Copyright 2006 Rasheed Ali

Electronic books, or e-books, have been used as an internet marketing tool for several years. Electronic books can be purely informational or they can have a sales message that promotes your product or service. The many benefits of using electronic books for internet marketing include becoming known as an expert in your field, having a product that attracts visitors to your site, and having something you can give away to new subscribers or customers. In addition to providing your customers with solid information, e-books can also be used to create residual income and boost your income over time.

What is residual income?

Residual income is income that continues to flow even after you have already provided a product or service. The simplest way to think of residual income is 'do the work once, get paid forever.' Residual income used to be limited to just a few professions such as voiceover artists and musicians. Each time their songs or voice tracks were used in commercials or at events, these professionals were paid a royalty. Now that Internet and in particular marketing on the internet is so popular, you can earn residual income by selling products that can have automated sales.

What is an electronic book?

An electronic book is a short book containing information or a sales message that can be used in a number of ways. You can use these e-books to create awareness of your brand, provide an added incentive for visitors to stay at your site, as a giveaway to provide added value for customer purchases, sell valuable information on a particular topic, and to distribute as a free gift with sign up to your newsletter or members only area. These books are usually done in PDF format, but there are software programs that can create books that have turning pages like a real book.

How can I use electronic books to create residual income?

Writing an electronic book may be time consuming, but once the book is written, you can set it up so that the sales and marketing are automated. This means that the time you spent writing the book and setting up your sales systems will continue to pay off again and again. In order to make the sales process automated, you can hire someone to market your e-book and take care of sales. Or, you can save yourself some money and purchase a software program that will allow you to sell your book even when you're fast asleep.

These software programs make it possible to accept credit card payments and have each customer download your e-book as soon as the payment transaction is complete. Not only does this allow you to make money while you're sleeping, it also increases customer satisfaction. People love instant gratification, so being able to pay and immediately receive the book download is an added bonus and a great customer retention tool.

These are known as 'shopping carts' and many of the great ones have additional features like, auto-responders and an affiliate management platform. Yet another way to create residual income with an e-book is to embed your e-book with affiliate links. If you don't have any additional products to sell you can make even more monthly income by adding links to affiliate programs that you belong to in order to sell other products.

So'not only did you just sell your own e-book but you now have other income opportunities embedded in your ebook.

How can I get started with using e-books to make residual income?

If you're not a writer, you can find a freelance writer to develop an e-book for you before you market it as one of your products. Marketing can be accomplished with your web site, affiliate marketing, and special promotions. Once you have your book and marketing plan ready to go, you can set up an automated sales program so that you can start building residual income that will continue to grow as your sales increase.