An E-Book is just another book in digital format, reading material until you add in your marketing message and a link to your website, then voila! You got yourself a tool for viral marketing. This technique uses the multiplication effect to explode the distribution of your message by eager participants.

This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site.

Using viral E-books as a marketing method is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s even quicker if you use rebrandable E-books that have been written by others. Just use your favorite search engine and run a web search. You will find many rebrandable E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in that apply to your e-business. One method of distributing the E-book is to offer it to visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family, they are promoting your business for you.

E-books are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited only by the enthusiasm of the participants.

E-books are fairly easy to create. It’s possible to produce your own E-books by combining articles that you have written or have gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.

Using materials that have Private Label Rights is a common approach that is very cost-effective. These include articles and reports that have been written specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Cutting off a portion of a larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters of a large E-book could already also be used as a viral E-book.

In the business world, you are out there in the competing against other small businesses and large businesses like Wal-mart, McDonald’s, etc all the time. And you have to try and keep up with marketing against all of these other companies. You also have to try and provide as many services that these companies provide in order to make yourself stand out as the solutions provider.

It’s a tough road as many of you know. Do you want more business? Of course you do! Why not make some new friends first? When I am talking about friends, I am talking about the florist, the photographer, the caterer, the banquet facility, the limousine company, etc. After the friendships begin flowing, then the real business will also begin.

You may be asking yourself what I am talking about. I am talking about the power of joint ventures. Joint ventures are still today, one of the most underutilized relationships that a business can have.

What are joint ventures? Joint ventures are when two or more businesses come together, share their resources, customers, expertise, etc for the benefit of both businesses and everyone’s customers.

Here is just an example of one of the joint ventures that I coordinated: January and February are normally dead for us. It is also usually that way for many of my business friends too. We decided that we would put our resources together and sponsor a Valentine’s Day celebration at one of the banquet facilities whom I am also business friends with. The sales manager at the banquet facility loved the idea, because they were making money on a night that they probably wouldn’t have been booked anyways. The florist was happy because they got a lot of flower sales because of the promotion, sold additional flowers at the event, and did some marketing after the event to all the guys who came offering them a chance to sign up for flowers to be delivered monthly to their significant other (which they sold a lot of). The photographer made some nice money taking photographs of couples and upselling packages. The limousine service made more money than they normally would on that night because they charged per ride, instead of an hourly rate. The hotel was happy because they booked a large amount of rooms because of the extra people who wanted to stay over.

Overall, everyone was EXTREMELY happy. You are probably thinking that this took a lot of hard work in order to pull it off. In fact, it wasn’t that tough at all. Why? Because every person that I choose to be a part of this event, I have total confidence in. They are total professionals and experts in their industry. We all pitched in our expertise, figured out the numbers game, and then threw out our client lists for marketing purposes.

At the end of the night, we totaled everything up and we had OVER 400 people attend the event. We were hoping for 200 people, but were totally amazed at the results of our marketing. People raved about it and wanted it again the following year. The best part of it all, we all made more money than we hoped for and all the vendors were equally excited about doing it again.

I don’t usually tell this to many people, but I guess I am telling the world now. I have made MORE MONEY with joint ventures in all my years of business THAN ANY OTHER BUSINESS PROJECT I HAVE EVER DONE. I am serious about this.

There was one joint venture that I did with a local charity. I won’t go into details now, but I might talk about the joint venture later. Anyways, I worked TWO Friday nights a month and made just over $25,000 per year. This took about 10 hours a month of my time. I continued this event for over four years until I moved out of the area. It was all because of the networking I did to build the business friendships that led to the joint ventures.

What are you going to do with your business? Make a list of all the people that you already know and where they work, what they do, or what business they own. This can include other vendors, suppliers, competitors, businesses with the same audience or community, your bank, or maybe even your service providers. Make sure that whoever you decide to start a joint venture with they are cooperative instead of competitive. This will make or break the success of your joint venture.

Start piecing the puzzle together and see how you can work together with your friends to make EVERYONE more money and bring each other more success. Believe me, if you do it right and find the right combination, you will be very successful. Good luck and happy joint venturing!