Substance and Style

E-books can be very effective marketing tools. They’re popular lead magnets, they build brand awareness and loyalty, and they can even generate passive income as paid content. Once written, they can be broken into smaller parts for social posts, turned into podcast episodes, or turned into webinars or classes. Whatever you use them for, they’re a high-converting cost effective marketing tool. Follow these steps to get started with creating an e-book today:

Step One: Prepare

1. Identify your goal and audience. Are you trying to increase brand awareness with a new audience? Are you trying to establish your expertise to an existing audience to gain customers? Your audience should be directly linked to your goal. Don’t try to market an e-book to more than one audience at a time. 
2. Choose your subject matter. Focus on your audience’s problems and how you can solve them. Choose something you know enough about; you want your e-book to be informative and useful for your audience. A poorly written e-book that provides no useful information will not accomplish your goal and could damage your brand. 
3. Decide length and structure. An e-book can be any size and structure. Will this be long and deep, divided into chapters, or short and sweet with lists and worksheets? Most likely, it will be something in between, depending on your audience’s needs, interests, and attention span. 
4. Do any necessary research and cite your sources.

Step Two: Write

1. Start with a clear outline. Make sure you plan to cover everything you need to so that the entire book makes sense to your target audience. 
2. Write clearly and provide useful examples and explanations. Remember that your audience should gain skills and/or knowledge by reading this. They should be better off at the end than when they started. 
3. Include a Call to Action. You don’t want this book to be their last interaction with you unless the book itself is the product you’re selling. Make sure you include something near the end about how you can help them advance their goals. 
4. Write in your brand voice, style, and tone. Speak to your audience on their level. Keep your style consistent with the style of your website and social media channels. 
5. Check your work carefully for grammar and style errors. Proofread more than once. 

Design

1. Include infographics where appropriate. Make sure they are easy to understand and serve the overall purpose of the material.
2. Keep your design clean and uncluttered. Use fonts that are large enough and easy to read, leave plenty of white space, and follow general good graphic design principles. 
3. Use your brand colors, fonts, and design style. 
4. Check for responsiveness. It’s important that your formatting look good on mobile devices. 
5. Publish in an accessible format. Currently, the most universally accessible file format is .pdf. 

Promote

1. Think about search. Your e-book is probably a gated .pdf (meaning that people must fill out a form or make a purchase before viewing it). When content is gated, google can’t index its contents. Even .pdf files that aren’t gated are not indexed fully. The file properties of the document are the only thing the algorithm is going by. Therefore your e-book should be on a fully optimized landing page to bring in traffic. You will also need to promote it elsewhere.
2. Choose your channels. Look at where your existing audience is, and where your desired audience is. Focus on those channels for the bulk of your marketing. Use a mix of social media and email. Depending on your goals, consider paid advertising and influencer marketing. 
3. Evaluate your success. Track downloads and adjust your strategy accordingly.