The Best eBook Template to Generate More Subscribers (+ Easy eBook Ideas)
The Best eBook Template That Will Help You Generate More Subscribers In 9 Easy Steps
Click To TweetDownload Your Ebook Template Bundle (Word + PowerPoint)
Download your ebook template bundle to create ebooks at the drop of a hat quickly. Inside you’ll find:- eBook outline template: This template will help you format your thoughts and ideas before you start writing so you can stay on track.
- PowerPoint eBook template: This PowerPoint ebook template will let you quickly customize and format your ebook so all you have to do is hit publish.
- Word eBook template: This word template is another way for you to format, customize, and create your ebook.
Grab this free #ebook template bundle from @CoSchedule to build your brand's authority
Click To TweetWhat Is An Ebook?
For marketing purposes, an ebook is a brief book on a specific topic that is available in a downloadable format such as PDF, .mobi (to read on Amazon Kindle), and .epub (to read on Barnes and Noble Nook and other e-readers). These ebooks provide a variety of benefits for marketers, including:- Generating subscribers
- Allowing you to reuse content you’ve previously written
- Telling a comprehensive story
- Getting your content on more channels
Why Are Ebooks So Important For Marketers?
Ebooks allow marketers to dive into a topic and teach their audience about it. The fact of the matter is blog posts sometimes can't be long enough to cover an entire topic, and if a topic is complicated, it can be challenging to cover in one post. By creating ebooks, marketers can target their audience and build content upgrades that provide additional value for their readers. By ensuring that value, customers are then willing to share valuable information in return (ie. their email address).9 Steps To Creating Your Own Ebook
Writing an ebook can be easy as long as you plan. Because these books are a bit lengthier than your average blog post, it can be easy to get off track. However, by using this nine-step process, you’ll be able to, as we say at CoSchedule, plan your work, then work your plan.Here's how to create the perfect ebook for your business in nine steps.
Click To TweetStep One: Choose Your Topic
The first step in creating your ebook is to choose a topic. These topics should be something that your audience wants to learn more about. What questions do they have that you want your ebook to be able to answer? Now, you may already know the topics that your audience is interested in. If you don’t, you can use some necessary SEO keyword research skills to find out what your audience is interested in. So let’s say for example, that your audience is interested in gardening. To find a specific topic that your audience is interested in, open a tool like Moz or Ahrefs and type your subject into the search bar: From there, you’ll see a related list of keywords that match the topic you first entered. In the case of our example, our marketer might want to write an ebook on gardening tools, since it appears in list: If you don’t want to use keywords to determine your ebook topics, you could also pose a question to a Facebook group (if your brand has one) and ask what your audience wants to see directly. You could also create a survey using tools like Survey Monkey or PollDaddy and send it directly to your audience via email. Some questions you could ask your audience are:- What are topics in our [industry] that you would be interested in learning about?
- What problems are you currently facing?
- What are the biggest problems your team is facing?
Step Two: Create Your Title
Once you have your topic decided, you need to figure out what major subtopics you want to cover in your book. These subtopics should help you zero in on the angle you want your ebook to cover. By zeroing in on an angle, you can avoid rambling to fill space. So let’s go back to our gardening example. The angles our example ebook could have may revolve around:- Basic gardening tools list
- Kid-friendly gardening tools
- Ten types of gardening tools
- Best gardening tools
- How To Do [Subject of ebook] in [Number] of Steps
- The Ultimate Guide to [Subject of ebook]
- How To [Subject of ebook] like a pro.
- The Beginners Guide to [Subject of ebook].
- How to [Subject of ebook] to [benefit of reading your ebook].
Step Three: Outline Your Chapters And Write Your Headers And Subheaders
Once your title is decided, you can move on to writing your ebook right? Not exactly. Before you jump into filling the pages of your ebook with the information, outline your chapters and write your subheaders. This is an essential step in your ebook creation process because it will allow you to decide the order you want to share your information in. Plus it can help you avoid rambling. Remember, this ebook is not your end all be all, magnum opus of your marketing career. Only include as much information as you need to thoroughly teach your reader about a topic. That means your ebook could have three chapters in it or seven. It needs to be as long as it needs to be to cover your topic and angle comprehensively. But no further. This is also why it is so important to have your angle figured out before you start writing. One way to do this is to create a mind map and highlight which portions of a topic you want to cover. Here’s an example of what a mind map could look like: Let’s say our subtopic was finding the kid-friendly gardening tools for the job. After going through all of our research, the team decides this ebook is going to be broken into five chapters. Our example gardening ebook could have the following chapters:- Why having the right tools is so important for kid gardeners.
- Choosing your kid-friendly planting tools.
- Choosing your kid-friendly watering tools.
- Choosing your kid-friendly weeding tools.
- Choosing your kid-friendly harvesting or collection tools.
- What are five things you’d like to know about [subject]?
- What information do you need in order to solve [problem]?
- What do you already know about [subject]?
- Where have you already looked for information on [subject]?
- What types of kids gardening tools are there?
- What is a list of gardening tools that are safe for my kids?
- Where can I find the best gardening tools for my kids?
- How can I tell what a good tool for young children is vs. a bad one?
- What is the proper way to organize and store my kids tools so they last?
Step Four: Write Each Chapter
Now that you have your outline, you can start writing. For some, this can be nerve-wracking and cause writers to stare at a blinking cursor for hours on end, but not you. You have your outline to follow, so you know exactly what you want to write about. Even though your chapters and headers are in statement form, use the question-style headers you came up with earlier to guide your writing. Think of it like interviewing yourself; your reader has a question, and you are the expert with all the knowledge they need. As a blog writer, I find that writing for shorter periods of time helps me knock out blog posts as quickly as possible. So as you write your ebook, try the following:- Find someplace quiet.
- Turn off your phone.
- Turn off your computer notifications.
- Grab a glass of water.
- If you want to listen to music, try something without words. (Spotify’s Deep Focus playlist is a great option).
Step Five: Edit and Format Your Ebook
At this point, you should have a rough draft of your ebook template. Now you need to edit your draft. There are two steps to your editing process. The first one is editing for spelling and grammar. This is the point where you need to make sure you used the proper form of there vs. they are or that you added commas in the right places. Editing tools like Grammarly or Hemmingway may help you out here, but don’t solely rely on them to catch every error. Nothing beats a set of human eyes reviewing your content. Once your spelling and grammar check is complete, you can move on to line editing your ebook. Line editing is the process that allows you to ensure that your content is easy to read and you’ve thoroughly covered your topic. Taking a break in between your spelling and grammar check before you read your ebook is essential. You can line edit by reading your ebook draft line for line, or you can read it out loud. When you’ve completed your line edits and you know your content is error-free, you can move on to formatting the text in your ebook. Catherine Howard suggests you do three things when formatting your ebook:- Forget about page numbers.
- Remove all your indents or tabs.
- Avoid having a three or four line gap between your writing.
Step Six: Create Graphics And Other Design Elements
The next step in your process is to create any graphics or other design elements that you want to add to your ebook. Remember that graphics should not be added to your ebook at random; they should always be used to enhance your readers understanding of the concept. If you don’t have a designer at hand, tools like Canva or Piktochart can be a great place to create your graphics. If you just want to add images to your ebook, sites like Unsplash or Stocksnap.io are great places to find free stock photographs. Once you have graphics designed, you can add them to your ebook.Step Seven: Build The Landing Page That Will Host Your Ebook
Ebooks can be hosted in a variety of formats to attract subscribers including blog posts, emails, and landing pages. You don’t have to host your ebook on a landing page, but it can be a great place to direct your audience with little effort. Plus, you don’t have to worry about your ebook becoming buried in an out-of-date blog post. As a marketer, building a landing page can get complicated, especially if you don’t know how to code. That’s why tools like Unbounce or LeadPages are great options that allow marketers to easily create their own landing pages without knowing directly how to code. Just start on a site and choose a template to build from. Both LeadPages and Unbounce have models created explicitly for ebooks. These tools also help you host the ebook file itself, so once a subscriber gives you their email address, the page will automatically deliver the ebook. Simply select your template and start designing. Then follow the instructions from the respective tool to launch your landing page. Once your landing page is complete, it should look something like this: Some tips to keep in mind as you draft copy for the ebook landing page:- Look to the information in your foreword for inspiration. Your goal is to convince visitors they need the ebook to solve a specific pain… and to solve that pain, they simply need to give you their email address.
- Make them feel like they’re missing out if they don’t download the ebook. Others who downloaded the ebook already have experienced amazing results because of it… right? Include testimonials, write copy that appeals to the fear of missing out, and reiterate that their life could be so much better if they simply downloaded the ebook.
Step Eight: Add Calls To Action Into Your Landing Page
Once you have your book formatted and your landing page built, you can move on to adding your CTAs (call to action). The primary purpose of creating your ebook is to generate subscribers, so you want as many people as possible to download your book. Creating the right CTA is essential to making that happen. CTAs should ask your reader to do something: Writing a great CTA is easy, you just need to tell your audience what they are going to get in exchange. According to Crazy Egg, there are six characteristics of a high-performing CTA button. They are:- That your CTA is a clickable button.
- They have a compelling copy that takes action-oriented approach.
- They are placed logically on your page.
- They are a contrasting color from your page.
- They are close to the previous action your customer has taken. I.e., if they filled out a form, the CTA button would be right underneath it.
- They don’t compete with other things on your web page.
Step Nine: Promote Your Ebook
The last step in your ebook creation process should be to promote it. The likelihood of someone randomly stumbling on to your landing page and finding your ebook is a little too close to the “hope is a strategy” approach, so you need to give it a boost. There are a few different ways you can do this.Email Campaigns
One way that you can promote your ebook is through an email campaign. Set up a series of emails that go out to your general list or a list of people who you think would be interested in downloading your ebook.Social Media Campaigns
Another way to promote your ebook to your followers is through a social media campaign. Social campaigns are an easy way to promote your content directly to your audience. How do you know how often to promote your ebook on each of your social media channels? Here is an infographic on the best publishing schedule for your ebook landing page: Using this promotion schedule will make it easy to maximize the reach of your content and get it in front of as many eyes as possible.Make Project Managing These 9 Steps a Cinch
When you're releasing an eBook, it takes a lot of hands to make it come to life. You'll need:- Writing.
- Editing.
- Design.
- Social media promo.
- Email promo.
- A landing page.
Now, Let's Talk Topic Ideas
This can often be the most difficult part of writing an eBook. Trying to figure out a topic that hasn't been already talked about to death is no easy feat. Here are 5 easy ways to compile your eBook.Repurpose Blog Posts
As mentioned earlier, chances are you've got an eBook goldmine sitting right under your nose and you don't even realize it. One of the easiest ways to get your eBook going is to stitch together several of your blog posts to create an ultimate how-to eBook. Say you've got a bunch of posts about marketing automation... Create an "Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation eBook" where relevant blog posts are fused together in a coherent way. You can re-write the content so it's different, without having to re-invent the wheel.5 easy ways to write an eBook... plus a free eBook template.
Click To TweetConduct Some Original Research
Who doesn't love a good statistic? Conducting original research is something more and more marketers are engaging in. It allows them to bring something unique to the table. Here's a stat from some original research, about original research: 37% of B2B and 20% of B2C marketers are using original research for content marketing purposes. This option is more time heavy on the front-end, but your efforts will be rewarded. For starters, one epic piece of content can drive your entire content strategy for the whole year. You can spin off micro, industry-specific reports; chop up infographics for social media content; use the data for talking points and presentations; the list goes on. Secondly, original research offers a great carrot for gated content and can be a lead magnet. Lastly, original research is one of the best ways to get backlinks. A study from SEO PowerSuite found that original research is the best way to get backlinks to your site.Compile Influencer Opinions
Reach out to the big names in your industry and ask them for an interview on a specific topic. These interviews can be aggregated into an eBook to provide readers with exclusive insights from the best in the business. Not sure what to ask? Start with comments on any topics that have changed the industry recently; the challenges they face in their roles and how they have overcome those challenges; etc.Template Kit
Why tell someone how to do something when you can show them. People love templates because they save a ton of time. Going back to our marketing automation example – you could produce an eBook containing 35 (or whatever number you like) marketing automation workflows, to make every marketer's life a lot easier. There are tons of directions you could take this... The "Everything You Need to Know About Essential Oils" Kit The Busy Parent's Cloth Diapering Kit The 2019 Content Planning Kit Etc.Share Your Knowledge With The World And Create An Amazing Ebook
Now that you have your ebook templates and a strategy to create killer content, you can start attracting new subscribers. The main problem that will hinder your success is your ability to be organized. Learn more about how CoSchedule can help you get and stay organizedThe Best eBook Template That Will Help You Generate More Subscribers In 9 Easy Steps
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