If your business has an online presence, chances are you’ve already got your plate full with the multitude of tasks required to build and maintain a strong presence in the digital world. You must have a website, you must be marketing your business on different platforms, using various methods to grow your email list, and building or maintaining some social media presence along with trying to keep your blog active and updated. Even after doing all this, if someone tells you that you’re not doing enough and should write an eBook, you’re likely to raise an eyebrow. We won’t blame you for that!
Many business owners don’t know what they are missing out unless they get an eBook published under their name.
How Can eBooks Benefit Your Business?
Whether you write them on your own or hire book writers for the job, eBooks can help boost your business in several ways. Here are some of them:
- They Work as Lead Generation Machine
eBooks are great tool for top of the funnel marketing. Using eBooks as gated content on your website can help increase both the quantity of leads as well as push your prospective customers further down the sales funnel.
- They Help Build and Improve Your Expertise
Since eBooks are detailed, they give you a better chance to share your industry knowledge with your audience. They give you the opportunity to establish yourself as thought leader by coming up with new ideas and sharing in-depth analysis.
eBooks also help you build credibility by addressing your audience’s pain points. Talking about the issues or concerns of your audience helps you gain their trust, which eventually increases their chances for conversion. Several research studies and surveys have shown that brand trust is one of the most important factors for online consumers when making a purchase decision and eBooks are a major tool for winning that trust!
- They Help You Build Relationship With Your Target Audience
By helping you generate leads, eBooks give you the opportunity to start a conversation with your target audience and to build a relationship with them, in the long run. For example, you could get in touch with people who downloaded your eBook to get feedback and then eventually to market your products.
- They Give You Content for Repurposing
eBooks provide you loads of content for repurposing. You can later publish different topics covered in the book in form of blog posts or podcast series. Similarly, you can share your research findings or any statistical data in form of infographics.
This not only helps you keep your blog updated by providing you with several topics, but can also help you target different segments of audience or people at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Alt Text: A woman reading an eBook
Image Text: An old woman reading an eBook
Image Description: An old woman reading a book on tablet
How to Use an eBook to Promote Your Business?
A large number of business owners and marketers have started using eBooks to boost their business, but not all of them remain successful in achieving their goals. This is because the success of an eBook depends on several factors, ranging from selecting the right topic to effective marketing. Here are a few important things that you should be careful about to get desired results from your eBook:
- Find the Right Topic
There are several factors that need to be taken into account to make sure the topic you are planning to write an eBook on is right for your business. These include:
- Relevance to your business (obviously)
- Your knowledge and expertise
- Your audience’s interest
While you can write an eBook on literally any topic, it won’t serve the purpose if it doesn’t meet fulfill these three conditions. The first one is self-explanatory – you want to promote your business, so the topic of the eBook should be something that’s related to what you offer.
Wondering why your knowledge and expertise matter, when you can simply collect the information from the internet?
Well, you can do that, but you shouldn’t!
If you want the eBook to help establish your expertise, the content should reflect that. It should offer value to your audience – something that’s not available elsewhere. There’s no point of writing an eBook if it just offers the same information that’s readily available on the internet. The content of the book should reflect your in-depth industry and market knowledge, your vision, and your understanding of a particular topic. Therefore, always write on a topic that you’re really an expert in.
Lastly, you should also consider your audience’s interest while selecting the topic for your eBook. This is because no matter how well-written a book is and how much information it offers, your audience won’t read it if they are not interested in that topic. Therefore, it is important to take your time and do research on what your audience is interested in learning about. You can perhaps write a couple of blog posts on similar topics and see what kind of response you get. You can also ask your audience directly about what topics they want to learn more about or you can look through question-and-answer websites, like Quora, to get input from other writers and business owners.
- Offer Value
As mentioned above, your eBook should offer valuable information – industry insight, analytics, or viewpoints – that’s not (easily) available elsewhere.
While your primary purpose for writing an eBook is to promote your business, the worst thing you can do is to make a sales pitch in it. You should aim to address your audience’s issues and offer expert advice and proven solutions to help resolve them.
- Give It Away for Free
Let’s face it – there are countless eBooks already available on the internet on literally every topic. Why would someone buy your book, unless you’re a leading industry expert? For example, if someone wants to buy a book on digital marketing, they are more likely to go for the one written by industry experts like Ann Handley, Jeff Bullas, or Seth Godin rather than the one written by a small business owner. Similarly, most people are likely to purchase novels written by famous fiction writers than a novel written by someone they never even heard the name of.
Therefore, the best way to make the most out of your eBook is to offer it to your audience for free, but as gated content. You can ask them to fill a form, signup for your newsletter, complete a survey, or share your post on their social media (whatever serves your purpose) and then offer them eBook for free, in return.
If you don’t want to give the whole book for free, you can create a trail version of it, including one or two chapters, and offer that for free. This will help your audience figure out if they are interested in the topic as well as give you the opportunity to engage them. Take our word for it, many people will willingly pay for reading the remaining book if you’re able to capture their attention and incite their curiosity through the trail version of the eBook.
Ebook Can Be the Missing Link in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Believe it or not, sometimes an eBook is all that you need to give that nudge to your target audience. It opens a world of new opportunities for business growth. If you think you don’t have the skills to write an eBook, there are many professional book writing services available out there. Look for a reliable one and get a well-written eBook to boost your business.
Image Credits
- Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash
- Photo by Retha Ferguson from Pexels
By Rob Davis