eBooks can be a valuable addition to your content marketing strategy.
Writing an eBook for your brand can be a power move for your reputation, your SEO strategy, your online visibility, and even your capacity to generate leads. An eBook is basically a piece of long-form content, anywhere from 10 to hundreds of pages long, and is typically offered as a downloadable PDF. It’s easy to be intimidated by the concept, but it’s actually easy to write an eBook, provided you have a solid topic to start with—and the benefits can be enormous.
Why Write an eBook?
So why would you write an eBook? There are several potential benefits, depending on how you choose to publish and promote it, including:
- Thought leadership. Writing an eBook can and will make you seem like a more prominent authority in your industry. This is especially true if you’re presenting findings from your original research, or original ideas that aren’t typically discussed.
- An offer of value. eBooks serve as great value offers in exchange for signing up for a newsletter or filling out a contact form. They’re near-ideal lead generation tools.
- Speaking opportunities. If your eBook generates enough attention, you could use it as a platform to get new speaking opportunities, which can improve the visibility of your personal brand further.
- Inbound link attraction. Well-researched eBooks tend to attract inbound links, which cultivate referral traffic and boost your search rankings simultaneously.
How to Get Started
To start, you’ll need a topic that hasn’t been done to death, yet is important to your customer base. Ideally, you’ll target a subject you can conduct original research for—though this isn’t a requirement. Then, you can start writing the book from scratch, developing an outline and one chapter at a time. Or, if you have an extended archive of blog posts already, you can stitch them together as a kind of content compendium—ideally with a new foreword and afterword.
Of course, if you don’t have the time or patience to write your own eBook, you could have a professional content marketer handle it. Contact us to learn more about our content services today!
