Create a Giveaway

You may have heard of them as opt-ins, giveaways, lead generators or even bribes, but they all mean the same thing. Something attractive that you give to a website visitor in exchange for their name and email address, which you store in a database maintained by an autoresponder.

I'll cover setting up and using an autoresponder in the next lesson.

This lesson will cover how to create your product to give away in exchange for your visitor's details.

How to Create Your Gift as an E-Book

You’ll need a gift to give away to your visitors in exchange for their name and email address.

This section explains how you can use PLR to create your very own e-book.

What Is PLR?

PLR stands for Private Label Rights and can be applied to any medium, but most often to an e-book.

Along with the e-book, you buy the right to claim authorship, with or without modification to the original and the right to resell it.

Normally, you do not have the right to resell it yourself as PLR. If you do, it’s called buying Master Resell Rights, which normally costs more. That’s a different matter entirely and not what we’re talking about here.

The remaining pages in this section are a case study of creating an e-book from PLR.

There is a huge number of PLR providers and their quality varies enormously. The ones that I use and can recommend are

Tiffany Lambert
Arun Chandran
JR Lang
Susanne Myers & Tracy Roberts (Piggy Makes Bank).

They all produce high quality PLR at what I consider a bargain price and often give away stuff as well. Arun's work is a little more irreverent but I find his style entertaining.

You can Google them to find their websites.

Case Study

I have a short PLR e-book from Tiffany Lambert called “10 Ways to Increase Laser Targeted Traffic”.

Here’s a screenshot from the first page:

And here’s the cover image that Tiff provided to go with it:

Now there are two things that I really like about this PLR:

It’s from Tiffany Lambert and her writing is always top-notch and
People really like reasonably short, valuable lists of things and “10 Ways” really fits into that.

But…

You need to change some things.

The Things You Need to Change

It’s essential to add your personal touch to PLR, so that you are clearly differentiated from the lazy marketers who buy it and then publish it as is.

No matter how good the original is, there are three things you need to change:

The cover. It’s the first thing your visitors see and it’s what creates the first impression. And you know what they say “you only get one chance to make a first impression”
The title. Don’t let your e-book have the same title as everyone else
The format. I use the same format for all my e-books, whether they are being published as PDFs on my own website or as paperbacks on Amazon. I’ll reveal that format later on in this lesson.

The Cover

I go through the details of creating an attractive cover further on in this lesson. But using the same technique, here is the cover that I designed for Tiff’s PLR (after deciding the new name would be Does Your Website Need a Traffic Boost? Here Are the 10 Essentials):

The Title

As shown, I’ve changed the title to Does Your Website Need a Traffic Boost? Here Are the 10 Essentials.

The Format

I have a Word doc that is formatted to produce an attractive looking book, whether it’s a downloadable PDF, a Kindle e-book or an Amazon paperback. It’s my template.

It has a

Title (and sub-title) page
Copyright page
Disclaimer
Table of contents
Page showing the formats used for chapter, headings 1, 2 & 3 and paragraph with a drop cap
About the author page.

Let’s have a look at some of the settings.

Paper Size is set to Custom 15.24cm x 22.86 cm (6” x 9”).

Title (font) is set to Calibri Light 28px.

Sub-Title is Calibri (body) 11px.

Table of Contents uses Automatic TOC 1 (but I sometimes modify it to increase the h1, h2 and h3 indent levels)

Chapter font is Literata 20px.

Heading 1 is Calibri (body) 18px.

Heading 2 is Calibri (body) 16px.

Heading 3 is Calibri (body) 14px.

Normal is Literata 12px.

The first few pages, up to and including the table of contents, don’t have headers or footers.

After that, each page has the book title centered in the header and the page number centered in the footer.

You can download this template from the Resources section at the end of this lesson.

Creating the E-Book

The first thing we do is copy Tiffany’s text (Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C) and paste it into the appropriate page in the template.

To paste, I use right-click and then the Merge Formatting icon so that the formatting built into the template is used.

Then I immediately use Save As to give the new book file the name The 10 Essentials and make sure I don’t overwrite the template.

Then…

Replace the book title in the heading
Change each of Tiff’s major headings to h1 font and precede it by a chapter number and page break
Insert a drop cap as the first letter of the paragraph for each chapter.

Let’s take a look at some of these pages.

The Cover Page

Typical Page

I’ve ended up with a 30-page book, which is just about a perfect size.

Small enough to be digestible but large enough to feel substantial.

Creating the Cover

Now that we’ve built our opt-in e-book, we need an attractive cover that will encourage our visitors to download it in exchange for their name and email address.

Here’s what the cover that we are about to create will look like:

Although there’s an old saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” the fact is that it’s the only thing your visitors will see, so it had better be attractive!

There are probably ways you can do it for free, but I doubt that any of them will be as simple as the software I use, Pixel Studio FX.

I’ve had it for many years and was grandfathered in for a single payment, so it’s like a free resource for me, always available. I did upgrade to the professional version, which made all the covers available to me.

They’ve since moved to a monthly fee structure, starting at just $12 a month, so if you had a few book covers to do, I guess you could sign on, do them and then opt out, at a cost of just $12.

Pixel Studio FX

To start, go to studiofx.net, create your account and sign in.

You will see some default images and a list of categories in the left sidebar.

We are going to select the category Computers / Internet.

This will display the available covers in that category.

Scroll down to see more.

Note that you can ignore the words (title, sub-title, author etc.) as they can all be replaced.

Just look for a cover that’s attractive.

I’m going to use this one:

Just because I like it, not because my e-book has anything to do with Vector Graphics.

Choose Your Presentation

When you select the design, you can choose what form your finished product will take, such as box, CD, flyer, magazine, book etc.

With book, you can choose from several different presentations.

I’m going to use BOK-3, which is a book standing on its end, with its pages slightly open.

Click on BOK-3 and the cover image will open for editing.

Then click the Zoom Out icon until you can see all of the cover on screen.

Click on the book title Vector Graphics.

You will be able to edit it from the right sidebar. This includes changing the text, its position, the font and the size.

This is the result after changing the title to the one we want, the font size to 120 and repositioning it slightly with a drag and drop.

Click the Apply button to see the changes.

Note that you can move the selected text to anywhere on the screen simply by clicking and dragging.

Similarly, we can change the sub-title and author, both on the front cover and the spine of the book.

Complete the Editing

OK, that’s looking pretty good. Just two more things:

I want to change to color of the title to match my website’s primary color and
It will look more like a “real” book with a barcode in the spine.

Changing the color is easy. Just select the title, go back to the options in the right sidebar, select the color swatch underneath the font and then choose the new color.

Click the Apply Color button to see the immediate effect.

To insert a barcode, click on the Images icon in the right sidebar (it looks like a cloud with an up arrow) then select the System Images tab and click on the barcode image.