How to give an online life to your printed brochure?

This article will show you a way to cheaply distribute online your brochure. In fact, it will only cost you the time you spent uploading the brochure on scribd.com

You’ve designed and printed a brochure for your tourism-activity and you are trying to do your best to distribute it. You can distribute it during face-to-face meetings (tradeshows, walk-in visits to your office, …), and sometimes you tried to send the electronic version by e-mail (knowing how painful it is to send a 4Mb file by e-mail from Madagascar, you can be reluctant to repeat this exercise often when potential clients/partners is requesting an electronic copy of your brochure).

There’s plenty of solutions for you to distribute these brochures. Today, I just want to highlight one (that is obviously leveraging one Web 2.0 concept: taking advantage of established communities and social bookmarking features). How to proceed?

First, you have to be ready with an electronic (preferably on PDF format) version of your brochure.

Next, you can upload this file onto your own website hoping that  few visitors will download it

OR

– try to find an online community that will help you distribute it via social bookmarking, upload your document there under the right category (though a much-targeted visitors/downloaders).

One interesting solution is scribd.com: the good part is that you can use it even if you don’t have your own website.

You can create an account there, then upload your PDF file on the right category and that’s it.

But the best is yet to come. In fact, the most interesting part is only beginning once you uploaded the file since:

– you can have the stats of the number of viewers of the document (which you usually don’t easily have access to on your own website)

– the viewers can contribute to make your document popular by “social bookmarking” it on popular websites like digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.con, del.icio.us, …

– you can even keep the old “e-mail it” way as there is a form for you (or for other viewers) to e-mail the document… So, you only upload it once, then you can go to scribd.com and send by e-mail your brochure as many times as you want without having to suffer from low bandwidth each time you have to e-mail your brochure

– visitors can also download it (though, if you don’t have your own website, you can still go on with this solution)

– other people can embed your brochure on their own website a