Content Marketing Tips: Don’t Forget the Ebook

How’s your content marketing strategy going?

Now that the fanfare about the iPad has died down you might want to think again about working on an e-book. I’m sure interest in e-books will increase once again when the iPad starts shipping.

Time to update my ebook, I think!

I’m personally already a big fan of ebooks: I read a lot of them as a way of keeping up-to-date with new and emerging information. Just in the last week or so I’ve enjoyed e-books on WordPress SEO secrets, Web 2.0 marketing, Content Marketing, blogging, as well as working out at the gym. Each book was an indication of the skills and expertise of its creator and did a lot to persuade me of their worth. I’m now following several more authors blogs and twitter accounts as a result.

I’m convinced a quality ebook should be part of your content marketing strategy and will really benefit your business.

Here’s four reasons why I think e-books should be an integral part of your business’s content marketing:

E-books can show your strengths

It’s hard to cover a lot of ground in a single blog post. With the extra space an e-book allows, you can compellingly and visually establish thought leadership with an e-book and connect with potential. Sure, a quality e-book may well cost time and effort to produce but they’re a great way of showing what you know. One of my recent favourites was a presentation that was ported to Slideshare and worked as an excellent ebook discussion of whether corporate blogging is dying.

An e-book is a brilliant tool to grow your list of prospects

From a marketing perspective, it’s wonderful when someone willingly hands over their email address in exchange for an e-book. In a way it’s like saying, “Okay, thanks for the ebook! Now you can follow up with messages, including offers, if you provide great stuff”. Of course people can always unsubscribe, and its important you don’t spam them. But well-targeted quality offers do work.

The other option, though, is to give your ebook away completely for free, without requiring a sign-up. If it’s great, it may well encourage them to connect all the same.

Ebooks are so easy to share

You work hard to keep people coming back to your website or business blog! Don’t forget, though, that e-books distributed on sites like Scribd and Slideshare and promoted on twitter, or offered for free by other bloggers, can help people find you in the first place. With customers hanging out online in different places on the Net you need to be everywhere. E-books can help you grow your brand. An additional benefit is that ebooks don’t require much technological known-how to put together; applications like Word and Pages can easily export to PDF and then you can share them via your blog, Scribd or Slideshare.

E-books can breathe life into blog archives

It’s quite difficult to get people to read through your archives once they land on your site. An ebook, however, is a great way of re-using older but valuable material. Lots of bloggers put together How To ebooks on the basis of older posts, or collections of interviews, creating a visually cool themed work that showcases some of their best material.

E-books are a great compliment to your content marketing strategy

Ultimately, the better your e-book, and the more targeted it is to the needs of potential customers, the better chance you’ve got of growing your business. Just as blogs, white papers, newsletters – both on-and off-line – can help you find and grow you audience, ebooks are an integral part of your online marcom efforts. Sure, they take time to craft and do well, but maybe, just maybe on the even of the iPad shipping, you might want to give them another thought.

Bonus link: My favourite ebook of all time is Seth Godin’s What Matters Now.

Update [Wednesday Feb 24, 2010]: Danny Brown released a great ebook this morning. Another one to enjoy!

http://www.cottagecopy.com Holly

Great thoughts! Building your mailing list is essential, especially when you’re starting out, and an e-book can be a great way to do that while advertising and creating goodwill.

Can you comment on what you think makes a great e-book in terms of length, subject matter, etc?
http://www.jontusmedia.com Jon

@Holly – Thanks for stopping by!
I think a great e-book shouldn’t be more than 50 pages. A lot of the best ones I’ve read come in at somewhere between 20-30. But it’s as long as a piece of string, really. Length isn’t an indication of a book’s quality.

As for subject matter, I think the more targeted it is to your audience’s needs the better. For example, a dog trainer might write an ebook on “Essential Training Tips for Newbies”; a stylist might write an ebook on “Tried and Tested Ways to Look 100% Stunning”. The tone and level of trust the ebook garners, the better the audiences’ reaction is likely to be.
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