Home
| Leisure
| Electronics
| Kindles
| How Can a Business Use Ebooks?
How Can a Business Use Ebooks?
by April Wilson
-
Overview
With e-books becoming more accepted by the mainstream, many companies are looking to capitalize on their use to enhance their every aspect of their business. From giveaway bonuses, to additional sales opportunities and increased communication with employees, e-books can be utilized to grow and manage your business now more than ever before.
-
Employee Manuals
Save the expense of a printed employee manual by creating your manuals online in PDF format. Employees who have an e-reader such as a Kindle, Sony e-reader, or Nook will be able to put your manual directly on their e-reader, while other employees can simply save and read the file from their computer. Use a tool like Office Policy Manual to make creating your e-book easier.
If your employee manual contains proprietary company information, you can use digital rights management (DRM) to lock the content. If the content is especially sensitive, you can put it on your company computers so employees can access it but cannot copy, print, or otherwise share it with others.
A third benefit is the ease of creating new editions. Changes can be made quickly and easily by the creator of the document, without the time and trouble of going to press to print new copies.
-
Information Products
If you've got a website (and every business should), you should be offering not only a list of your products and services and how to order, but valuable information. Trust in the online world is built differently than trust in the offline world. In the online world, customers are searching for information. If you supply them with quality information, not only will the search engines index you better so you gain more site visitors, but customers will be more likely to purchase your products and services.
While you should have free information on your website itself to build trust, once you gain that trust you can sell an e-book as an "information product." Not every customer is right for every product or service, and an information product can help fill in the gaps and close a sale where otherwise the visitor would have left the site without purchasing anything.
Use e-junkie.com as a shopping cart interface to make paying for and downloading your e-book easy. You can also add an audio version of the book in the bundle.
-
Giveaway Bonuses
Ebooks can be used as free giveaway bonuses to get customers interested in and subscribed to your newsletter. It is important that a free e-book contain useful and quality information. This will not only build trust in the reader but also appreciation for your company, making it more likely that customers will purchase other things in the future.
You can also use e-books as a free gift with purchase. If the topic of the e-book is enticing enough, you can use it to help sell other products or services from your site. As a bonus offer, you can also attach the free giveaway to a larger information product you're selling.
