PDF's for Viral Marketing
Let's look at what makes this such a powerful tool! First of all, people need a reason to pass something along and send it viral. One of the best reasons you can give them for spreading your message is that it will make them money. If you are someone who sells your own products and operate your own affiliate program, creating a Rebrandable PDF is especially suited to you. You simply write an e-book or a special report with links to your products embedded in the PDF.
You then give the e-book away (or sell it cheaply) with reprint or redistribution rights. This means that you are giving the e-book buyers/recipients permission to rebrand the product links in the PDF with their own affiliate ID. When they pass on the e-book and a product is purchased through their affiliate link they will make a commission. This is a real incentive to pass the PDFs along! If you sell you own products, but do not run your own affiliate program yet, check out XXXXXXX. They have an easy system that allows to you create your own affiliate program. PDF files have another advantage over plain text files or html files posted on a website. They have a longer shelf life with individual readers.
Guerilla Marketing The typical reader will download a PDF file to their hard drives and then periodically notice it. Since disk space on their hard drives is so inexpensive, they often hesitate to delete the PDFs, even after they read them.
So they keep seeing your PDFs, and that increases the chance of them clicking a link and visiting your site, or at least passing your PDFs on. There are many tools that may help you create viral marketing materials, such as short reports like this one.
To produce this report, I used Microsoft Word but you can also use Open Office word processor, which is freely available from OpenOffice.org. Once you have all the material into a format that you like, just use the built-in PDF export feature to create a PDF that is easy to pass along to others. To create a viral PDF for affiliates, i.e. a PDF in which affiliate links can be rebranded, you can use a program called ViralPDF.