When you develop any type of information product — a book, a CD, a comprehensive multi-media package, a home study course, or anything else — it’s essential to build within your product, mechanisms to drive traffic back to your website to capture the name and email address of anyone that may see your product.
Products get passed around. So you don’t know who all may be reading your information. If you’ve written a book that’s being sold in a retail environment or via someone else’s website then you probably have no way of knowing who purchased your book. Barnes and Noble, Borders and Amazon certainly don’t provide you this information.
So you’ve got to include something within that book that will cause the reader to come to your site and provide you with their name and email address. It can be a free bonus that can only be claimed online. Or it can be a newsletter subscription they can only get online.
It doesn’t really matter what it is — it just matters that you’re capturing their information so you have the ability to market other products or services to them.
The same holds true for any other type of information product. If it’s a CD put a sticker on the packaging to come and claim their free bonus at your site. If it’s a home study course put the information on where to get that bonus within the content of your course. And do it several times within the product.
If it’s an ebook you should have multiple links back to a specific website that will allow you to capture their information. Yes, even ebooks sometimes get passed around.
Your product should be a marketing tool. It’s your job to make sure it is.
