Creative Marketing: For the Price of a Tweet

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In a former blog post I wrote about a great way to introduce your upcoming book to readers, creating a prequel in form of a short free book, which should include links to your book sales page or your website.  But how to let as many readers as possible know about your freebie – and at the same time about your new upcoming book?  
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Use the Help of Social Media
Let your free book or other written content go viral via Twitter by re-tweeting from your followers to your customers, friends and everyone else.  Nowadays it’s sometimes more valuable to have people talking about your book than the money you would earn for it.
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Sell Your Free Book for the Price of a Tweet
It’s a service that lets visitors access to your content without having to “pay” for it by giving up any personal information on a form — all they have to do is share it with their own networks on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Facebook.
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3 Steps to Get Your Book Noticed!
Step 1: create a button and embed it on your website, e-mail or wherever.
Step 2: user access your content and ‘post’ about it.
Step 3: your users’ shares are re-tweeted and re-posted by their friends and followers.
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Easy to Set-Up and to Use
Not only is the tool super easy for your landing page visitors to use, but it’s also quite easy to set up. Pay With A Tweet allows you to stash content (a song or an e-book) and only allows access to it after a user has tweeted something about it.  In other words, it’s like a paywall in which you pay by tweeting about something.  If it’s true that attention is a scarce resource, drawing attention to something ought to be worth something, right?
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Downloaded 130,000 Times
The “social payment system” was developed by two young Germans, Christian Behrendt and Leif Abraham, who tested it on their own book: Oh My God What Happened and What Should We Do?  Great book content BTW!  Available in both, English and German language.  After eight weeks, their book had been downloaded 113,000 times and they had sold 1,300 copies on Amazon.  It became a Twitter trending topic twice, and the only promotion they did for the book was to tweet a single time.
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Teaser Version for Your Book
Why not give away a teaser version of your ebook in exchange for some promotion? Authors and book sellers can post the exact message they want consumers to send, in exchange for the free book. Retailers can attach a URL to the Twitter message that directs consumers to the web page that has the “Pay with a Tweet” button.
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Good to Know:
If you use a WordPress.org theme for your website you can install their own plug-in.  While consumers can add short personal notes to the author’s message, consumers cannot edit the URL attached to the tweet.  The Basic Version of Pay with a Tweet is FREE.  Read more details in this Hubspot article.

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