The ability to build your business with ebooks is undeniable. They take little time and effort to put together and considering the many different ways they can be used for both promotional and traffic generation purposes, this time is well worth it.

Let's examine 7 different options we have to utilize an ebook as a highly effective business building tool.

1. Offline marketing

By putting your ebook on a cd you now have an audio brochure you can use in an offline mailing campaign. An effective means of followup with any subscribers on your list. This can be used to promote your primary product line or as a means to build further creditability with members on your list.

2. Copyright

By copyrighting your material, you now have exclusive rights to this ebook allowing you to sell it. By promoting it thru your website this will create more traffic and help you build your list of contacts with whom you can market additional products to in the future.

3. Post it to your website

By doing this you have created another reason for people to visit your site. If you post it a chapter at a time, this will keep your visitors coming back allowing you additional chances to market to them.

4. Use as a giveaway

To entice visitors to subscribe to your list, fill out a survey or to purchase one of your products the ebook can be used as a free giveaway. For customers who have already made a purchase with you it can be used as a 'thank you' gift.

5. Continually update it

By keeping the information fresh thru updating, you can extend the value of the ebook for your online business purposes. You may want to circulate it as a free giveaway to gain name recognition.

6. Test marketing

By offering your ebook as a product you can use it as a test marketing tool to judge the market as to whether there's a strong enough demand for a product like it. If sales appear to be strong, you may decide to invest more time and effort into further developing your ebook. This can then be followed up with a more significant product launch.

7. Use as a series

An ebook can be broken down into several sections to be used in your auto-responder as a series of content packed emails or perhaps a free course you can offer to encourage visitors to your website. Maybe you want to use certain components of it to promote other related products.

As you can see with a little diligence and creativity your ebook can prove to have the versatility and lifespan of duct tape. By using only various components it can serve as promotional materials, by maintaining its unity, it can be sold as a product. However you choose to use it there's no ignoring the flexibility and expansion capabilities of an ebook and the advantages it offers to build your business.