Downloadable "eBooks" as a marketing tool

Has anyone had success with this?

[Zapatista]

I am giving a lot of thought to taking the text and photos from one of my education, non commercial websites and making a downloadable "eBook" out of it. This book would feature small, adword like ads for my commercial sites.

Looking at popular "download" website, many ebiz's there seem to be marketing through their downloads of programs and ebooks.

For my commercial sites, I am thinking of doing the same thing so potential customers could read it later, offline, at their convenience. The industry I represent sells a big dollar item where a customer might come back in a year or two. (It's not like the site is a shopping mall where frequent repeat visits from past customers would do me any good.)

My question is: Has anyone had any success with this marketing method and if so, please discuss your experience and advice.

[kyr01]

I do not have experience with ebooks, but I have a site with downloadable pdf booklets. The booklets are 6-8 pages of quite detailed information about single products and they were exactly intended to be read offline, targeting "dial up" people. Few points of note:
- The booklets seem to be a great way to gain subscriptions for a newsletter, just adding a check box on the request form;
- You can put a toll free number on them, which will be more effective than displaying the same number on your web pages, when people are busy browsing;
- I am using pdf since I want to be sure that our logo, phone number, email address and any other contact detail cannot be removed from the booklets;
Everything considered, I must say I am not able to calculate an accurate "conversion rate" for these pdf booklets, but I do believe that most of the phone calls to the toll free number are coming from them (which would be a conversion rate of about 5%, given the numbers of booklets and successful calls/sales). At the very beginning I did not have any faith, but now I would strongly suggest to put some kind of downloadable content on any site, at least to get newsletter subscriptions (very effective, about 60% of users subscribing) and to (hopefully) leave your name and contacts saved on the client PC.

[Learning Curve]

Zapatista, Why not just mention or discuss your commercial sites in the copy of the e-book and nix the "adword like ads"? Editorial mentions usually get a better response than ads.

[buckworks]

In many contexts, keeping ads clearly separate from body copy is a matter of editorial integrity.

[Learning Curve]

However, in some contexts it's fine. "For a handy comparison chart on X, see [link] on our sister site [URL]." Any further references to the site would not need the "our sister site" information, in my opinion.

[Zapatista]

Learning Curve, I am still churning the whole thing in my mind and haven't developed a definite approach yet. However, I hate it when a search engine offers Overture results at the top and they look a lot like natural results.

kyr01, thanks. Interesting...