Viral marketing can be performed in several ways. Many of these different forms of viral marketing have enjoyed enormous success over the years. One proven application for viral marketing is ebooks.
Ebooks or electronic books are self-contained files usually in PDF format exactly like the document you are reading now. The document could be a website you've created in HTML, a Microsoft Word file or nearly any other digital media format.

When downloaded, the file opens up on your client’s computer, usually using the Adobe Reader software application that can be downloaded free from Adobe.com. Ebooks are very similar to normal physical books in the sense that they are rich in content. They are a huge resource for information.
Anything you can put in a physical book, you can put in an ebook and it costs practically nothing to compile your ebook.

If your site is about tropical birds, you might write a tropical bird guide. If your site is
about web design, you could write a beginner's web design tutorial. An ebook basically is a packaged document that allows authors a great deal of flexibility in presentation of content. Ebooks can be downloaded from your website and stored and read offline at any time.
Ebooks come with user-friendly navigation tools that lets the reader skip to any page or search for any keyword in the ebook.

Ebooks can be completely interactive with the Internet and can contain live links, graphics, forms, JavaScript, embedded video, audio, animation and more. Hyperlinks and internal search engines enhance navigation, allowing the reader to find items of interest quickly and
easily.

Ebooks will play a very important role in viral marketing over the next few years, no matter what the product or service offered by a company is. How can your business benefit from publishing ebooks with a viral marketing twist? Read on to find out.

Why are ebooks an effective viral marketing tool?
Here’s how viral marketing with ebooks works. First of all, it is essential that your ebook contains interesting information. It’s pointless to market something that is of no use to anyone. Readers of your ebook should learn something from the ebook. In this sense it is very similar to a physical book. A reader would throw away a book after reading a page or two if she finds it to be boring and dull. The same is the case for ebooks. No one would want to download your ebook if it is not rich in practical content. In other words, your ebook should have some useful information that the reader wants.
To use ebooks effectively as a viral marketing tool they should be offered to visitors of your website for free. The production and distribution costs of an ebook are generally very small. This is what makes it an effective tool for viral marketing. As you can see by reading my “Earn Money at Home” ebook, viral ebook marketing is not just something I talk about. It’s something I practice in my own business.

Your ebook should have the layout and feel of your business service or product, which would familiarize readers with your brand. Do you see how I’ve done this for our Earn Money service by Afqam throughout this ebook? The ebook you create would have a message promoting your website and a link to it. This will bring back the reader to your website and create an opportunity to generate business. Thus, ebooks can contain advertisements or links to your website that would persuade the reader to visit your website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have some message about your business and a link to your website that would interest the reader and encourage him to visit your website by clicking on that link. It’s simple really.

How does viral marketing come into the picture here? How do you ensure that ebooks can be given to more and more readers and in turn generate traffic for your website? A very simple way of doing this is to allow other visitors to your website to download your ebook for free
and allow them to give away the ebook for free to others. Be sure to include hyperlinks to your website throughout the ebook. Also, you can include brief advertisements and all kinds of other things if you want.

Your customer can either upload the ebook on their own website or offer it to their friends through email in the form of an attachment. To make the ebook even more appealing to your customers you can offer them incentives. For example you could give your customer the ability to brand your ebook with their own affiliate ID for your product so that they earn a commission every time a person visits your website (through their branded version of your ebook) and buys a product. Affiliate program software (discussed earlier) can be integrated with your website that would give you a detailed analysis of all your visitors and track the affiliate who referred them.
Now your affiliate can give away your ebook to others, which makes them look good for giving something valuable away for free.

Plus, every time your affiliate brings in traffic to your website through their branded version of your ebook, they earn a commission. This gives your affiliates a reason to be excited and tell others about your ebook. Imagine this scenario duplicated by hundreds and potentially
thousands of people passing around your ebook and you’ll get a sense for how quickly your marketing message can be spread across the Net.

This is exactly what is being done with the “Earn Money at Home” ebook right now. I could have turned this information in this ebook into a paid product if I wanted to, but I know the benefit of viral ebook marketing far outweighs the profits I could earn selling this information online.
To further benefit from ebooks, you can allow your customers to copy, change, and co-brand the ebook, which would contain a few ads and links about their own sites in addition to your own links. This will also help your customers to generate traffic for their websites.

Think about it… The more incentives you add to your ebook that inspire other people to pass your marketing messages around, the more you will benefit from viral ebook marketing. It’s that simple.
Ebooks are one of the best promotional tools online. With its vast variety of uses, just one quality ebook development and distribution can produce an on going viral marketing tool that will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week spreading your marketing messages around the world exponentially.

Tips for Creating an Ebook
The most important aspect of an ebook is the content. Unless the content is well written and interesting, you will find it hard to attract customers. So the first rule of thumb is to produce useful content.
The format of the ebook is also very important. I recommend that any ebook you develop be created as a PDF file. The main advantage of using PDF is that it works with almost all operating systems whereas many other types of files cater only to Microsoft Windows users.
Additional tips to consider when creating an ebook include: Make sure your source code is protected. This should be done for security reasons. Your source code may allow
unauthorized users to hack into your website which is the last thing you would want from a marketing campaign.

Allow icon customization (allow using custom icons for your ebooks).
Allow resizing of the compiled ebook to the preferred size. Resizing and icon customization basically allow your customer to change your ebook according to their own preference. You could allow your customers to reformat and edit content from your ebook. However, care should be taken that they are not allowed to delete advertisements and links to your website. Making links and advertisement un-editable can be done while creating an ebook.

Allow co-branding of your ebook. This is a very successful strategy and gives your customers a huge incentive to download your ebook and pass it on to their customers.
Create an ebook search function. This provides easy navigation. Readers should be able to skip to any page in the ebook directly. They should also be offered keyword
search functionality that enables them to search for a particular keyword in the ebook.
Support Flash Files, Shockwave, JavaScript, DHTML, Audio, Windows Media, Midi Files and other formats.

Insert a tracking feature in your ebook that tracks the number of people who have downloaded your ebook. There are many different ebook compilers on the market that can help you accomplish everything discussed above. Simply do a search engine search for “ebook software” or “ebook compiler” and you’ll find plenty of options. The two software programs that helped me turn this “Earn Money at Home” ebook into one of the most popular and widely read Internet marketing ebooks of all-time are Adobe Acrobat at Adobe.com and viralPDF at ViralPDF.com