One of the greatest ways through which you can sell your experiences, skills, and ideas online is by eBooks. Normally, it’s the gateway to making a comprehensive online info membership or product website. Additionally, eBooks are an outstanding way of developing your electronic mailing list through a lead magnet.
However, despite the importance of eBooks, many people usually find it hard when it comes to writing owing it to the complex design, the layout, the cover, the technology or the images. The fact is that this is the simplest part that I’ll explain towards the end of this post. The most challenging part is the writing one. Here, you’ll be expected to come up with something that will draw people to read and remain hooked on being engaged until the next step which is buying something more from your stock.
This article is designed in a step-wise approach to help you in writing an ideal eBook. It has 6 steps where the first to six steps explain about content creation while the last step is about the eBook production. Keep reading and know everything that you need to.
Writing an eBook Ground Rules
What to write about
The below steps have described a formula by which you one can results. However, unless it is a topic you’re conversant with or you have an interest in, it won’t be of any help. This is usually important because it will be boring if you find yourself writing something you don’t enjoy. And, if you combine this with an online world which is particularly devised to catch your attention, your project is going not to live long.
The best length of the eBook
Normally, people will find it hard and boring to read a 500-page eBook. They will even not be able to digest it. For that, you ought to create between 10 and 100 pages. Particularly, if it happens to be a lead magnet, 10 pages should be enough addressing clearly the key points.
However, if you want to sell it as an info product, then, you can make it about 100-page piece. This is because you’ll require giving more examples for supporting your points.
Generally, the quality is all the matters. Thus, you must ensure that your content makes sense; no place for filler content!
Time to take in writing the eBook
You should try to finish writing your eBook as soon as possible. Actually, the more time you take, the longer it’s likely to take to be completed. This implies that you have to concentrate on getting it completed and just get those words on the paper. You can write on Google Docs, Evernote or Word. So, start now and get the job done.
You can, first of all, forget about the writing rules including complete sentences, spelling, grammar, layout, etc. This way, you’ll be able to put down as many words as possible then you can do the editing later.
Additionally, ensure you eliminate all the potential destruction. You should try and switch off Email, Phone, and Facebook. Further, you can try to set for yourself 45 minutes on a timer to focus and doing nothing else. After the 45 minutes is over, you can rest for about 15 minutes, then go back and reset your timer for another 45 minutes. If you make to do even 3 iterations of the 45 minutes, you will have achieved more than what you probably have done within an entire day. (Hint: Install Facebook News Feed Eradicator – and you’ll gain 1 hour a day back into your life.)
Step One: Ensure you have a market for the eBook
Although this may sound obvious, it’s the biggest mistake a lot of people make. Honestly, if there’s no market, then there will be no one to buy or even download the eBook. So, you need to do these:
Search traffic for your writing
Determine if there is search traffic for what you are writing about. You can simply do this by visiting Semrush.com where a free registration will be required and type in the top-level keyword for the topic you are writing about. This way, you’ll see if the topic you’re for is worth it or not.
The keyword issues
Here, you’ll need to establish whether the keyword is on the trend, declining or even seasonal. Using Google Trends, you can easily do a comparison of the various topics and see which one is trending more, declining or the one that is seasonal.
Step Two: Defining your Avatar or Persona
In this step, you must be clear about your target audience. You’ll need to be in a position to connect with the target audience by meeting their needs as well as helping them to find answers to their issues.
The representation of your typical customer is called an avatar. Thus, you’ll need to take a moment to learn and define this. By so doing, it will help you when you’re writing to do it in an understandable way. Utilizing marketing personas normally makes websites 2 to 5 times more efficient and simpler to utilize by targeted customers. Additionally, it drives 18 times more income compared to broadcast emails.
For example, if your topic is on Keto, it could be:
A mother, aged between 35 to 45 wants to lose 50-lbs fast. She has been striving with diets which are hard to stick to. Also, she is very busy taking care of her family and, therefore, lucks enough time for cooking.
It’s very important to focus on the avatar because it helps in defining your hooks as well as design style. For instance, a feminine color design would do better compared to a masculine black.
Identifying Personas
If you already have a website, there’s one unbeatable easy way to identify the persona. This is by looking a Google Analytics for information. Here, you can establish where your guests came from, the kinds of keywords used, the amount of time they spent on your website. Further, you can identify demographics including age, location, gender, interests and much more. Understanding about your prevailing visitors recently became easier to create personas for.
The following are some of the effective ways of identifying your Persona:
- Monitoring social media speaking about your keywords or brand
- Identifying comments, complaints, and compliments
- Following your competitors to see what have done
- Questioning on Reddit or Quora
- Questioning on Google Search
Persona template
Normally, it’s simpler when it comes to writing an eBook relating to a person you know. So, if you have someone you would like to write an eBook for, the better. However, if you do not have any idea, the following Persona template will help you come up with an idea:
Persona name (example Jane):
Job title
- Company details (sector, size, etc.)
- Job role details
- Family role (dad, mom, sister, brother, etc.)
Demographics
- Gender
- Age
- Salary/Combined household earnings
- Level of education
- Location
- Family size
Goals & challenges
- Main goal
- Secondary goal
- How you assist your persona to reach the goals
- Primary challenge
- Secondary challenge
- How you can help to resolve these problems
Values & fears
- Key personal values
- General objections throughout sales process
Add images & color
- Make use of a charming color scheme which indicates the characteristics of your persona
- Icons, as well as graphics, can assist in knowing who they are
- When it comes to the persona, it could be a cartoon, photograph or a sketch. So, come up with a non-bias image
Psychographics
- Behaviors
- Opinions
- Attitudes
- Motivations make your personas human
Brands
- Assists in providing wonderful insights into the customer’s likes as well as hobbies, and sometimes may feature competitor brands.
Lastly, it’s important for you to understand the point at which your persona is at as far as the buyer’s journey is concerned. Doing so is going to help you in fine-tuning your eBook as well as come up with a targeted aim of where you need your readers to eventually end up. https://venngage.com/blog/user-persona-examples/
Step Three: Devising the hook
The hook forms your headline, title or the subject line. The hook is designed so that it catches the attention of the reader by promising an outcome for the same. Hooks can be thought of as cliffhangers as they provide the reader with a strong sense of what they will get after reading your eBook minus giving away all in it.
Finding and adding hooks to the eBook
In this step, you’ll need to read your eBook noting down every answer the eBook has to offer. After doing, establish the key problem you are trying to offer a solution to as well as the pain points of your target audience.
You’ll need to ask yourself what will the life of your readers look like, or what they will be able to do, the moment they have implemented your solution. Of course, you want your readers to feel proud of themselves. If you can create such feeling of identification and relation, you’ll be ready near to the point of obtaining the sale.
Now that we already defined our avatar, this step begins to become simple. Just like we narrated above, Jane wants to lose her weight fast. She has little time for cooking and with a very family. Additionally, she has previously struggled in sticking to diets, probably since she is demotivated.
Thus, the hook ought to be on such words as:
- Quick, fast as well as easy in implementing methods
- Quick outcomes so you are encouraged to stick
- For very busy people
3 methods of inspiring your hook subject line:
Amazon Advanced search
Make use of Amazon Advanced search, and sort by bestsellers to search utilizing your main keyword. Search at the titles which are in the top 3 to 5 places.
What are the main things which stand out for you? The following are the bestselling titles:
- Utilize Words such as Simple, Easy, Step by Step, Plan, Cookbook, etc. All these shows that there’s an easier process one can follow.
- Use numbers. Numbers always serve well when it comes to titles because they show that there’s an end to the specific information, that is, there’s simply a number of things individuals require knowing.
- Are driven titles, for example; Boosts brain health, Lose weight, For Busy People, etc. Your title should help the reader in solving his or her problem.
While you’re on the Amazon page, be keen at the 5 as well as 1 star reviews for particular information which people are searching for.
Using Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo happens to be an amazing tool of analyzing what is apparently out there as well as the opinion of what is doing well. You’ll be able to search your keyword in Buzzsumo free of charge.
Here are a few tips to assist you: Analyze the;
- Top-performing headlines
- Competitors headline
Then, filter based on the type of content and kinds of words as well as phrases people utilize.
Come up with headlines that:
- Hook the emotions of the readers
- Make a clear promise
- Convince the readers that they ought to care
- Provoke curiosity
- Call upon a tribe
- Provide explanations
Ask questions
Here, you can join a given Facebook group and come up with a poll. You can have a title like: “Hi, I am coming up with an eBook for X, and I need to ensure I am on point, can you assist?
What are the three main issues you’ve in doing X apparently?”
At most two sentences addressing each solution can be enough. As these serve as your hooks, and you will utilize them later the time you write the description of your book, headlines, title, chapters, etc.
Step Four: Creating the eBook outline
In this step, it’s good that you be precise yet offer sufficient information that illustrates your point. Keep in mind that you don’t need your eBook to extremely long.
Try covering the top five key issues and solutions. In case there are more, it will still be ok.
Introduction
In this part, describe what the reader is going to learn. Narrate your story then utilize the identified pain points. Expose your secret immediately. When you begin big and expose that single secret on the go within the introduction, this is going to let your readers develop a trust in you and hope for even greater results.
- Who are you and why do you want people to listen to you? …Narrate a story about how you learnt about whatever you’re or want to say.
- Put yourself as a professional.
- Describe the issue, highlight the solution and paint that picture
- Repeat the above 5 times
- Summarize what you have learned then attach a “Call-to-action” to read more.
After you have come up with an outline, you will want to begin filling in the blanks so as to assist expand as well as describe your eBook.
The simplest way of explaining this is by:
- Making it a “You & I” and simply writing. Make use of the persona so that you can have a natural conversation explaining to Jane regarding your opinions on your topic.
- Stopping to correct but rather than tell it all you have. You will need to later dedicate some time to be able to correct any spelling or grammar errors. Focus on giving out your ideas.
eBook ideal practices
After adding all your ideas into the eBook, now you can begin adding more helpful information. A few of these will include to:
- Add quotes
- Add images
- Import and highlight stats, the relevant sources, and much more.
- Put the relevant “Calls-to-Action” in your eBook
- Curate various paragraphs from different websites and sources so that you can empower your points
(Great source is Statista https://www.statista.com/ )
Step Five: How to edit your eBook
After you have filled in those blanks using every other idea you got, you will need to do the trimming, adding, and editing your eBook. Among the most significant sections of your eBook is to steadily adding value and engaging with the readers. Coming up with a prosperous eBook is to ensure not to repeat hence being precise instead of draining your readers. You will need to review a few of your solutions and determine if you can come up with bits of information. Make it precise by reviewing any reiteration. Always, re-read to see if there’s a way you can shorten, make your writing precise.
Checking for spelling, grammar errors, style as well as the structure
You should spend a lot of your time in this step so that you correct all the spelling errors, incomplete sentences, style as well as the structure. Here, there are 2 tools you can make use of:
- Concentrate on the main agenda to avoid being overwhelmed
- Get to the details such as tweaking sentences, typos, and grammar
Focusing on the main agenda is going to assist you in spotting things you have addressed in Chapter 5 which shows up already in Chapter 3. Throughout the initial phase, you may make the intro shorter, get rid of an entire chapter, combine tow into one chapter so that your entire eBook will be coherent.
Making use of grammar tools such as Grammarly can make your work easier. But, it’s good that you be careful when replacing every other error. This is because it may try to fix that single word instead of the whole sentence structure.
Generally, there’s no tool is accurate, so you have to go through your eBook out loud for you to notice any poorly written sentences and also take care of the tone of your sentences. And, if you find this hard, you can conveniently access proofreading services which will save on your time.
Any path you find convenient to you, you must ensure that you don’t leave any mistake for your reader to notice. Thus, ensure you check these off:
- Spelling & grammar.
- Each chapter’s length.
- Proper flow of the description
- The voice and tone.
Step Six: Converting into an eBook
The FIVE Step Method
Part One: Import with the use of Designrr
Here, you’ll Log in to a platform known as Designrr that will help you create eBook from the content you have. This tool can import as well as create eBooks out of your blog, Google docs, Microsoft Word, Medium, Facebook, another PDF or a Video or an Audio file, such as a link to YouTube.
Grab the share URL from the Google DOC.
Part two: Pick a Template
After that, you’ll need to pick a template. Literally, there are 100s from which you can choose.
Part three: Here, all that is needed is tweaking, customizing and tailoring your appearance. Begin by ensuring that there are no issues with the layout as well as grammar or typos.
Then start the process of designing:
Modify the fonts, colors, and style of the book then generate a table of content automatically. Adjust the colors of the template, the header as well as footers, your cover image, or even attach more photos from your PC or the in-built library of thousands.
Choose one for the new cover and then click “Publish” to PDF, ePub, Kindle or to a blog. After the eBook is already created, you can add a 3D thumbnail for using on your site so that you can motivate the user to download it.
Conclusion
Creating an eBook is sometimes a daunting task especially if you are not conversant with the steps involved. In this article, we have covered how you should identify if there is a market for the eBook and how creating personas can be of help in filling most of the content. Having an idea of what you want to write about is one thing while focusing one a person and involving them is another. However, coming up with the real eBook and making it attractive is the simplest part when using the right tools such as Designrr.