Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts

Thursday, February 24, 2011

YouTube and Your E-book

YouTube and Your E-book
There is a myriad of different ways to leverage the Internet to build a brand image for your e-book publications, but none are more potent than online video.

The growth in the popularity of online video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion present a unique marketing opportunity for e-book publishers. But what exactly are these opportunities? In this post, I will examine some of the reasons why e-book publishers should be considering the use of online video to build brand awareness for their products.
YouTube, by far the largest of the online video sharing sites, is considered the Mecca of online video and for a good reason. Recent viewing statistics for YouTube point to an upward trend amongst Internet users for video content. Here are some vital stats for YouTube courtesy of http://www.website-monitoring.com:
1. YouTube has more than 2 billion views every day
2. The average YouTube visitors spend 15 minutes per day viewing videos
3. Seventy percent of all YouTube traffic comes from outside of the USA
4. Partner ad revenue had more than tripled in 2009
5. YouTube is monetizing more than 1 billion video views globally every week
6. The number of advertisers using display ads has increased 10 fold during the last year
7. Hundreds of millions of YouTube videos are watched every month on mobile devices
8. YouTube player is embedded across 10’s of millions of websites
9. YouTube video consumption across social media networks:
· Facebook – 46.2 years of video watched every day
· MySpace – 5.6 years of video watched every day
· Orkut – 12.7 years of video watched every day
· Hi5 – 1.2 years of video watched every day
With YouTube’s massive audience penetration, it is not difficult to see why you, as an e-book publisher, should be choosing online video as part of your marketing effort.
Contrary to popular belief, online video is not difficult or expensive to produce. Video production companies, such as Contrast Design, can provide high-quality online video for a modest investment, an investment which is indeed within reach of most online marketers. If you are feeling creative and have access to video making technology, then you can always create your own online video. Making your online video yourself is much cheaper than employing someone else to do it for you.
Once completed, your online video can be uploaded to the video sharing site of your choice. The great thing about sites like YouTube is the fact that you can upload your video for free.
Many video sharing sites offer online marketers some packages for building brand awareness. The most popular of these is YouTube’s Brand Channel. Using YouTube’s Brand Channel, however, doesn’t come cheap at $25,000 per channel, and for the small e-book publisher or online marketer, it does not represent a viable marketing option.
A more attractive option is to use YouTube’s standard user’s package. YouTube’s standard user’s package will cost you nothing. And while you won’t have access to the same features as Brand Channel, you can still create a fan following for your e-book publications by using targeted video content.
An alternative to YouTube is the French-based video sharing website Daily Motion. At the time of writing, Daily Motion gets over 72 million viewers per day, not as many as YouTube but still quite a significant number when it comes to a viewing audience.
Daily Motion has 26 categories for listing uploaded videos, including a business category aimed at helping small businesses and marketers to build brand awareness. Unlike YouTube’s Brand Channel, building brand awareness on Daily Motion requires no media investment. It is free. The only costs you are likely to incur will come from creating exciting video content for your audience.
With over 50 video sharing websites available to online marketers, the potential for building a solid brand image around your e-book publishing business is enormous and need not cost you cost you an arm and a leg.

Monday, January 24, 2011

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Writing E-books for Profit

There is a multitude of online opportunities open to the wannabe e-entrepreneur. From building membership websites, selling products on e-bay, blogging, publishing your own e-books and affiliate marketing, it is all a question of choosing the right opportunity that matches your demeanor and interest.

Perhaps the most open of all the opportunities available to wannabe e-entrepreneurs is the world of e-book writing and publishing. If you are passionate about a particular topic and you can write about it with some authority, then writing and publishing e-books might just be for you.

Writing and publishing your own e-books has several advantages over other areas of Internet marketing. The most notable of these advantages is the control that you have over the revenues you receive on the sale of your e-book product. In most cases you will be able to keep 100% of the profit.

E-books also have a sense of immediacy about them, which makes them the ideal e-commerce product for Internet marketing. Buyers of e-books can download their chosen e-book within seconds of paying for it, thus satisfying their need for instant gratification.

The other advantage of e-book authorship is the relatively low cost of production and distribution. Once written, you can reproduce and sell unlimited copies of your e-book at no further cost to yourself or your business.

Moreover, unlike affiliate marketing, you do not need a blog or a website to host or promote youre-book product. You can simply upload your e-book to an e-book publishing platform/host.

E-book publishing platforms are the Internet’s equivalent of a book store. Visitors can browse e-books much in the same way visitors browse books at the local bookstore.

E-book publishing platforms handle the payment transactions related to the sale of your e-book. When your total sales reach a certain threshold, say $100, you get paid. E-book publishing platforms normally charge a 20% handling fee for the use of their facilities.

Reliable statistics on how much e-book authors actually make from writing and publishing e-books are relatively hard to come by. But if you write your own e-book and sell one hundred copies of your work for $10 each, you do not need to be Einstein to know that $1000 is a sizable chunk of pocket change. Considering your e-book might have only taken you a day or perhaps even a week to write, $1000 is not a bad return on your effort.

The downside to writing e-books is the fact that the Internet is awash with e-book publications. These publications vary in size and quality but they are all, nonetheless, vying for the same dollars as your e-book. Your problem as an e-book author is one of differentiation. You need to differentiate your e-book offering from the rest of the market.

The key to differentiating your e-book from the rest of the market rests on your ability to identify a niche that is not saturated by competitors. So be prepared to do market research before you dive into your e-book writing project. Market research will save you time and energy and will help you to produce a better e-book product.

In the final analysis, whatever your e-book niche, you should always bear in mind that it is the quality of your product that will deliver on going sales. There is no point in having good sales copy if your e-book does not live up to the hype. E-book buyers can be extremely fickle. If they feel short changed by your initial e-book offering, then they are unlikely to buy your next publication.

If you want to learn more about how to succeed as an e-book author, then click on the following link: http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=ebook&id=63918