E-books as Promotion

A very under-utilized yet powerful promotion tool, the E-book is unique in that anyone with a computer and some very simple software can make one, thus making it basically free of production costs. The fact that it requires no to money to make (just energy) would result in a decent profit margin indeed however, we are not talking about selling the E-book. No, instead we are talking about making it absolutely free. All the user has to do is give you his email address and sign up to your monthly newsletter. But we’ll get into that in an upcoming article, for now let’s discuss how you would make your E-book.

Guide

Let’s lay down some points to guide the creation of your E-book before we discuss what the topic should be:

1)      It should be interesting

2)      The content should be valuable, desired; people want to read it.

3)      It should be written professionally (you don’t have to be a professional writer, but it should have mistakes and be coherent)

What should it be about?

As we have already established that it needs to be something interesting, and something which the people visiting your website would find valuable and desirable and want to know, so how do we figure that out? Surveys, of course! It is a deadly thing indeed in the world of promotion to assume that you know what the customer is thinking without a survey and hard numbers to back you up.

Obviously whatever it your E-book is, it will be related to your industry, we just have to find out what exactly people are interested in knowing in your industry (by survey), and then we can serve that up to them.

What should I survey?

Have yourself or your staff survey your customers (at least 100) on the following questions:

1)      What problems do you encounter most often in regards to [your industry]

2)      If you could overcome those problems what would you be able to be, do, and have?

It is on the basis of these two questions that we will build our tailor-made E-book.

Come back next week after you have done your surveys and we will take the next step on your E-book adventure!