News10 ideas to market and monetize your digital book or whitepaper

10 ideas to market and monetize your digital book or whitepaper

Are you planning to create a digital guide for your customers? Or a downloadable checklist or a whitepaper?

Are you planning to create a digital guide for your customers? Or a downloadable checklist or a whitepaper?

Whether it’s a huge book or a few-page long digital guide, you have quite a few unique ways to market and monetize it.

Creating a digital book can help you with quite a few marketing goals:

  • Downloadable assets build loyalty allowing your customers to take your brand home
  • It can be an effective lead magnet
  • It can be used to attract backlinks and social media votes
  • It is a powerful influencer marketing tool

Whether you plan to publish a paperback or a digital book or both, there are quite a few ways to market it online.

From social media to blogging, the opportunities for spreading the word about who you are and what you do are nearly unlimited online, leaving you with a vast sea of potential with which to perfect your work and hawk your wares.

Here are just a few actionable tips to market your digital book online.

1. Monetize your book through a course

Co-promoting a book and the course is a productive way to build your niche authority while monetizing your expertise.

You can monetize your free book through a course or you can offer the book as a bonus download for everyone completing the course. I’ve done both giving away a few first chapters for free enticing people to enrol onto the course to watch videos and download more.

Kajabi is a great platform to come up with content upgrades that you can put together into courses and packages to sell online. It provides you with powerful themes, hosts your videos, processes payments for you and gives you access to the community that can become another powerful source for your content discovery.

It even let’s you create landing pages to promote your book and build easy to build email drips to interact with readers.

kajabi

2. Turn your digital book into a flipbook

More and more of your potential customers are going to land on your pages using mobile devices. Serving them a special call-to-action with a smartphone-friendly product is the best way to convert them.

Flipsnack is a great free way to turn your digital book into a flipbook your visitors will enjoy interacting with. You can even embed a flipbook on your web page. You can see dozens of awesome examples here:

Flipsnack

3. Create a landing page or a dedicated niche website

In order to make the most of what the internet has to offer, consider launching a new site on your book. You can join our challenge to get that job done easier by using the help of the community. There’s no cost involved, so check it out.

Start a new site

4. Invite contributors and reviewers

These days when the internet has made collaboration so easy, there’s no excuse for doing anything alone. Invite known niche influencers to contribute a quote to your digital book or provide a short testimonial.

Having well-recognized name on your landing page will make promotion much easier. Here’s a good example for your explanation:

Invite contributors

5. Reach outside of your social media circles

Too often authors expect their books to catch attention simply because they are well-written, but this is rarely the case; in a world filled to the brim with writers and hundreds of new books published every single day, it can be very difficult to stand out in the crowd.

In order to give your book the exposure that it deserves, you’ll need to turn to the ever-popular world of social media.

Start out by submitting information about, excerpts from, and articles related to your book on popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, then take the time to utilize a free tool like Viral Content Buzz in order to push them as far and wide throughout the social media landscape as possible.

Viral Content Buzz

Make sure to promote all articles that mention your book too! Promote your promoters!

6. Engage with your supporters

Set aside a bit of time each day – as few as 15 minutes should do the trick – to answer questions, respond to comments, join in on chat sessions, and start new conversations of your own.

This kind of effort is sure to lead to memorable engagement, helping to push interested parties over the edge when they’re deciding whether or not to invest in your work.

Use Commun.it to manage your online engagement, especially if you cannot afford the time to chat online daily responding to comments.

Commun.it

7. Set up dedicated social media profiles for your book

It’s a common question: should I create a separate Twitter account, a separate Facebook page, a separate Instagram profile, etc. for my digital book project? My advice is always, you should.

Branded social media presence allows for more opportunities even if you only use the accounts to broadcast your business social media updates (when you have no time for anything else). They will build up their own following and will ultimately increase your risk.

I use MavSocial to broadcast to multiple social media accounts and pages and semi-automate the process. I also use Cyfe to monitor social media growth of my accounts and spot any negative trend if any:

Cyfe

8. Market your book on Amazon

There’s a weird thing going on with Amazon writers: the minute you are there, you are considered an authority. It will be much easier to market yourself as a serious writer once you establish yourself as an Amazon writer.

Getting on Amazon is not tough: Here’s a very detailed tutorial. It’s promoting your book there which will take some considerable time. And having a listing with no reviews will do no good for your brand, so you’ll have to dedicate some time to getting your book reviewed on Amazon.

amazon direct publishing dashboard

The good news is, the connections you make along the way will last for years, so you won’t waste your time. You can also market yourself on Good Reads too.

9. Set up a launch party on Twitter

Regular Twitter chats may be exhausting to set up and market but a one-time event could give you a huge boost without taking too much time. TwChat is a great tool to host the party: It takes minutes to set up and you get a well-branded neat landing page to promote.

Here’s a good example of a book launch party hosted on TwChat.

#WeNeedToTalkGuide Twitter launch party

You can use your branded hashtag later on any time you mention your book on Twitter. That’s a great way to consolidate and market Twitter sentiment.

10. Never give up

Often, writers find themselves ecstatic about the possibilities their finished work present which provides them with a boost of energy and good spirits that can lead to a great job done of marketing and pushing the finished product.

Conversely, though, the lack of initial results that they’re sure to experience can cause those hopeful feelings to dry up very quickly, leaving a despondent – and often lethargic – writer and marketer behind.

To avoid this trouble for yourself, be sure to go into your marketing phase with the same patience that you used to craft your digital book to begin with, working with the understanding that every worthwhile endeavour takes time to come to fruition.

Keep working hard through both the good times and bad, and don’t allow a lack of success – or even success itself – to slow you down.

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

whitepaper | Analytics The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing

whitepaper | Analytics Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

whitepaper | Digital Marketing The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

whitepaper | Digital Marketing Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y