Using e-Books for Viral Marketing Campaigns - The Answer
Ideal links should link to various selected pages on your site, and you should also be able to determine the anchor text, because this could be a very important factor in determining the exact words for which your site is ranked on the search engines. But unfortunately in linking you do not get to determine your anchor texts ALL the time. But with an e-book you could determine quite a number of your anchor texts.
You provide an e-book, and offer the people who download it rights to redistribute it for free. This gives web masters a free resource to offer their users. They immediately pull your e-book from your site (of course there is still the problem of getting webmasters to see your valuable resource). You then offer the web masters the option of selling your e book, even allowing them to call it what they like as long as they leave links back to your site.
Most web masters won't sell it, and the few that do won't get many sales. Most web masters will simply put the resource on their servers and let their users download. Note that the e-book must be in PDF format.
Some Models
An excellent model for this technique is http://www.seoelite.com/, which holds the top ranking for "SEO software." The entire site's publicity is based on the viral spread of his e-book or e-lessons in SEO. The book contains links back to "Brad Callen's" site seoelite.com with SEO software as anchor text.
I have personally run across the e-book at least three times on different sites; the fellow even ran full banner ads for the e-book on SEO Chat. This book has free re-distribution rights and even has a "deal sweetener" that helps satisfy a webmaster's need for revenue. The whole e-book can either be offered as a single course or as a series of twelve courses via email (with a very strong sell message laced into every chapter).
The Clincher for Seoelite
Really, this deserves a whole chapter. Apart from giving redistribution rights, seoelite.com now offers webmasters PDF re-brander software which they can use to replace standard links and place unique affiliate links back to the landing page. Now note this technique -- they give a free resource, then tell you that if you change the links to affiliate links (they give you the free software to do this) you get paid a certain amount every time someone who clicks on that link buys seoelite software.
So what happens? Discerning webmasters put the resource on their very best pages and do everything in their power to presell the SEO software. That's why despite all the bad press saying "seoelite is obsolete" (it even rhymes), seoelite is still a top (automated and DIY) competitor for many of the very best SEO (manual and outsourcing) companies.
