E-Books: Great Online Marketing Tool

The reason why Internet users love blogs is because they want to learn more about their special interests or share with other people who like the same thing. They also want to get the latest information from an expert–the person writing the blog, who may or may not be selling products or offering services. 

This is Why People Love E-books, too!

Here’s Ten–10–Reasons to Write Your E-Book Now

1) Driving Traffic: Your present or potential customers or clients are hungry for information on the subject you know best. If you offer this information, they will come to your site to obtain it.  This is a perfect way to encourage people to your Web site.

2) Building Lists : All web sites need to grow a list of people who are interested in their products or services. These are individuals who want to hear from you about new items, information and news about their product or service of interest. When you offer a free e-book, you capture the name of these people for future marketing.

3) Fighting Competition:   You need to distinguish yourself from your many competitors. What better way than offering free information?  When they have a choice, Internet users will go to the location with free valuable information rather than just a product or service listing.

4) Establishing Expertise: When you provide up-to-date, relevant information, you are building a reputation for being an expert in the field. People want to buy from individuals who are in the know.

5) Returning Customers: Internet users will go to sites where they find information and will return to these sites again and again. If you have e-books to download, they will keep coming back for more.

6) Growing SEO: Many of these e-books can be accessed by search engines, offering key words and extensive material to help with ranking.

7) Offering Flexibility: Do you know that you can now put your e-books on your own web site as well as book sites such as Amazon.com, free e-book sites, e-readers, electronic devices and other web sites? You can get a lot of exposure just with one book.

8 ) Growing Income: Once you establish a list that is interested in your topic, you can sell more in-depth and specific e-books to them. These can also be sold on other locations.

9) Making Contacts: Send a link to your e-books to potential customers or clients, the media, organizations who may need your services, consumers, legislators, professionals, and anyone else who would be interested in downloading them.

10)Publishing Ease: The best thing about e-books is that they can be done quickly, effectively and for a very reasonable cost.

**You have all the information in your head. You are the expert. You just need to get the information on paper. That’s easy with a few telephone interviews.

**An e-report of about 25 pages or an e-book of about 100 pages can be completed and on your site in a couple of weeks–cover and all.

**Just set aside several hours to establish the e-book’s theme, topics and chapter order, and a few times to be interviewed, and it will be done before you know it.

**Forget the high costs of ghostwriting a book from scratch. You are “writing” the book, but just with verbal versus written words.

Holiday Sales Rise Says Start Online Business

If you are thinking about starting an online business.  Think about it more seriously.  This holiday season saw another increase in online e-commerce despite the U.S. recession.

E-commerce sales rise 5 percent to $27 billion for the 2009 holiday shopping season in comparison with last year, when sales were down, according toComScore.

Tried-and-true business Internet marketing online ideas paid off once again. ComScore says that in this difficult economic time, those retailers who had enough  financial resources and a desire to invest in aggressive marketing and free shipping offers were the clear winners.

Another study following the holiday season shows that the larger online businesses did better than the medium- and small-sized ones. This was partly true because the larger companies have retail brick-and-mortar businesses attached to the Internet presence.  Another reason, these larger companies are devoting the resources to make buying very easy for their customers.

Lesson Learned:  Even when money is tight, do not forget about the customers’ online comfort.  When starting an online business, remember that the Internet buyers are becoming very savvy and spoiled. Check out online-business-guide articles for information on how to start your e-commerce Web site.

Online Customers’ Future Needs

Today’s online shopper is Web-savvy, which means online businesses must continually raise the bar and second-guess what customers will expect in the future. In the coming years, online consumers will want:

 –Enhanced Web site accessibility and usability due to ever-expanding new technologies.

–Greater multi-channel commerce choices, such as mobile devices, allowing Web stores to focus on personal relationships.

–More user-friendly and social e-commerce sites that expand community involvement and user input.

–Further reliance on retail Web sites that sell through catalogs.

–Increased use of Analytics, allowing retailers to offer top-level customized service and competitiveness.

–Expanded ability of digital downloads that rely on newly developed software.

–More integration between virtual and brick-and-mortar shops, such as at-store product pickup.

–A larger number of global Web sites offering a variety of safe and secure payment options.

–Expanded marketing budgets for online promotions.

–Greater dependence on long-tail options, such as cataloging, allowing a smaller group or niche of customers to find small quantity or customized items. The “long tail” concept describes the niche strategy where businesses sell a large amount of specialized products, each in relatively small numbers.

–More emphasis on building brand over only selling products.

–More personalization and community integration, where customers’ habits are recognized and catered to.

–Further expansion into new international markets to expand global presence.

–Greater reliance on other vendors who can offer the latest in payment provisions, such as Google Checkout™, where a consumer can conveniently buy from stores across the Web and track their orders and shipping information in one location.