Content marketing (or inbound marketing ) has been quite effective in several market niches. Increasingly, people search for online content, such as ebooks, in order to learn more about their business, audience or strategies. Therefore, becoming a reference within your own market is a great way to attract future consumers of your product or service.
In addition to attracting people who are already interested in your business, informational content can be decisive at the time of purchase for those who are in doubt about whether or not to purchase a product / service.
In this context, the ebook continues as a powerful way to dispel information online, quickly and simply. This is because it is a consolidated content format, especially after the popularization of smartphones and tablets, once you just download it and it will always be available for access. And it is at this moment that you capture the lead, requesting data such as email address, in exchange for your content.
Read this article to understand how to create an ebook and what benefits you can have in producing this type of content.
Benefits of creating an ebook
Here are some of the main benefits of creating ebooks in a business’s digital marketing strategy.
Lead Generation
You may already be tired of knowing that the real value of your business is in your contacts. This is an excellent method of increasing your contact base with people who may be potential customers because they are interested in your content.
Increased reach
An ebook is a great way to share information. If the content is really relevant, the reader will certainly recommend it to someone else who may have the same interest.
Market reference
Show you dominates its market , will bring confidence to prospect not yet decided on which product to buy. Encouraging you more and more when making a purchase decision.
Now that you know all the benefits that quality content can bring, we will teach you, step by step, how to create your own ebooks.
Research on what your market is looking for
The first step in creating the ebook is to know a lot about the content you are going to write and, mainly, the target audience of this material. With this information in hand, it becomes easier to think about how to approach the content in order to produce relevant material for the audience.
As obvious as it may seem, producing content that does not attract your target audience, or that attracts people with no interest in your product and business, can be a shot in the foot. That’s because you will invest time and money unnecessarily, often leading you to think that this type of marketing does not work.
For that reason, the first step in planning your ebook is to know what your market is looking for . This makes your material easier to find, as it will be using the right expressions and content.
Ebook keywords
The first stage in deciding the content of your ebook should be based on the most popular and most searched keywords by the people who access your website/blog, or which of your posts is most popular. This will give you lots of ideas about what kind of material to produce.
Some tools to help you define the most attractive keywords :
Google Analytics
Keyword Planner (or Google Keyword Planner). To have access to this tool, just have an account with Google Ads.
Creating an attractive theme and title
Now that you have done your homework in the previous step and know exactly what your target audience is looking for, defining a theme and a supertitle is fundamental to the success of your material. For this, your ebook needs to be original and with a topic of extreme relevance to your market.
Write about content you have mastered
The success of your ebook depends on the content that is presented in it. So write on a topic that you are an expert on. After all, the main objective of the ebook is to share knowledge and bring relevant information to your market.
So, avoid writing about topics that you don’t have enough understanding to produce quality material.
Application examples
The best materials are those that share real problems and solutions. This is because examples are extremely important to visualize the content being applied in an existing business. This type of action demonstrates that you have knowledge and experience in the topic addressed.
Writing ebook content
Instead of creating complicated content with difficult words, write simply and objectively. This ensures that all content presented is understood by the public. Read our Sqribble review to create content for ebooks in 60 seconds.
Make a self-explanatory title
Generic titles are not usually well accepted. The amount of content available on the internet today is innumerable, users do not want to find out if their material has anything relevant. So, be as specific as possible when creating the title for your ebook.
Remember, Google shows about 70 characters. Smaller headlines are better to display in email, blogs, etc. Always think about how the title will appear on different media before creating it. And of course, know exactly which keywords you need to use to attract your audience.
Show the purpose of the ebook
People will download your ebook because they want to know how to do it or how something works. For that reason, you start your ebook by presenting what information it will have, or what it will be able to do, after reading your content.
Structure of the ebook
As we mentioned earlier, there are some rules that can help you get your ebook out more easily. We will explain each step and what should be thought about in the development of the material.
First, group the content so that the reader feels guided . It may seem silly, but if you assemble it as if it were a story with a beginning, middle and end, your audience will be able to understand the information more easily.
The Cape
The cover will be the second most relevant item in your ebook after the title, so take care of the layout and try to give a general idea of the content inside. From it, the reader will draw some conclusions about the quality of the material.
Also, remember that you are creating a digital version of a book and, when presenting it on your website, it is cool to create a feeling of volume, this will give you more credibility and make your book more “palpable”.
Ebook index
The index should be done last, as it will only make sense after all the content organized on its proper pages. Its format can be very simple, containing only the largest topics of each content or more detailed, showing titles and subtitles in cascade idea.
In the index, you will find some details such as the dotted line that links the content to the page numbers, this gives more readability for the content to be found more easily. Another feature of the index is having all the content linked by anchors throughout the pages , the result is having the content separated by a click.
Different weights for bonds
It is common that, during the creation of the content, you create a hierarchy of topics, for example, a title/chapter that serves as an umbrella for subtitles that share the same subject and, therefore, fall into the same chapter.
In these cases, use weights from the same source showing the degree of importance between each of the text areas. At the end of this effort, you will have a visual unit with easy access to various topics.
Too many paragraphs, lists, and line breaks
People find it difficult to read very long content. Reading endless sentences becomes a tiring activity and often ends up not providing absorption of all the material read.
Therefore, organize the content in different paragraphs . When necessary, create a list of items, don’t forget the line breaks and, mainly, the breathing time between one idea and another.
Readable fonts in readable sizes
Through the internet, it is possible to find a wide variety of fonts available for use, but do not fall into the trap of using something that will not give the necessary legibility for long texts.
When in doubt, use fonts already established for their easy application in different materials such as Arial, Verdana or Georgia . Improve your knowledge of fonts and other items by reading this article , to boost communication and customer retention by optimizing the layout of your email marketing .
When creating content for the web, you must understand that fonts will behave differently from print, this is due to the method in which it is displayed. While in the printout the fonts can be between 10 and 12 pt, for web format we recommend using 14 or 16 pt .
The colors of the project
Defining a colour palette for your project can give you a feeling of limitation at first. However, if you persist, you will see that the content will unfold more easily, in addition to educating the reader about the particulars of your ebook. Think that if every box of tips has the same colour, it will be easier for the reader during a quick crawl of the page to find out where the tip is.
Take care to use colors with a pegged meaning, like red, which means attention or green, which refers to nature, they will not normally match a content different from the pegged concepts.
In fonts, use only fonts that give a good contrast to the background , after all, you want the content to be read in full. Leave it to test other colors and fonts in titles, as they tend to be faster and larger than the body of the text.
Use images and graphics in the ebook
Working with images, illustrations and graphics bring to your ebook a better dynamic for your material. Always try to keep the same graphic line by choosing illustrations with similar colors and lines or even images with the same pigmentation tone, since you can still edit images to make the visual language close, check out some tips here. And, to help you choose which images to use, we recommend reading the post about the 10 free image banks for email marketing. However, note that the more images you use, the larger the size of your final file.
When it comes to numbers, graphing them using a static or animated graph is the best option. This makes the understanding clearer and with better conditions for comparison.
You can get help from sites like Tiny PNG or Optmizilla, which optimize your images, making them lighter.
All images (including the cover) need to be created and optimized for the web . Images cannot be more than 800 pixels wide and saved in web format (such as .jpg). It is important to reduce the weight of your image as much as possible, always trying to maintain good quality.
Devices
It is essential that you perform a preview of your ebook on the most used devices. For example, desktop, notebook, tablet and smartphone. In this, you will remove all doubts about whether it can be read in various sizes and that the images retain the same concept even in the smallest sizes.
Review, review and review again
After spending hours working on your ebook and thinking it is finally ready, pass it on to some people to review it. Don’t just look for grammatical or typing errors, but also make sure the content is consistent. Be ready to receive criticism from people who are willing to improve your content.
Convert the file to PDF
All popular ebooks are in PDF format. That’s because PDF is a format recognized by both Mac, Windows, and most mobile systems. In addition, this is one of the most consistent formats. When converting a Word document, for example, to PDF, any device will read the same way, the same does not happen in other formats.
Finally, it’s time to spread the material, to attract new contacts and potential customers.
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