Small business marketing is just as competitive as big business marketing and you need all the strategies and tools you can get. As a business owner, you might ask yourself, would my online marketing be better if I wrote and gave away a free eBook?
Well, you could try to give away free puppies, but I don’t think that would be a good idea.
If you want to stand out as an expert in your field or tell your prospects and customers more about your business, then the answer is a resounding “Yes!”
So, in this post, I’m going to give you all of the reasons why your small business needs to use an eBook to promote it. I’m also going to show you how you can get one written for your business very quickly.
Reasons Why Your Small Business Marketing Needs an eBook
I think eBooks are getting a bum rap.
Recently, I read an article that said everyone and his mother were giving eBooks away free to get people to sign up to their list.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed just about every business has a blog, social media presence, or are creating videos constantly too. So, it appears that eBooks have a lot of competition.
The fact of the matter is eBooks can be just as much of a force in your small business marketing as any other tool or vehicle you use.
The online fact-gathering site, Statista, showed that in 2017, there were 266 million eBooks sold at the tune of 1.02 billion dollars.
Because eBooks are so much more convenient and easier to distribute, they have become the new business card of choice. It’s almost like not having a website. If you don’t have one, you’re probably not serious about your business.
In this post, I’m going to show you why you need a free ebook for free download to help your small business marketing efforts. Before you finish reading this post, I’m also going to give you a quick start guide on how y0u can get your eBook within a few days.
Become an Expert in Your Business or Niche
I don’t know if writing a book will continue to be the trend in establishing yourself as an expert in your field, but as of 2020, it still seems to be the defining method of proving that you know your stuff.
If your eBook is good enough, it may give you a boost that you would have never expected. A lot of authors who write non-fiction or informative books that make the best seller’s lists wind up on shows like Oprah.
While your eBook probably won’t propel you into appearing on TV shows, it can help you gain a lot of attention online.
It’s not uncommon for an entrepreneur to find themselves on a Podcast with an icon from their niche. Not only that but getting the chance to write guest posts and create alliances with other entrepreneurs is a clear benefit of producing one.
Create a Long-Term Investment for Yourself
When you promote your business by giving away a free eBook you can do so indefinitely. You can publish it and encourage people to copy and share it. Of course, you’ll need to brand it so that people can find your business online and off.
Years ago, I discovered a top-dog in the marketing world named Dan Kennedy. I was running an online embroidery business and one night and after I finished sewing out a ton of orders, I needed something inspirational to read.
I started searching around online and I found a free eBook from Mr. Kennedy about motivation. The eBook promoted a pamphlet called The World’s Greatest Success Secret which I quickly ordered for around $10. I love that book, and I feel it changed my life.
This book was also branded and it promoted more of Kennedy-Glazier’s products which I started to purchase immediately. Over the years, I’ve spent thousands of dollars purchasing Dan Kennedy’s books, videos, courses, and other marketing information products.
One day I realized that all of my purchases from his company started from downloading one free eBook. So, creating a great and effective eBook can bring you long-term financial gains and become a part of your sales funnel.
Increase Website Traffic
If you create an eBook for your small business marketing efforts, you’ll find it’s easy to use when you want to approach prospective customers and clients online. You can offer it on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Let’s say that you have a hairstyling salon and you create an eBook that compares the top brands of hair products.
Of course, you can do a review of the kind of hair conditioner your salon uses on customers too. You can then offer discounts in your eBook for everyone who visits your salon for products you sell or on different kinds of haircuts.
You could give this eBook out on social media sites, your website, or send it out to your email lists. which will help you start a conversation with your current customers as well as your prospective ones.
eBooks Can Help You Capture Email Addresses
One of the most important things you can do to promote your small business is to get people onto your email list. I’ve been using eBooks for capturing email addresses for years, and it works well.
Once you have a solid eBook written, all you have to do is offer it for free in exchange for your visitor’s email addresses. This is a very common practice. Almost 67% of businesses use eBooks in their lead generation campaigns.
The reason why you’ll want to do this is that it will help you to connect with your devotees and readers while guiding many of them into your sales funnel. You can offer your audience valuable tips that are related to their industry or show them how your product or service will help them fix or correct a problem they are having.
An eBook will enable you to hand your followers much deeper knowledge about you and your business than any advertisement you’ll pay for.
Crush Advertising Costs with eBooks
I’ve got a friend who has a small enterprise and loves to cut corners on his small business marketing efforts. One of the reasons he does this is because he operates a small business renting out boats for fishing at a big lake, and he’s trying to save revenue.
I explained to him that if he gave away a free eBook on how to find and catch fish at the lake, he could give it away for free on his website.
So, we worked on a fishing and boating guide for his business and he created a page where people could download his eBook for free.
The next thing you know, he’s calling me because he is overjoyed; customers are telling him that they are downloading his eBook. It turns out he is the only boating business in his area who is giving one away.
But what excites him, is the fact that he is saving all kinds of advertising money. Once you’ve created the eBook, it can help you reel in customers for years without spending a dime.
If you add up all of the costs with marketing online you’ll find that free content, whether it’s a blog post or a free eBook, will save you a lot of money in the long run.
Save Time Creating More Content
I love the idea of repurposing content. One fear many marketers have is duplicate content penalties by search engines. This is the idea that if you take content from your site and repost it elsewhere, Google will penalize you.
However, getting penalized for duplicate content issues is not true.
But if you’re worried about it, I have a hack you can use.
You can take your website content and blog posts and convert them into eBooks. Since eBook content does not get crawled by search engines, you can duplicate your efforts very easily without worry.
All you have to do is copy and paste your content into a word processor like Microsoft Word and save it as a pdf file. Once you’ve done that, you can brand your content with your business’s information and create a cover for it.
You can do this as many times as you like and give it away online liberally. I have several eBooks I have repurposed into eBooks for years and they continue to bring in traffic year after year.
Another way to expand on this idea is to take several blog posts you’ve written and combined them. If you make sure the posts you’ve written are about a similar topic, it can bulk up your eBook into a bigger document and impress your followers.
[ctt template=”1″ link=”_px3H” via=”no” ]You can take your website’s content and blog posts and convert them into eBooks.[/ctt]
Make Great Connections
Years ago, I found several copywriting clients very easily. I wrote a rather large 200+ page eBook on how to blog and I gave it out liberally. (I don’t think there was a person in my LinkedIn connections who didn’t get a copy of it.)
One day out of the blue, I got an email that caught my attention. It was from one of my contacts on LinkedIn asking me to take a look at a manual he was trying to write.
He had skimmed quite a bit of my eBook and was wondering if I would take on a large project for him. I wound up doing several projects for him and he passed my eBook on to other prospects. This led to other people contacting me for more work.
Quick Start Guide to Writing Your eBook for Free Download
If you’re considering giving out an eBook for free download, then there are a few things you’ll need to make before you get started. Telling you how to produce your own eBook would make this a very long post, so I’m going to give you the abbreviated version here.
Step 1: Figure Out Why
If you don’t have a plan for your small business marketing, I’d highly suggest that you take the time to write one.
The reason why it’s so important to have a marketing plan in place is that you’ll already have a very good idea of what your goals are and what kinds of tools you’ll want to use. If you don’t have one in place already you may want to consider these questions before you get started on your eBook:
- Which marketing goals do you want to achieve with it?
- What do you want from your website’s visitors in order to get it?
- Which products and services you want to promote in your eBook?
- How can you use it to outdistance your competition?
- Where does it fit within your sales funnel?
Step 2: Consider Who Your Reader Is
As I mentioned above if you already have a marketing plan in place, you’ll already know exactly who your reader is and what makes him or her tick. The main thing you’ll have to consider is what makes your prospects lie awake worrying at night or what do they salivate over on a regular basis.
I once had a serious problem with a leaky roof. My wife and I had contracted a company to install a metal one and it started to leak considerably in different parts of our house. Both of us could barely sleep at night worrying about this problem and how we were going to fix it.
I looked at all kinds of web pages, videos, and eBooks that were dedicated to solving this problem. So, you can easily see how a roofing company could really benefit from giving out an eBook on how to fix a leaky roof.
Other facts you may want to know about your ideal prospects and customers:
- How old they are
- Where they live at
- What their lifestyle is like (behaviors and attitudes)
- What they are interested in
- Their income level
Step 3: Create an Outline
Once you have a clear picture of who your best prospects are, you’ll want to start planning out your eBook. You don’t want to randomly start writing without some sort of structure in place.
The best way to create a structure for your eBook is to look at your prospect’s profile and brainstorm ideas. Try to think about all of the ways you can help them out.
Out of this brainstorming session, you can organize your content into a sequence (outline) from which you can logically use it to create your document.
Step 4: Start Writing Like Crazy
Once the structure for your eBook for free download has a solid outline in place, you can start writing. My advice to you is to look at the first topic in your outline and start.
Don’t start editing or worrying about how it reads, just write like crazy. You’ll need to pull out as much information from your brain as possible, so write anything you can think of about the topics on your outline.
A good rule to follow is to get 2 solid uninterrupted hours completed.
Writing an eBook will take time, but if you schedule several hours a day you can get one completed for your small business marketing goals in a week.
If you’re wondering where you’re going to get the time to do this, sit down for a moment and think.
(Yes, there is a reason why the best-selling business book ever is called, Think and Grow Rich.)
Ask yourself if there are times of the day when you find yourself watching TV, engaging in social media, or wasting your time.
Any time you find that you are sitting idle or could be using your time better, fire up your laptop, and get to work. Even if it’s only 15 or 30 minutes, they all count and can help you get your eBook written.
Step 5: Keep Moving
Just like anything else, there will be a time when you feel like you’ve run into a brick wall. So here are a couple of hacks to help you stay motivated and keep the ball rolling.
Make yourself accountable. Back in the pre-Internet days, you had to have friends, neighbors, teachers, and coaches to keep you motivated. Now you can go on social media and get help from complete strangers.
If you want to force yourself to be accountable, just announce on your social media sites that you’re writing a book. You should tell your followers how you are accomplishing your goals and how awesome your eBook will be once it’s finished. You can even be transparent and crow about how it will help your small business marketing efforts.
Doing this will force you to get the job done. No one wants to tell the world that they are going to do something and then not get it done. Telling everyone you know online that you’re going to do a thing and then not getting it finished will make you look foolish, which is the whole idea.
Another thing you can do is keep track of your progress. I use an online program called NaNoWriMo. What you can do with that application is key in your progress every day so you can see how much you’ve completed every day.
I’m a big believer in using the power of habits. If you want to get your eBook written fast, you’ll develop the habit of keeping track of your progress after every writing session. The last thing I do after writing is type in how many words into the NaNoWriMo app because it gives me a sense of accomplishment.
Behavioral psychologists have proven that if you can get a feeling of accomplishment by doing a particular action after a chore, workout, practice session, or whatever it will make you want to complete your tasks more.
Give it a shot and see if it works for you.
Step 6: Go Back and Edit
Once you get your entire document written, go back and ruthlessly edit your copy. There are several online applications you can use to edit with. I use Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor.
The free version of Grammarly will find most of your basic writing errors while the Hemingway Editor will alert you to sentences that are too long or complicated to read.
Step 7: Drop Your Graphics into Your eBook
Now you can begin to polish your eBook and make it into a work of art, so to speak. Personally, this is my favorite part because it’s fun creating the cover and images which accompany my finished document.
To create the images needed, I use the free versions of two of my favorite online programs – Canva and Venngage.
I use Canva because it’ll allow me to quickly create a cover for my eBook, while Venngage lets me create great infographics and visual images to help explain concepts.
But it’s entirely up to you what kind of graphics you’ll want to use to make your eBook shine.
Step 8: Put Your Branding into It
After you get your graphics into a place you can put devices like a table of contents, indexes, ad resource sections into it.
You’ll then want to shamelessly advertise and promote your products or services into your eBook. Remember to treat your eBook as if it were a business card that you can give away online.
So put all of your business contact information in it as well as a bio and profile of yourself and your company.
Keep in mind whenever you write anything into your eBook that you address all of the things you can do for your prospects. This is very important, even when you write your “about me” section. If you are going to write about yourself make sure you are highlighting all of the things that your expertise and education can do to make your prospects’ lives so much easier.
Conclusion
Actually, I could have written another 3000 words about how to market your eBook for free download.
As I said from the start, having an eBook as a part of your small business marketing plans is a really good idea. Don’t underestimate the power of writing one and giving it away to everyone you know. It’ll definitely separate you from other small business owners in your niche or target market.