How to Create an eBook? – A Step-by-Step Guide

When you are creating an eBook, it is usually with the intent of generating leads for the sales team. Hence it is of critical importance to select a topic that makes it logical for your prospect who has downloaded your eBook to go have a talk with your sales team.

The topic for your eBook must not deviate much from the content of your other marketing channels. In fact, this is a great opportunity to get into the details of something you have only touched upon but know that your audience needs to learn about.

While writing the introduction for your eBook, you must introduce the contents of your eBook to attract the reader. The introduction should tell the reader everything that will be covered in the eBook and how it will help or benefit the reader.

You must have heard people say that an eBook is a series of blogs combined together. It actually does make a lot of sense, but when you are creating these chapters as individual blogs, make sure that they flow smoothly from one to the other.

While creating these chapter outlines you can establish this flow and make sure that your readers are excited to go through the whole eBook.

An effective way to get writing is to approach each chapter the same way you would approach an extra long blog post. Break each of the chapter down to smaller sections or bullet points. Doing this helps you keep things simple and clear, instead of using unnecessarily sophisticated words and complicated terminology while explaining each point. The idea is to educate the customers, not overwhelm them. So, keep it simple!

While doing this, make sure that you have a consistency across every chapter. This can help you transition smoothly from one chapter to the other, instead of clunky stitching together of blogs.

Once you have your content ready, it is time to design the layout or the structure of your eBook. This will help you make your eBook look the best and attract more readers to continue reading all the information you have so painstakingly compiled into an eBook. You can look at a few free eBook templates online and customize them or create your own from scratch.

This is important for two reasons – color psychology and brand image consistency. When someone is reading your eBook, make sure that they know it is you who is offering all that value. This can be taken care of particularly by ensuring that your brand is reflected at each step of the way. Visually, color is the most critical element that helps readers from associations, hence when you translate your brand colors on to your eBook, you are parking yourself in the sub-conscious thoughts of your readers. They associate the amazing value they are getting from the eBook with you and your brand.

It is easy to go wrong with the visuals and graphics you are trying to place in your eBook. The most effective way to get this right is by considering the visuals to be a part of the written content you are creating or at least complement it. You may still decide to add the visuals later, once the eBook is ready to be published, but they should be designed while keeping mind that they either highlight some key points mentioned or elaborated in the eBook or deconstruct the meaning of a concept so that it is easy to understand and register.

Refrain from adding images with the sole intent of beautifying the eBook, it doesn’t really do much for you. Make sure that each visual you place in the eBook improves the understanding of the material that you are putting in your eBook.

Adding quotes from relevant research work or personalities or stats adds great value and authenticity to an eBook. You should definitely consider doing so if relevant. However, I can’t stress enough on the importance of only adding them, if they add value to the eBook, and not mere decorative elements or a box to check.

Now that you have identified the quotes and stats you wish to highlight in your eBook, make sure that you keep the following things in mind.

• Keep all content, including the highlighted quotes or stats in the same margin
• Maintain the same indents as the rest of the copy for your highlighted content
• Be consistent in terms of the colors and stick to the color theme you have chosen

At this stage of the process, you have all the content in place and designed properly. Now you must optimize it all to generate leads, convert, re-convert, and even promote.

Once your readers are committed enough to the content you are delivering, you now have to figure out an appropriate CTA to get them to a landing page which will deepen their engagement with the company.

Now that your eBook is complete in terms of content, design, formatting, and most importantly the relevant CTA, it is time to convert it into a format that is easily transferrable or distributable.

In all my experience as a marketing professional, I have never seen anything as effective and convenient as a PDF.

Creating a good eBook is not the end of the road for you, it still needs to be distributed. The eBook should be available for download through a landing page on your site. A landing page is essentially a web page that is created with the intent to promote or describe an offer. The landing page typically ahs form that the visitors need to fill out with their contact information so that they can access or receive. In this way you can convert the visitors into business leads that the sales team can later follow up with.

Even if you have done everything right till this step, it doesn’t really mean that you are going to be capturing hundreds of thousands of leads every day. Once your landing page has been designed you must use the URL to promote the eBook using all the marketing channels for your company.