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Creating an ebook to give away and build your email list is a great way to get traffic.  But there’s a ton of stuff you need to do it right.

Read Every Tool You’ll Ever Need To Create and Launch An E-Book

There was a time when an e-book was considered a novel idea. It turned into a gold rush. People throwing stuff into a PDF file, throwing some slick marketing behind it, and basically creating income out of thin air.

Obviously an attractive concept. Then the gold rush mentality took over. People sold a lot of crappy ebooks. People also bought a lot of crappy ebooks. Just look at Clickbank’s Marketplace and you’ll find a LOT of really stupid ebooks – all of them claiming to be the secret to something.

Read:  The Decline Of The Ebook, And The Search For “THUD”

This is part of my 30 Days To More Traffic Series

One of my favorite ways to get traffic is to build an e-mail list. And I can build my list a lot faster if I have an e-book that I give away when people join.

Creating e-books to sell or give away has become very popular with people but all too often I find that people do a poor job of formatting their e-book.

I am certainly no expert on desktop publishing but I have written several e-books and want to share a 12 tips I have picked up along the way.

1. Font choice and size

The font you choose doesn’t really matter as long as it readable. You can choose Times new Roman, Arial, or whatever you want.

Just make sure you use the same font throughout and that it’s not hard to read.

When choosing a font size I like to go with size 12 or 14.

You want the text to be large enough that anyone can read without too much trouble but not so large that it looks like you’re just trying to make your e-book longer.

2. Margins

I know some of my readers like to print out e-books and read them while sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee. Having a hard copy  makes it easy for them to write notes or questions in the margins.

Because of this I like to have at least an inch of space for all margins (top, bottom, left, and right margins).

3. Have an introduction

At the beginning of my e-books I like to put a short introduction that tells the reader a little about the author.

Here is the introduction from one of my traffic e-books:

My name is Nick Stewart and I am the creator of Nick’s Traffic Tricks:
http://NicksTrafficTricks.com

If you want to learn lots of boring facts about me then go to:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/about/

I do not like e-books with lots of unwanted fluff and miscellaneous motivational stuff so I am going to get right down to the point.

Getting Traffic is not rocket science.  And it’s not that hard.  You just need to know the rules of the game.

4. Double line spacing

I recommend having your line spacing the 1.5 or double in order to make it easier for people to read your e-book. It also makes it easier for them to write notes or questions they may have.

5. Make good use of headers

You definitely want to break up your e-book into logical sections and have a header for each section. Usually your header is a little bit bigger then your normal text and might be bolded or italicized.

For example, take a look at this blog post and you’ll see that it is broken up into different sections and each section has a header.

6. Have a copyright statement

At the very beginning of your e-book you should include a simple and direct copyright statement.

Here’s what I usually include in the copyright section of my e-books:

This guide is copyright © 2010 Stewart Marketing Inc.

This report is NOT free.  You may NOT give it away.

[NO] Can Be Edited Completely
[NO] Can Claim full ownership
[NO] Can be added to paid membership sites
[NO] Can be packaged with other products
[NO] Can be sold
[NO] Can be bundled with other products
[NO] Can be broken into multiple chapters
[NO] Can be given away
[NO] Can sell Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Master Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Private Label Rights
[NO] Can be offered through auction sites
[NO] Can sell product as is without changing a thing

Of course if you are giving your e-book away for free and you want people to distribute it then your copyright statement might look something like:

This guide is copyright © 2010 Stewart Marketing Inc.

This report is totally free and you may give it away to your friends, family, neighbors, and your favorite dentist. In fact I encourage you to give it away.

[NO] Can Be Edited Completely
[NO] Can Claim full ownership
[YES] Can be added to paid membership sites
[YES] Can be packaged with other products
[YES] Can be sold
[YES] Can be bundled with other products
[NO] Can be broken into multiple chapters
[YES] Can be given away
[YES] Can sell Resale Rights
[YES] Can sell Master Resale Rights
[YES] Can sell Private Label Rights
[YES] Can be offered through auction sites
[YES] Can sell product as is without changing a thing

7. Table of contents

If you have more than a couple sections in your e-book then adding a table of contents will give your e-book a more professional look.

If you’re using Microsoft Word this is a piece of cake to do.  There are lots of free tutorials on the Internet if you don’t know how to create a table of contents.

8. Have an appendix

The appendix of your e-book goes at the very end and serves two purposes.

First, it’s a place where you put a list of all of the links referenced in your e-book. There have been times when I read an e-book and it mentioned an interesting link in one of its sections. A week later I opened the e-book and spent 20 minutes searching for that link. If the e-book had had an appendix with all of the links listed I would’ve saved a lot of time.

Second, it’s a place where you can put references and links to websites where people can get additional information.

9. Contact information

At the beginning or the end of your e-book you want to have a way for the reader to contact you with their comments or questions.

You can list your e-mail address or a link to your website.

10. Page numbers

If you’re reading the e-book on your computer then page numbers don’t really matter.

But if people print it out and decide to read it on the couch then page numbers are really helpful.

I prefer page numbers in the format of Page x of y.

11. Print it out

When you have finished your e-book and you think it’s perfect then you need to print it out and see how it looks on paper.  Many people (like myself) have a printer that only prints in black and white so be sure that you print it out in black and white.

Questions you should ask:

• Does it look exactly the way I want?
• Are the margins the right size? Is there enough room to write down questions and comments?
• Does the font, size, and line spacing make it easy to read?

12. Have someone proofread it

You may think your e-book is the greatest work of literature since The Count of Monte Cristo but you still need someone to proofread it for you.

When selecting someone to proofread your e-book look for someone who is a native speaker and has experience writing (or at the very least did well in English in high school).

One of my readers emailed me and asked,

How do I protect my e-book from being distributed and downloaded by people who haven’t paid for it?

You can’t

Once you’ve sold a copy of your e-book to someone they could turn around and e-mail it to their friends. Or they could put it on their website and make it available for everyone to download.

And there’s really not a lot you can do about it. There are a few things that you can do but some of them are probably not worth it.

Include a copyright statement

At the very beginning of your e-book you should include a simple and direct copyright statement explains that your e-book is not free and may not be sold or otherwise distributed to others.

Doing this will decrease the number of people distributing your e-book.

Here’s what I usually include in the copyright section of my e-books:

This guide is copyright © 2010 Stewart Marketing Inc.

This report is NOT free.  You may NOT give it away.

[NO] Can Be Edited Completely
[NO] Can Claim full ownership
[NO] Can be added to paid membership sites
[NO] Can be packaged with other products
[NO] Can be sold
[NO] Can be bundled with other products
[NO] Can be broken into multiple chapters
[NO] Can be given away
[NO] Can sell Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Master Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Private Label Rights
[NO] Can be offered through auction sites
[NO] Can sell product as is without changing a thing

Make people register

One thing you could do is require people to register their e-mail address and create a password when they buy your e-book. After they have registered they can download the e-book and in order to open the it they have to put in their e-mail address and password.

And if they wanted to send your e-book to their friends or post it online they would have to include their e-mail address and password so people could open it. I believe this would deter people from distributing your e-book.

There are a few downsides to this:

First, it would require additional software (which may not be very cheap) and some technical expertise to set all of this up.

Second, it would annoy some of the people that purchased your e-book and may increase your refund rate.

Third, someone would likely create a “hacked” version of your e-book that did not require an e-mail address and password to open it. They would start distributing this “hacked” version.

What about the DMCA?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. In theory it should protect citizens of the United States from theft of their intellectual property i.e. the e-book you wrote.

Unfortunately they are several hurdles that you have to overcome for the DMCA to actually help you.

First, you have to identify who is distributing copies of your e-book. You can do a Google search and find some of them but many of them you’ll never know about. For example if Bob buys your e-book and e-mails it to Sally, Fred, and George you will never know about it.

Second, you have to find a way to contact the person distributing your e-book and ask them to stop. Tracking down contact information can be difficult here on the Internet.  For example if someone posts it on their blogspot blog there may be no way for you to get their contact information.

Third, you have to contact their website host (i.e. blogspot) and notify them that this person is distributing copies of your work and that they refuse to stop. Furthermore you have to get the host to do something about it which can be tricky.

If the host is located in the United States then you can threaten legal action. But I don’t think you want to pay an attorney $100 per hour to stop the distribution of $10 e-book.

Is it really worth it?

Let’s say for example that you have an e-book that you sell for $10.

And every month 16 people find a way to download it without paying for it. Of those 16 people you can only track down 8 of them.

Of those 8 people it is very likely that only 4 would have been willing to actually pay for it in the first place.

So by tracking down these people the most that you can realistically recoup is $40 (4 e-books at $10 each).

And you may spend 10 or 20 hours tracking down these people.

Is a really worth it? I don’t think it is.

Focus your time & energy elsewhere

In the amount of time that it takes to track down a few individuals and possibly recoup a little money you could instead write another e-book. And the sales of this e-book would be worth far more than getting a little money from people that steal your e-book.

I personally believe that tracking down people who distribute your e-book is not only a waste of time but in a very real way a waste of money. You can make way more money by spending your time and effort producing great content and additional e-books to sell.

Welcome to Day 7 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Write a report or ebook and convert it into a PDF file and give it away for free. When you convert your material to PDF it (mostly) ensures no one can alter your material in any way.

You can easily create PDF documents using Open Office:
http://www.openoffice.org

Writing a short ebook is relatively easy. If you already have several articles written then you can put them together with a page break between each one. Add to the front of your ebook a title page which has the title of the ebook, the author’s name and a copyright notice. Following the title page is a page with the Table of Contents. That’s all there is to it.

Tips and tricks

Here are some tricks to get traffic from your ebook:

• This may seem obvious, but it has to be said: Make sure your ebook has real value to the reader! All of the ideas below will be totally useless if your ebook is worthless to the reader.
• At the top or bottom of your ebook put a copyright notice that allows people to share your ebook with others. The idea is to get the ebook distributed to as many people as possible.
• Put a link to your site in the front/title page of your ebook.
• Many people finish reading something and ask themselves, “Now what should I do?” You should put a link to your site at the end of your ebook.
• Put a link to your site in header or footer of every page. You can also put an enticing (and relevant!) affiliate link in your header (for some extra cash) and a link to your own site in the footer.
• When you link to your site make sure the link is enticing, promising additional information.
• Many ebooks have an appendix at the end. Instead of putting an appendix in your ebook put the appendix on your site and link to it. This not only sends traffic to your site but also allows you to keep your appendix up to date, adding further value to your ebook.
• There are many people with large email lists in your niche. Find out who they are. If my niche was Poodles I would Google poodle email list or poodle newsletter or poodle news and see who comes up in the search results. Chances are they have a sizable email list. Subscribe to their list and respond to one of their emails. What you’re going to offer them is to have their affiliate link at the top (header) of every page and you keep the link to your own site in the footer. All the list owner has to do is send an email to everyone on the list with a link to your ebook. The list owner wins by having an affiliate link in the ebook being distributed and you win by having everyone on the list read an ebook with a link to your site!
• Find other people selling related products and offer to have your ebook bundled with their product. In return give them a link in the header of your report.
• Submit your ebook to sites like http://www.scribd.com

More ideas

Additional ideas on how to create, package, and distribute your ebook can be found here:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/385_day-26-give-something-away-for-free/

Here is a guide to creating PDFs

http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/downloads/PDF_creation.pdf

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