Creating Interest Within Your Community With E-Book

One thing that makes an excel­lent resource on your com­mu­nity is an E-Book. They pro­vide invalu­able con­tent, and usu­ally revolve around one main topic and many sub-topics. Releas­ing an E-Book on your blog is a great way to get your read­ers inter­ested in your blog if you write about the one thing that they really want.

In this pretty broad post, I am going to go over with you 3 steps you can take to cre­ate enough inter­est within your com­mu­nity to make your E-Book a hit. Like I said, this is a broad post with some pretty basic ideas for get­ting your E-Book started and noticed within your community!

What is an E-book?

Really, it is just a book you can read online. E-Books don’t always have to be books about fic­tion or non­fic­tion top­ics, but use­ful arti­cles and tuto­ri­als on a cer­tain subject.

Wikipedia.com inter­prets an E-Book as:

An e-text that forms the dig­i­tal media equiv­a­lent of a con­ven­tional printed book, often pro­tected with a dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment sys­tem. E-books are usu­ally read on per­sonal com­put­ers or smart phones, or on ded­i­cated hard­ware devices known as e-book read­ers or e-book devices

Step 1 — What Do My Read­ers Even Want?

That’s always the first thought that should come to mind when you are plan­ning to write an E-Book. If you release an E-Book no one really wants, it’s prob­a­bly not going to do you much good read­er­ship wise is it?

If you strug­gle to come up with an idea for writ­ing an E-Book, try out some of the below suggestions:

1. Look at the 5 most pop­u­lar posts on your blog, and see if you have enough to talk about to turn it into an E-Book.
2. If you have series posts, merge them into an E-Book and add some­thing “extra” to it so they are dif­fer­ent from the blog posts.
3. Write an E-Book on how you did some­thing on your blog. Exam­ple — Make Money, Design, Drive Traf­fic, etc. etc.
4. Make a giant ass list on one topic. I’m not talk­ing “100 Great­est Things” (unless you get really detailed) — no. I’m think­ing more like 300 – 500 things!
5. Pick a topic you know you will have a ton to talk about. Even if it is some­thing that has been talked about before, as long as you have a Unique Point of View, what­ever you talk about is fine.

Get Ideas From Your Read­ers Themselves

This is for your read­ers, so if you want to be dead on about what you write in your E-Book, go out and actu­ally ask your read­ers! You can write a blog post about it, ask on other sites, or if you have an email newslet­ter — ask your read­ers through that! Any way you can con­tact peo­ple, do it.

Step 2 — Get­ting Some Kind of Payment

Make sure your read­ers pay for your E-Book. Now, pay­ment doesn’t always have to be money. It could be money, sure, but maybe you want to do some­thing else like have them sub­scribe to your RSS Feed, or fol­low you on Twit­ter to name a few examples.

It’s A Win-Win Situation

By hav­ing your read­ers “pay” for this E-Book, you win in two ways really.

If you did in fact make your read­ers sub­scribe to your RSS feed for the E-Book, then you will have more peo­ple read­ing and fol­low­ing your blog. That’s always good to get more sub­scribers, and this con­cept is almost bul­let­proof for get­ting sub­scribers because if they want your E-Book then they must be inter­ested in your blogs topic. Instant, easy subscriptions.

Your sec­ond win is that you will get your E-Book down­loaded and hope­fully read, in result help­ing some­body. When you help peo­ple, they trust you and will start lik­ing you so you can build rela­tion­ships with them and they can even go as far as to rec­om­mend your E-Book to others.

Step 3 — Make the E-Book Available

The next step after you have com­pleted your E-Book is to get it noticed — to mar­ket it. How do you make it avail­able so your read­ers can get to it? Post­ing it just on your blog isn’t enough — I can tell you that right now.

There are many ways to pro­mote your E-Book online. You can post it on forums, blogs, Social Net­work­ing sites, pretty much any­where. But there is one par­tic­u­lar tech­nique that I want to high­light here the most, as it is the most effec­tive in some cases, and was a way I was shown a really great E-Book.

Get­ting Up And Personal

Back in April, a friend of ours, Nico­las Prud­hon wrote a SEO E-Book called SEO for Web 2.0 and released it at his blog for free. He fol­lowed Step 1 cor­rectly and picked a topic he wanted to write about, that being Search Engine Opti­miza­tion through “Web 2.0″ Tools. His “pay­ment” was hav­ing you sign up for his Email newslet­ter in which you will receive the E-Book for free. He is also fol­low­ing the third step by pro­mot­ing his E-Book on his blog, and he wrote a blog post all about it.

So what did he do that I liked? He filled out one of our Con­tact forms and actu­ally wrote a descrip­tion of the E-Book and asked our opin­ions on it. I have yet to thor­oughly read through it, how­ever I did skim it a bit and even read a few sec­tions and liked what I saw. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have down­loaded it if he hadn’t con­tacted me about it.

This can be seen as spam by a lot of peo­ple, but I appre­ci­ated it because I am bad at SEO, and Nicolas’s book was prob­a­bly going to be some­thing I was inter­ested in. I would say not to email some­one about an E-Book unless you can give a very good why it can help them.

Do You Even Have An E-Book?

I think of of the more impor­tant ques­tions in this arti­cle is “do you even, or plan to ever release an E-Book?” It is one of my goals as a blog­ger to release one, but I cur­rently don’t have much time due to other activ­i­ties and web devel­op­ments to get around to it.

So, do you have an E-Book at your blog? If not, why?

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