Now how about this: A woman in a trench coat walks through a foggy drizzle, then pauses underneath a street lamp. She looks down at a creased card with words "meet me" in her hand. When she looks up again fog seems to lift, and she sees him -- standing cold and unsure in front of French café. He sees her and smiles, then at same moment they run towards each other and embrace on cobbled street. As they dissolve into a kiss drizzle disappears, and shy beams of sunlight begin falling on poignant Eiffel tower, watching over them and café and all lovers in world.

Now, these may seem like kind of images you usually see on tv commercials. As a matter of fact, they ARE.

But as marketers let's give them each a closer look, and find out what makes them affect not just our minds, but also places in our stomachs and our hearts.

The first image is asking you to order their pizza. The second is asking you to make flight reservations to Paris. Both are offering you tangible products & services.

But what they're really selling you on -- and what their images vividly show -- are EXPERIENCES they promise you'll get when you purchase what they offer.

Because although emotions are at heart of all human decisions, it's EXPERIENCE that catalyzes all emotion. And knowing that can help you win most any round of this marketing game.

YOUR Product Is An Experience ----------------------------- Our lives are made up of strings of experiences, and they're what define our memories, awaken our feelings, and influence our decisions both personal & professional.

As business owners, we need to understand that when clients start asking about our products, they're really not that interested in speed, gigabytes, or all flashy buttons (although they might seem to at first).

At heart of all their questions they really need just one answer: How is your product going to affect their lives?

And this question can only be answered by describing experience.

Fairy Tales and Coffee Mugs --------------------------- Disney initially defined itself as a maker of cartoons, then eventually went into other business ventures as well.

In brief, you can apply term 'viral marketing' to any strategy that encourages others to pass on your marketing message.

This can result in exponential growth of traffic to your web site, and therefore to your ebook sales levels as well.

A viral marketing strategy should be an essential element of your strategy for promoting your ebook, and in this series of articles I'll tell you five different ways you can achieve this.

You may already be following some of these suggestions, and if so that's excellent. But I'm sure there will be others here you can try as well. This applies to myself as well - each strategy takes time to implement, important element is to work towards them, and over time your traffic and your sales will gradually build, and your business will expand. Persistence holds key to success on internet.

1. 'Send to a friend' script

We've all seen them, those buttons on web sites inviting us to 'Send to a friend'. For example, if visitors like sound of your ebook, they can enter in names and email addresses of people they would like to recommend it to, and script will send those people an email containing URL of web site together with a short message.

Here's some resources you can use:

http://www.referralblast.com - claim you can add it to your site within 10 minutes, charge from $99 per year

http://www.tell-a-friend-wizard.com/ - claims to track your most sent pages and your most active people; from about $6 a month

http://bignosebird.com/carchive/birdcast.shtml - popular free CGI script

http://www.cgibiz.com/go.cgi?partner=popupmtr - CGI Tell-a-friend script for $39.95, free trial version is available

http://www.aspalliance.com/steven.swafford/articles ellafriend.asp - an ASP script you can use

http://www.aspalliance.com/chrisg/default.asp?article=26 - another ASP script

http://wsabstract.com/script/script2 ellafriend.shtml - a JavaScript version, allows you to send to a friend via normal email

That's probably enough to choose from!

2. 'Freebies'

Giving something away for free is one of most powerful marketing methods available.

Giving something away for free in *right way* turns it into a VIRAL marketing method that is much more powerful.

For example:

- Giving away two or three free chapters of an ebook you have for sale, can encourage people to sign up to your newsletter and/or an autoresponder sequence, and hopefully lead to increased sales - great result.

- If you include in these ebook chapters links to your own web site, and information about products and services you want to promote, you'll increase your traffic and your sales - even better result.

- If you encourage people to give away these free chapters themselves, you've suddenly turned it into a viral marketing program that will bring you exponentially increasing traffic and sales, especially if you provide people with option of rebranding it with their affiliate link to your site - excellent result.

If you think you can't improve on this you're wrong! If you use software like Viral Marketing Program at http://www.instantviralmarketing.com as a mechanism to give away your free chapters, you'll increase your traffic and sales exponentially, and then you've got traffic and sales you'll get from sample chapters themselves - this creates an absolutely incredible result, I know.

The important thing is to ensure that any freebie you give away actually has some value and has a quality that reflects on and promotes quality of your business - don't give away something just because it's virtually worthless, it will reflect badly on you and results will be poor.