6 Sweet eBook Marketing Hacks

Ebooks are hot way to heat up your lead generation—and the reason is no further than the little device you’re probably reading this article on.

The ebook is the perfect way to deliver top notch content to a busy reader  on the go. It’s mobile-friendly.  It’s deeper than a blog post, but not quite a book.

What’s the diff between an ebook and a white paper? Tweet this!

Older marketers will scent a bit of the formerly popular “white paper” format in today’s ebooks–and that’s accurate. The difference between a white paper and ebook is academic: they are the same animal. White papers tend to be chart and data heavy–more for the engineering audience. Ebooks are visually more accessible–think of them as longform blog posts. The difference between a white paper and an ebook is essentially visual style and semantics. Tweet this!

Hacking the ebook Tweet this!

Here are six smart ways to hack the format and get the most out of your ebook marketing:

1. Ebook covers. Yes, they matter a lot. Invest in your ebook cover. Use ODesk to commission a quick, fast and affordable ebook cover. That’s how we created the Content Marketing Field Guide cover by the way–it cost under $75.
2. Ebook templates. Hubspot has a tremendous library of free book templates to get you started. As you build out your program, you may want to invest in your own ebook template. Pro tip: the most attractive ebook templates use Apple Keynote, Adobe InDesign or MS Powerpoint–not Word.
3. Instant ebooks. 
   • Transcribe your webinars. Freelancers that do transcription come recommended on freelancer sites like Elance and Odesk–or you can go with one of the companies we rely on at Write2Market, Rev. They charge us about a dollar a minute for our webinars.  You can expect a 45 minute webinar to provide 35 minutes of real content. That’s going to render down into a 10-15 page ebook. Perfect!
   • Do a “best of” your blog. Looking back over your company’s blog, some of the content undoubtedly outperformed other content. Take a tip from that and publish an ebook with the top 10 blog posts, wrapping it up as a “Top 10 Insights” type of ebook.
4. Ebook landing page design. Check out Unbounce for lots of good landing page ideas. One of our favorite articles on the subject is this guide to 8 things not to do. We use Optimizely to test different landing page designs to figure out the right one for your site and your audience.
5. Attendee surveys that become ebooks. Try SurveyMonkey for fast, light, easy-to create surveys that come from your tradeshow marketing program. (Check out 10 Tips to Rock Your Tradeshow Marketing for more details).
6. Social integration.  If your ebook content is online, try the TweetDis plug-in Tweet this! . It will allow you to call out sections of your ebook in tweetable format. It’s automagical.

Let us know how your ebook marketing program is going @Write2Market!