by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 12, 2009

Selling e-books can be an extremely cost effective way of making a serious income from your writing material. We can sign up with such as Clickbank, who have over a hundred thousand affiliates working for them on a commission basis on countless different sites around the Web, or we can simply promote and sell the books ourselves, for free, without having to pay anyone any commission at all.

The second option is the one which I am sure would appeal most to most people, so how do we do it? How do we in the first instance get the word out that our book exists and subsequently convince people to buy it? Essentially, we do both at the same time.

I am assuming for the purposes of this article that the e-book has already been written and is ready and available to buy, so the first step I would suggest is to build a Squidoo lens about it. Squidoo is a fantastic Web 2.0 hosting site which allows the writer or web designer to build a page or series of pages - called lenses - on virtually any subject of his own choosing. This is done by utilising a series of what are essentially building blocks, called modules. There is the simple text module, which will be the one most familiar to the average writer, but also dozens of other modules from linking lists, to modules which allow us to sell products via the likes of Amazon and eBay, to modules which allow us to include graphic imagery on our lens. Squidoo also enjoys great favour with the major search engines and lenses are often found occupying the number one position of many thousands of entries.

Our first lens set up, we should switch to Hub Pages, which is essentially very similar to Squidoo. Both Squidoo and Hub Pages allow us to earn in a variety of different ways as we promote ourselves and our work so very much provide a win/win service. Link from both these sites to the one selling your e-book and vice versa.

We then want to promote our Squidoo lens and our Hub Page. The first way and quickest one-off way of doing so which I would suggest is to link to them on the variety of different bookmarking sites which exist around the Web. Sites such as Digg, Delicious and Reddit have magnificent potential for driving traffic our way and also provide powerful back links to our sites which always increases our standing in the eyes of the search engines.

It is then time to promote our pages on the likes of MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. Join such as groups and forums on the sites, make friends, all the time speaking about your sites and your e-book and sprinkling links here, there and everywhere which is appropriate.

These procedures will get us started on the self-promotion of our e-book but we must remember to keep our lens and Hub fresh with new or updated content on a regular basis, to maintain their visibility with the search engines. In between times, we can start on a new e-book and follow the whole procedure again from start to finish.

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