making them anymore.

As the saying goes" that was then this is now," Today’s Internet buyers are jaded, and for good reason. Too many have been burned by mediocre ebook products that provided no insight whatsoever into making money and even at the low giveaway pricing of $19.95 it still "ain’t" a bargain.

Does that mean that eBooks have no place in the home business marketing plan? Absolutely not. As the Internet and ecommerce is evolving so is Internet marketing and the trusty old ebook is part of the evolving program. How is this so, you may ask? Simply put ebooks are making a comeback but not in the same way as before.

Online Home Businesses are utilizing the ebook in different ways. The first and foremost is the ebook giveaway.Home business marketers are embedding links to their sites or affiliate products and allowing the distribution of the ebook to anyone. This in a sense makes the ebook viral. It’s a good way to freely advertise anything provided that the ebook has some relevance to a given topic or idea.

Using the ebook as an affiliate tool. This method calls for utilizing branding software that allows your affiliate to brand an ebook. This works if you are selling a product that improves something. The ebook talks to the problem and the solution is your product. When you give the ebook to your affiliates they brand the ebook with their affiliate link with you and give it to their viewers or customers. When the customer buys through the affiliates branded link you get a sale and your affiliate gets a commission. This is also called viral marketing.

Give an ebook away on your website to develop new customers. This is one of the most popular ways to use an ebook. Offer it as a "freebie" for sign-up to your newsletter, website or membership site. This still works, although not as well as it did a few years ago.

The next question is what format should you create your ebook in for the widest distribution? That’s an easy answer. There is no wider distribution than PDF. It’s an international standard, just about every PC or MAC owner has the Adobe Reader on their computer. That doesn’t mean that other ebook formats such as .exe aren’t useful, they are and that’s another article.