How to Collect Leads from Your Blog by Building an eBook
Updated on 03/07/2023
Digital book marketing is not new but it’s getting more popular these days because it’s a great way to curate and organize your own content as well as offer your readers an alternative format to read your articles.
eBooks might not always make much money alone, but affiliate, PPC, and other marketing strategies have made them a valuable commodity in the content world. People have launched whole careers on the basis of a single ebook, which took their blogs from a simple website to something new and exciting that would impact the rest of their lives.
One of the things that make ebooks so incredibly effective is that they can be made up of anything – including repackaged content, which is becoming a popular option for those who have run blogs for a number of years. Taking blog posts and stringing them together into a cohesive ebook is pretty simple these days.
Here are some tips (and tools) to help you turn your blog posts into an ebook that takes your marketing and conversion optimization to a whole new level.
Define Your Goal
Is this going to be a free ebook you will only use to collect leads?
Or are you going to ultimately monetize it and sell an extended/advanced guide?
You can try choosing one option but you can also do both:
- Create a detailed ever-growing guide on something you know well (and sell it)
- Give away a free chapter to collect leads
If you decide to monetize your ebook, make sure you come up with your plan first. You can sell your ebook from your site as well as upload it to various platforms allowing you to sell digital products. Make sure you know how to calculate your taxes to include this new source of income. Quickbooks is a solid blogger-friendly platform to do that. Here’s Quickbooks cost explained.
Find A Narrow Topic
You may be tempted to create a general ebook that is based on the niche your blog is. But this robs you of the opportunity to create a whole series, or at least runs the risk of repeating topics too frequently when you inevitably release more.
Instead, focus on a more narrow subject within your blog’s niche. For example, if you are a content marketing blog, you could create an ebook about how to use Pinterest to promote your website through a strong visual marketing plan.
Once you have your topic, you can start finding other blog posts in the past that in any way relate to it. This gives you the basic content for your ebook, and a look at what you will have to write to complete it.
Use Your Blog Posts As Chapters
You don’t have to do this, but I have always personally found it a convenient way of planning the outline. Take your blog posts and pull the titles of each. Then use those to create different chapters that will be included, that you can expand on later
Sometimes, you will have multiple subjects covered in one blog post, however. When that happens, you can easily take each section and create chapters out of those. This is a quick way of making an even more thorough, longer ebook, though it will require more work to flesh it out.
Here’s a huge list of free WordPress plugins to help you market your free chapter.
Be Ready To Rewrite
Your posts are not going to be able to go into the ebook on their own. They will need to be updated, reworded, and written into a new piece of work. The blog posts themselves make up what will be the framework for your ebook, and the best examples in the industry are those that treated them this way and did an epic amount of rewriting to make the final product perfect.
The good news is that a lot of what is there can be kept if changed. That makes the process a lot easier and faster and is one reason that so many marketers are turning to repackaging to meet their needs. It reaches a wider audience with already tested (if adapted) content.
Here are a few resources to help you create your own eBook:
- Here’s a great collection of tools to create a professional eBook cover for free.
- To get you inspired, here’s a list of motivational books to read
Tools For Converting Your Blog Into An Ebook
- BlogBooker: Create a pdf book that is customizable and exportable. What makes this such a cool tool is that it also allows you to create content from comments left on the blog, which can be edited or quoted. It gives things a bit more dimension and helps keep the real message behind the posts and community interaction intact.
- Zinepal: This is one of the older conversion tools out there. You put in your website, select the sections, and edit it into an ebook right there in the software. It can include images in full color, and they have layout templates that are easy to use.
- Anthologize: Another oldie, you have to download Anthologize to use it. But it creates a more official-looking ebook in many ways and is very simple to use thanks to drag and drop. You can generate content from multiple websites if you choose.
- Bloxp: You can grab up to 250 posts automatically with this tool, which makes it very fast to use. It also auto-edits it into a format appropriate for ebooks, though many people would rather have a better option for editing and changing it. If you just want a quick collection of posts provided in a downloadable format, this may be the tool for you.
- Smashwords: Smashwords has publishing software that you can use, but it is also a community to share that ebook for free. They have published hundreds of thousands over the years, and many are provided without charge there. It is a great way to promote yourself and to gain a following from a like-minded community of book lovers.
- BookBaby: This tool is similar to the one above. It works by publishing your ebook, and then promoting it on several platforms across the web for maximum exposure. Again, if you have tried it, let us know in the comments.
Publishing an ebook out of repackaged content from your blog is a valid and simple way of marketing yourself and your brand. With all of the tools at your disposal, anyone can do it quickly, and with great results.
If you have any tips or tools to share, leave them in the comments!
Ann Smarty
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