What if you could tell people, “I literally wrote the book on the subject,” when they ask how much you know about your industry?
Few things look better on your resumé than “author,” even if you’re a self-published author. Even better than that is the fact that ebooks can be a great way to lead prospects to your business. People certainly search the internet for information and often find blog posts and landing pages, but sometimes they want to dive deeper into a subject, and that’s when they’ll start looking for books on the subject. If they find your book, like what they see, and need your products/services, they’ll know to reach out to you.
Many people looking for books on a topic are trying to figure out how to do something for themselves, so not every book sale will become a client, but you still get to keep the money from that sale. Others will read the book and realize there’s too much for them to do it all themselves effectively and still cover everything else they need to take care of, which is when they’ll hire you.
Still others will explore your site before deciding to buy from you, and if they see you’ve written a book on the topic, it will help convince them you know what you’re talking about, and so they’ll be more likely to buy from you, regardless of whether they end up reading the book.
Approximately 65% of B2B businesses use ebooks as part of their content marketing strategy, so if you don’t want to get left behind, it’s time to start writing that ebook.
But that’s easier said than done. Even if you’re a talented and experienced writer, writing an ebook is more daunting than writing a blog post. So we’re going to tell you everything you need to do.
Table of Contents
- Determine the Goal of Writing an Ebook
- How to Choose a Topic for Your Ebook
- Write an Outline for Your Ebook
- Research Before You Write Your Ebook
- How to Edit an Ebook
- How to Publish an Ebook
- How to Promote an Ebook
1) Determine the Goal of Writing an Ebook
The first thing you need to decide before you can start writing your ebook is: what is the goal of the ebook?
As mentioned above, you can write a comprehensive book on a topic in your industry and use it to lead prospects to your business and convince them to buy from you.
Shorter ebooks and PDFs can be used to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter. How-to guides are great for this, so if the goal of your ebook is to get people to sign up for your newsletter so you can put more great content in front of them and use it to lead them down your digital marketing funnel, your ebook can be shorter and you won’t have to worry as much about keywords (which we’ll get to a little later). You do, however, have to consider what your audience is looking for and what kind of content will motivate them to give you their email address.
Just keep in mind that, since the GDPR went into effect a few years ago, websites that offer free stuff in exchange for an email address could be subject to fines in the European Union, so if you have followers in Europe, you might not want to implement that particular tactic. It’s become much less popular in the past few years as a result.
Some businesses have short ebooks that can be downloaded directly from their website for free. Those short ebooks can still help improve your authority and provide proof you know your stuff before leads decide to buy from you. They also allow leads to leave your site without having completed the final stage of the buyer journey while increasing the likelihood they’ll come back on their own because they have that content with your brand name downloaded onto their computer.
If, on the other hand, you want to write full-length ebooks that are packed with juicy content and can bring in their own money, as well as leads, then you need to invest a bit more time and effort in writing your ebook.
2) How to Choose a Topic for Your Ebook
The first thing you need to do is decide what your ebook is going to be about. This is easier said than done because you want to make sure your book stands out from the crowd. For example, if you’re a financial planner and you want to establish your authority in the realm of retirement planning, you might want to write a book on retirement planning, but a quick search on Amazon shows more than 10,000 titles on retirement planning alone. If that’s all your book has to offer, chances are it’s going to get lost in the crowd.
1) How to Conduct Keyword Research for an Ebook
As with any content you produce, you’ll want to carefully research potential topics before deciding on one. Use at least two keyword research tools (so you can compare results) and make sure you choose one that is relevant to your business, while also having a high search volume and a low SEO competition score.
Pro tip: Get specific. “Retirement planning” is a short keyword, but the longer your keyphrases get, the more likely you are to be able to rank for them. For example, “How to Start Planning for Retirement in Your 50s” is a much longer keyphrase that targets a specific demographic. The best title for your ebook will be (or at least include) a keyphrase that is relevant to the products/services you provide and speaks directly to your target audience.
2) How to Use Blog Posts to Write an Ebook
One of the great things about blog posts is, not only can they help draw traffic to your site and convert leads, but the content on them can be used again and again. You can use them in your newsletter and social media posts, but you can use them to write an ebook.
For example, let’s say you’re an attorney who’s written a series of blog posts about the legal relationship between landlords and their tenants. You can take all of those blog posts, make each one into a chapter, and voilà! You are the proud author of an ebook!
Just make sure you at least make some changes to the blog posts and add a few chapters to your ebook so people don’t feel like they’re paying for the same content they could have gotten for free on your site. If the blog posts have been on your site for a while, you might even want to delete them before publishing your ebook.
3) Write an Outline for Your Ebook
Regardless of whether you’re using blog posts you’ve already written or starting from scratch, your ebook needs to be organized in a way that makes sense to your reader. Start with some background on yourself and what makes you qualified to write this book. If you can get buy-in from influencers in your industry in the form of an introduction to your book, for example, all the better. Otherwise, just start with why the topic is important and what your reader can expect to get out of it. The goal is to motivate them to read all the way through to the end.
Obviously you don’t want to write the whole book in your outline, but write at least a sentence or two (a paragraph at most) on each of your chapters so you have an idea of what you’ll cover in that chapter.
4) Research Before You Write Your Ebook
Of course, you know all there is to know on your chosen topic, but it never hurts to see what content is already out there, even if it’s wrong. If it is wrong, you can be sure to mention the misinformation in your book and explain why it’s wrong. It’s your chance to clear up popular misconceptions in your industry that your reader might not have realized they had taken for granted.
While you probably know your industry forwards and backwards, it can still be hard to think of everything you want to include in your book right off the top of your head. Doing a little research can help you identify points you might have forgotten about, or even help you clarify points you had identified but couldn’t quite articulate until you saw it somewhere else.
5) How to Edit an Ebook
Once you’ve finished your rough draft, the most important thing you can do is leave it alone for at least a week. Don’t look at it. Don’t even think about it. You want to be able to come back to it as fresh as possible so you’ll be better able to see all the mistakes you made, the issues you forgot to mention, and the parts where it doesn’t flow as well as it could.
Once you’ve done all that and you have a second draft in hand, it’s time to get some help. Ideally, you should hire a professional editor to edit your ebook for you, but if that isn’t in your budget, at least get a colleague, a neighbor, a friend or family member to look it over. The idea is to get a fresh pair of eyes to look it over because they’re more likely to catch things you missed.
While a colleague can be a great editor, we recommend getting someone who fits your target audience to look over your ebook for you. If you wrote your ebook for other people in your industry, then a colleague can be a great editor for the book. But if you’re trying to target an audience that needs your products/services, but doesn’t work in your industry, you’ll need to get someone outside the industry to look over your book for you. They can tell you if it makes sense, if you use too much industry-specific jargon they don’t understand, or if it put them to sleep.
Once you have a draft you’re proud of, it’s time to proofread. That’s when you stop checking to make sure it flows and makes sense, and start looking for the grammatical errors and misspellings. Obviously the spellcheck tool and Grammarly can both help with this phase of writing an ebook, but they aren’t perfect. You need to look over the entire book, front to back, at least once to make sure it’s free of errors.
Formatting your ebook and designing a book cover are both topics worthy of their own blog posts, but we’ll just say you’re better off hiring a professional. Despite the saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, that’s exactly what people do every day, and if they don’t like how your book’s cover looks, they won’t buy it and you’ll have lost that chance to turn them into a prospect, much less a customer.
6) How to Publish an Ebook
If you think your book could be the next Freakonomics, you might want to try to get an agent who can help you publish the traditional way with a publishing house. There are certainly benefits to that, but the process can take years and there’s no guarantee that a publishing house will buy your book, or that they’ll do it justice. If you want to maintain full control of your content and keep all your profits, you’ll want to self publish.
Obviously Amazon is the biggest name in self publishing right now, but it’s not your only option. It has it’s pros and cons, but the fact is that most people looking for anything (including books) tend to go straight to Amazon to search for it.
The good news is that Amazon makes it easy to upload your book and start selling it with just a few clicks. Just make sure before you do that it’s formatted correctly so you don’t find out afterwards that an image got cut off or some text disappeared somewhere between your draft and the final Amazon product.
Amazon can also print books for you, in addition to distributing ebooks, which allows you to reach a wider audience. Are you a keynote speaker at a big event in your industry? Bring print copies of your book to sell there. It will help boost your authority as a speaker while helping to bring in some extra money.
Pro tip: Whatever you do, don’t hire a vanity press. These are companies that are not publishers, but they offer to do a lot of the work of self publishing for you, including editing and marketing your book for you. Many of them charge thousands of dollars and don’t deliver on their promises. You’re better off either going the traditional publishing route, doing it all yourself, or hiring independent contractors who specialize in each phase of the book publication process.
7) How to Promote an Ebook
Remember what we said above about making sure you include a relevant keyphrase in the title of your ebook? It’s important to remember that Google is far from the only place people are entering search terms. They’re also looking for specific things on each of the social media platforms, as well as online stores like Amazon. If they want a book with DIY tips for taking control of their own finances, they’ll put in a search term in Amazon to get the book they need.
This is why it’s so important to carefully consider your title, but also your book description. You’ll want to use relevant keywords in both, but without stuffing them full of keywords. Amazon bestsellers used to attain that status by packing both their title and description with as many keywords as possible, but Amazon (like Google) has since cracked down on that practice. They’ve also put a strict limit on how long their book descriptions can be, so use that space wisely. Remember, the goal is to convert browsers into buyers, and the deciding factor will be your book’s description.
Another thing you need to consider is the section you want your book to be sold under in the Amazon bookstore. Amazon has book categories ranging from YA Paranormal Fantasy to Aging Parents. As with keywords, the more specific you can get, the better off you’ll be, not only because it will help you get in front of your target audience, but because it will make it easier for your ebook to reach the top of that category, at which point you can start calling your ebook an “Amazon bestseller.”
See, when people say their book is “an Amazon bestseller”, they don’t mean it sold more books than any other book on Amazon. They mean it sold more books than any other book in its category of the Amazon bookstore. So choose your category carefully and then promote your book as much as possible.
Before your book goes up on Amazon, you want to reach out to influencers to see if they’ll help you talk it up. If they agree, use that in as much of your marketing material as you can, including your newsletter and your social media posts. Spread the word that you have a book coming out to build anticipation, because if it doesn’t reach the top spot in the first few days, chances are good that it never will because it will be drowned out by all the other books getting published in the same category.
But your work isn’t done once the book is published. You still have to talk it up in your newsletter and on social media every once in a while to notify new followers of its existence.
If you need any help writing an ebook to get more leads for your business, we can help with everything from market research and keyword research, to writing and editing your ebook.
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