Copyright 2006 Willie Crawford
It’s no secret that, if you can create a product that points back to your site, and can then send it viral, you’ll generate an endless stream of website traffic. If your website is structured properly, you should be able to turn that traffic into a steady stream of subscribers and orders.
Over the past 10 years, the biggest problem that I’ve seen with most viral tools I’ve studied, is that they fizzle before they really reach critical mass. Once a viral tool reaches a certain “velocity,” then it will continue spreading. If it never reaches that critical velocity… where enough people are passing it along, then it “technically” was never viral.
Of all the viral tools that I’ve studied and dissected, the easiest to create and most successful one that I’ve personally used is the rebrandable PDF. Let’s look at what makes that such a powerful tool!
First of all, people need a reason to pass something along and send it viral. One of the best reasons they can be given for doing this is that it will make them money. When you create your PDF files, you simply set up certain links so that they can be changed to other links that pay the recipient money when they passes the PDF’s along.
As someone who sells several dozen products through my own affiliate programs, I have found this to be the perfect tool. When I write ebooks, or special reports, I often give them away (or sell them very cheaply) with reprint or redistribution rights. Then I give the buyers or recipients permission to rebrand certain links in the PDF’s, changing those links to THEIR affiliate links.
Now, they have a real incentive to pass the PDF’s along! They get paid when a customer makes a purchase.
I’ve done this with the articles I’ve written too… given people permission to substitute an affiliate URL for my URL in these articles. This works especially well with your affiliates who publish ezine or have blogs. They happily publish your articles and substitute their affiliate ULR’s in them. They get to product a quality publication or blog with minimal effort.
In my experience, the PDF document seems to work even better. I’ll let you in on a little SEO secret here. When your affiliates, or clients, take a PDF that they have redistribution rights to and post it on their websites, the PDF document will often rank HIGHER that straight HTML webpages on the same topic. The search engines sometimes seem to treat the PDF’s as more valuable, perhaps because authoritative reports and research `studies are often published online in PDF format.
So, sometimes it’s better to just post your PDF documents, with branded affiliate links, or links to your own products, on your web server. Then just link to those PDF document from another webpage that already indexed and frequently spidered. I like to do this by referencing a PDF document on one of my blogs that’s visited by the search engine spiders every day.
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. 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 PDF’s… even after they read them. So they keep seeing your PDFs, and that increases the chance of them click a link and visiting your site, or at least passing your PDF’s on.
I said that creating a PDF is easy. I simply type up my documents in MS Word (TM) and then save it using my favorite PDF creation tool. I use a fairly expensive, well-known PDF creation tool now, but there are lots of free PDF creation tools that easily output perfect PDFs.
For many years, I used a free tool called PDF995. With PDF995, after you finish writing and editing your Word file, you simply tell Word to print. When it asks for a printer, you select your PDF creation program as the printer, and the PDF is magically created.
After you create the PDF, you need to make it brandable before passing it on, or selling it, if you really want it to go viral. For that I use a PDF brander called Ace PDF Brander. You can get a copy at: http://AcePDFBrander.com
You’ll notice that Ace PDF Brander was actually created to MY specifications. That’s because, I found ALL of the other PDF branders that I looked at either too expensive or too cumbersome to use. Ace PDF Brander is neither.
After you create you brandable PDF, designating which links in the document can be rebranded, you want to package it up with a rebrander tool (that included when you get ACE PDF Brander) and a readme.txt file. The readme file simply explains to the recipient how to use the rebrander. You zip this all up into a neat package and you’re ready to start your traffic virus. I’ve done this dozens of time, and achieve outstanding result almost every time.
If you are too lazy, or don’t feel comfortable creating your own PDF documents, Ace PDF allows you to take pre-existing PDF documents, and make links within those rebrandable. This is very powerful, but also has tremendous potential for abuse. Theoretically, you could take ANY PDF document (that’s not locked or encrypted) and rebrand the links, and then pass it on… and perhaps violate the author’s copyright.
I’m certainly not advocating doing that, nor do I do it. What I am advocating doing, and what I do frequently do, is:
1) Buy reprint or private label rights to PDF documents and then make them rebrandable or rebrand them before passing them on. This allows me to either change the links inside to my own affiliate links, or to make it so that my affiliates can rebrand the links to their affiliate links. I’m sure you can see how powerful this is!
2) Request permission from the authors of PDF ebooks that aren’t rebrandable to make them rebrandable… and then change selected links to my affiliate links or pass the rebrandable PDF’s on to my affiliates.
Many of the documents that I do this with were created BEFORE this technology was invented. Many of them were written when the only way that you could make a PDF rebrandable was to add clunky “tags” to the document as your were writing them. Then you converted them to brandable documents with some fairly expensive software. With modern tools, you no longer have to do that.
As you can tell, I’m BIG on creating and distributing rebrandable PDF’s. The reason is that it works in sending lots of traffic and sales to my sites. It also serves to spread my name around… building my credibility and reputation. It can do the same for you!
If you’re not using this very powerful tool today to start viral traffic building campaigns, then you’re probably generating traffic using more difficult methods… or your site simply isn’t getting any traffic. Fix that problem today. Begin by checking out the tools that I mentioned. Ace PDF Brander is at… where else http://AcePDFBrander.com
PDF995 is available at: http://www.PDF995.com The free version works fine, but had a “nag screen” when you first open it. They do offer ungraded version to include an “enterprise version.” When I used PDF995, I used the free version… for several years and generated dozens of very profitable PDF’s 
Now that you know the secret, you have no excuse not to start creating that traffic virus today.
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