How to Give Away an eBook

I have a short eBook now that I am giving away called Business 101 for Engineers. Here are the important points on how I've got it set up:

1. the eBook is free. It is the first proof of value.

2. the eBook is essentially the first 5 articles in my blog (Business 101 for Engineers Blog). If you remember, this was the plan when I started writing the blog.

3. I will be shortly revising the eBook to have a call to action at the end (first it will be to sign up to my newletter to learn more. I can change this to order my next book, or course once I have that stuff ready). The sign up call to action will always direct people to my main page so that when I add new offers they will see them, even if they weren't there when they got the eBook.

4. you can order the book from my main page (BoundlessThinking.com) under the Books link. If you go this route you get a very short and to the point order form since you have already clicked on a "Free Download" button to get to the order form.

5. The main page website has been cleaned up with the sole purpose of making it possible for people to actually order something on-line. At this point there is nothing up here that I make money on, but the basic structure is there in the books section now. Overall, what I do now is recommend some books that have helped me, and point people directly to some place they can buy it. I also removed any placeholders that are not ready for action yet so that everything on the page works.

6. the eBook has its own domain and landing page. The domain name is the title (Business101forEngineers.com). If you go here you get a longer sales letter explaining the benefits you can get from reading this book. This cost me $10.

7. On the long copy sales letter there are multiple calls to action ("Get it now" links) that all jump to the order form at the bottom. You should have 5 to 7.

8. The long copy page has only one purpose, to get people to download the eBook. There are no links or references to anything else. After they download the book I can distract them with other stuff. Sales copy must have a single clear purpose and focus. There are only 2 choices given: get the eBook, don't get the eBook. Don't muddy the waters.

9. Since I don't have any testimonials yet I decided to have some fun with that in the mean time. Take a look and you'll see what I mean. I'm not really sure if this is a good idea or not.

It occurs to me that maybe I should explain the 3 types of web pages: Branding Page, Sales Page, Contact Gathering Page. I'll try to make that my next topic as its rather important.

That's it for today