As a brand, your company has valuable insights to share with audiences. Well-designed digital books are the perfect vehicle for delivering this expertise. You can bundle useful tips and knowledge into ebooks that educate customers, generate leads, and support your sales team, inspiring loyalty and conversions down the road.
There’s more good news. Creating ebooks isn’t as daunting as it seems, especially if you already have content to repurpose. Below, I’ll explain how to make an ebook from existing blog posts or videos, why it boosts your marketing strategies, and whether you need to gate digital assets to reap the rewards.
What Is an Ebook?
An ebook is a piece of long-form digital content that businesses use to engage audiences. The most effective ebooks are useful resources that provide insight into a topic, help solve problems, and reveal ways to do things better.
Ebooks can take many forms, such as:
- Lead magnets. Offer an ebook in exchange for a reader’s contact information, generating leads for future marketing purposes.
- Educational guides. Help your audience understand a topic or learn best practices, building brand trust and positioning your business as an authority.
- Product guides. Teach readers how to maximize your offerings with helpful tutorials and guides. This can inspire customer satisfaction and retention.
- Original research. Generate brand awareness and backlink opportunities through original research and statistics.
At Victorious, we currently have lead magnets and educational guides that we house here.
Why Should You Repurpose SEO Content Into an Ebook?
You likely already have the seeds of an ebook planted on your website. Some of your most popular pages may be calling out for a fresh audience. Since you’ve already researched and conceptualized your ideas, why not leverage this existing content into a new format and bolster your marketing efforts?
Making an ebook by repurposing content offers an array of benefits:
- It saves time. You don’t have to perform extensive research or writing if you draw on the pieces you already have on hand.
- It’s cost-effective. Get more mileage out of content that you’ve already produced, increasing your return on investment.
- It boosts your search engine optimization (SEO). Your ebook landing page is another opportunity to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs), establish authority, create backlinks, and drive traffic to your website.
- It generates leads. Collect information such as names, company names, job titles, and email addresses by gating your most coveted content.
- It supports your sales team. Help your sales staff nurture leads and reinforce your brand with helpful resources about your products and services.
- It educates your customers. Ensure your target audiences have the insights they need to achieve their goals, grow their businesses, and make informed choices.
- It expands your reach. Audiences have varying preferences for consuming content, and providing information in multiple formats helps you leverage different channels.
Examples of Companies Repurposing Content
Many companies adapt existing content into ebooks as part of their SEO strategies. For example, Hubspot created a blog post about web forms and translated the main ideas into the ebook “The Ultimate Guide to Web Forms.” The ebook is formatted with clear chapters and an appealing visual design. It also includes a checklist at the end to add value. This piece is gated to generate leads.
Similarly, Hotjar repurposed a blog post about heatmaps into an ebook titled “The Complete Guide to Website Heatmaps.” In contrast to Hubspot’s gated content, this ebook is accessible to all visitors to help them understand the benefits of heatmaps and encourage conversions.
At Victorious, we make use of both gated and ungated content. Our most popular gated piece is our SEO checklist, but since we want our target audience to be able to learn more about SEO, we offer ungated Get Started guides like this one.
Creating an Ebook in 10 Steps
Making an ebook is more than copying an existing blog post into a different format. You have to choose the right topic and align the piece with your audience’s needs and business goals.
1. Identify a Subject
When choosing a subject for your ebook, consider your audience’s pain points, interests, and the questions they want answered. How-to guides, primers, and resources about best practices are often useful to readers. You can do a Competitive Analysis to see what your rivals are writing about or survey your customer service teams about the inquiries they field most often. You’re looking for topics that will fill your audience’s knowledge gaps and motivate them to download your ebook.
Back up your brainstorming with keyword research to find frequently searched terms and maximize your online visibility. Then, prioritize the keywords based on your business goals. If the keywords aren’t aligned with your products and services, you’ll attract irrelevant traffic.
2. Choose the Right Content
Next, evaluate your content inventory to find pieces to be the basis for your ebooks. Your website analytics come in handy here. Look for top-performing pages to find topics that are attracting and engaging audiences. If the pieces are sparking clicks from search engines, social media, and marketing emails, they’re likely to continue driving traffic.
Depending on the scope of your topic, you might choose one in-depth blog post or a series of related pieces. You can also summarize or expand upon ideas from webinars. Make sure the content is evergreen, as trending or seasonal topics become outdated quickly. Timeless content has broader appeal and holds its value for longer.
3. Organize the Content
Remember that the quality of your ebook reflects your brand’s professionalism and authority. Make sure the ebook has a strong foundation and logical structure with an introduction, chapters covering key topics, and a conclusion. Begin by defining the purpose of the book to help you determine relevant content and keep the topic tightly focused.
Review the pieces that you’re repurposing and note the key ideas. Then, create an outline or storyboard, plotting out the main sections of the ebook and important points to include in each one. Consider where charts or infographics can better communicate ideas. You can also include resources, templates, or checklists to boost the book’s value.
4. Adapt Into Ebook Format
Begin pulling your previously published content into the appropriate ebook chapters. Make sure the content is up-to-date and accurate. Expand sections as needed to flesh them out.
Your challenge here is to rework existing information into a cohesive final product. You’ll have to weave together ideas seamlessly, use transitions, and add new content where needed. Rewrite and polish the copy to maintain a consistent tone and style.
I find it easier to write the introduction and conclusion once I’ve drafted the rest of the ebook. Start with an overview that clearly outlines what the ebook covers and why audiences should read it, and wrap up with a summary of key takeaways.
Finally, include a table of contents with descriptive chapter titles so readers can jump to relevant parts of the ebook. If you’re linking to other resources, use trackable short links to gather analytics data that can inform future strategies.
5. Design the Ebook Layout
Visual design is a big part of creating an ebook, as the look and feel of your publication significantly impact user experience. An appealing layout improves readability and engagement and reflects on your branding.
Here are a few design tips:
- Organize text with headers, sub-headers, and paragraphs to guide readers through the document.
- Highlight important information with callouts.
- Make use of white space and margins for a clean look.
- Select a legible font and type size for headers, body text, captions, and other textual elements.
- Use brand colors and complementary accent colors to reinforce your brand identity.
- Include your logo for branding purposes, but make sure it’s not distracting.
- Create a style guide to ensure a consistent design.
The cover sets the tone for the ebook and should be professional, inviting, and aligned with your visual brand. You can use an image to capture attention or combine text and decorative design elements.
If you aren’t familiar with how to make ebooks, web-based tools such as Canva and Venngage can streamline the design process. These platforms offer templates you can adapt using drag-and-drop features. If you have graphic design knowledge, desktop publishing software such as Adobe InDesign provides advanced customization. You can also skip the templates and get unique done-for-you ebooks via our SEO content writing services.
6. Add Visuals
Text-heavy ebooks can be daunting to read. Use visuals to break up your copy and draw the eye through your ebook. Images, charts, graphs, infographics, and illustrations add interest and make complex information easier to consume.
- Choose visuals that complement the copy and add value.
- Use high-quality, compressed images for clarity.
- Offset visuals with white space for a crisp, clean look.
- Align images with the written copy and wrap the text for flow.
- Use captions to provide context and detail.
- Include image alt-text for accessibility.
7. Pick a File Format
Once you’ve completed your ebook, save it in a format that audiences can download and read on their devices. Formats to consider include:
- PDF. Most content marketers distribute ebooks through their websites as PDFs, or portable document formats. Widely used by businesses and consumers, PDFs maintain your document layout so that readers can easily view them on a computer.
- EPUB. Electronic publication (EPUB) files are compatible with most e-readers, computers, smartphones, and tablets. EPUB features reflowable text that responds to different screen and font sizes. This format can be a good choice for text-heavy documents or for distribution through Kobo, Apple iBooks, and Google Play Books.
- MOBI, AZW, and AZW3. Mobipocket, or MOBI, is an older file format that Kindle devices use. AZW and AZW3 are newer Kindle formats. Like EPUB, these formats feature reflowable text and adjustable font sizes that adapt to your screen.
You can give readers a choice of formats for downloading — for example, you can include both PDF and EPUB options on your website or landing page.
8. Publish and Share
Now that you know how to create an ebook, it’s time to get your perfectly polished resource into your audience’s hands. To help optimize your conversion rate, create a landing page where readers can download your resource.
For example, I find this BigCommerce ebook landing page highly effective. It has a headline and subhead that clearly communicate the benefits of the ebook, with a clear call to action to download the document. There are additional details below the fold for users who need a little more persuasion.
Then, spread the word about your digital book through various channels to send readers to the landing page. You can share the link through social media, marketing emails, and pay-per-click ads. Don’t forget to include internal links in related blog posts on your website. Your sales team may appreciate copies of relevant guides to educate potential leads about the benefits of your product or service.
To Gate or Not To Gate?
You can give everyone access to your ebook or require users to complete a form before they can download it. Both approaches have advantages. Base your deciscion on the audience you’re targeting, where in the sales funnel they fall, and your business goals.
Gating content lets you collect names, contact information, and company details. You can use these leads to build a subscriber list and market your services directly to them. However, you’ll limit the reach of your content as some users will be deterred by the form. I suggest gating your ebook when you’re providing highly valuable or unique content or targeting users further in the sales funnel who are more likely to convert.
With ungated content, you reach a wider audience. Consider this approach if you’re trying to reel in users at the top of the sales funnel. You may not be able to gather email addresses and concrete leads, but you can start building relationships that pay off in terms of brand awareness, trust, and loyalty.
Tap Into SEO To Drive More Conversions
And that’s it. You can now integrate high-quality ebooks into your SEO strategy to capture leads, support your sales strategies, and drive conversions. In fact, there are many types of digital content that you can leverage to generate similar results and drive business growth. Let our team guide you through the possibilities. Learn more about how optimized SEO content can attract and engage audiences by scheduling a free consultation today.
