I’ve had a few people ask me how they can hunt down free Kindle books for themselves so I’m kicking off this Weekend Takeaways newsletter with some suggestions.
You can, of course, simply go to Amazon and trawl through the Kindle store’s Top 100 listings in the free category but this is time-consuming and you have to evaluate each result for yourself.
A good alternative is to visit one of the many sites that now list free ebooks, some of which give frequently updated feeds or listings as well as spotlighting those books that are only available for a limited time.
The first is Bargain eBook Hunter which may not offer has many listings as some sites focusing on free ebooks but does provide very detailed reviews. You can search by genre for free listings:
http://bargainebookhunter.com/category/free/
Then there is eBook Lister which posts a comprehensive daily listing of limited time free ebooks from Amazon (USA).
You can choose a genre listing for the results and remember that free ebooks are almost always available in other countries – my time-saving trick is to replace the .com with the appropriate suffix in the Amazon URL so instead of it being www.amazon.com/WhateverFreeEbook you can type in www.amazon.co.uk/WhateverFreeEbook and so on.
Find eBook Lister here:
Here’s one rather nice freebie I found on eBook Lister for you:
The Whole Truth – The Whole Truth: SEO Link Building – How to get quality backlinks, win with Google now and in the future and still keep your sanity:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CQBIVRA/?tag=ebl1-20
And if you like your free ebook suggestions served up as a feed there is the essential Free Read Feed:
If you have an Amazon Prime account then you can borrow books from the Lending Library but weeding through the thousands available to find good freebies is another time suck so check out this useful Life Hacker post:
Talking of things Kindle, I also came across this handy ‘Down & Dirty Kindle Formatting Template.’ You can find that here:
http://www.coffeecraftsandclues.com/down-dirty-kindle-formatting-template/
She also references a good guide to formatting HTML for Kindle in her excellent post on getting started in indie publishing:
http://www.coffeecraftsandclues.com/cccs-guide-to-indie-publishing/
And staying with Amazon, I had an email this week from one of my subscribers who is one of those unfortunately affected by the Amazon ban in certain states. I found a sane and sensible post on what to do about that here:
http://theworkathomewife.com/amazon-affiliate-in-a-banned-state/
But the world is not (yet) ruled by the almighty Amazon so here are a few specific affiliate programs that would be a good replacement:
Target – Affiliate Program
eBay – Partner Network
Barnes & Noble – Affiliate Program
Sears – Affiliate Team
Don’t forget about programs such as Commission Junction – www.cj.com – and ShareASale – www.shareasale.com as well as LinkShare www.linkshare.com
Just to show how much I care about your whole lives and not just those portions spent marketing, here’s an immensely helpful list of 40 Life Hacks That Will Change Your Life done in pictorial form:
http://www.boredpanda.com/life-hacks/
Not only are these great suggestions but you could do this too as this is an excellent way to get your pics going viral on social media, tapping into the power of tips and tutorials (and you know how much I love those!)
Finally, as a change from TED talks, my video offering this week is this talk from Chris Haddad on 8 ‘Stupid’ Copywriting Tricks That Will Triple Your Conversions. Chris is one of the top copywriters on the planet when it comes to online marketing – watch and learn:
Have a wonderful week – I’ll be spending mine eyelash-deep in editing, creating and keeping all those balls in the air, including giving one talk and introducing another at one of our local business networks so it will be full on but fun. Hope yours is equally productive, if not more so, and speak soon.
