How do you create an ebook? A guide to planning an ebook strategy

Hi there!

A year ago I published my first digital marketing ebook, and today it’s time to show the results!

But before all that, I’d like to put together a guide on how to go about doing and planning all of this.

To be honest, I did this pretty haphazardly and made it up as I went along, but I’m not ruling out working on it again now that I have a bit more time.

I’m going to stop writing for others for a while and focus on my blog and my own content, and from here I’ll show everything I do and how it develops.

I’ll also try to cover new topics that I’m learning about and don’t know much about yet (it won’t all be SEO, hehe), and this post is one of them.

My experience when I made the ebook? None whatsoever.

The downloads didn’t go badly, but I need to keep working on it.

Let’s get started.

How do you create an ebook?

To be honest, to create the ebook I first needed an idea and a reasonably clear goal.

With everything going on with Covid and so on, I decided to make use of content I already had on the blog to create the ebook (I think it’s something few websites do, and it could be useful for attracting new followers or email subscribers).

You might be interested in: How to create websites with Google My Business

Goal

The goal was to get my name out there a bit and help other people.

With everything that was happening with Covid, a lot of people were struggling to invest and make the leap online, without realising that there are some fairly simple things they could start doing to win a few clients and reinvest that to keep growing.

Obviously they’re not going to get the same results as a professional, but they have to start somewhere, and it’s always worthwhile for them to have some basic knowledge so that nobody takes them for a ride and they understand what the work costs.

The pull effect

The second thing I needed was the help of other professionals and companies who would back my idea or be interested in taking part.

To do this I used the platform Reportaro.com. This platform puts professionals and journalists in touch with each other, so it’s a good source of resources if you want to create really valuable content. What’s more, if the content is good, the people featured in it will help you share it, so it’s a good way to build contacts and synergies.

Tools

To make this ebook I started from the tool that Rubén Alonso recommends in his guide to creating ebooks. Of the 3 he recommends, I used Reedsy, although it gave me a few problems when exporting it to PDF and I had to redo the whole layout in Google Docs (I spent quite a long time laying out and reviewing the content).

Rather than making an ebook, it might be better to create a PDF, as it’s much easier to read and download.

If you want to upload it to a platform like Amazon, it might be worth using this kind of software, but otherwise I wouldn’t recommend it.

It depends a bit on the situation, the audience and the goal.

Strategy

The idea of the ebook was to measure different types of activity and build a content structure around the ebook landing page.

This landing page had several cards that I designed with the help of the Codepen website. There’s some pretty interesting stuff there for using and creating blocks.

Structure of the strategy and the content

The aim of the strategy was that if someone landed on the pages that were part of the ebook, they could reach the landing page to download the ebook.

From the ebook landing page they could get to know the various professionals who had taken part in some way, with links to their social media, websites and articles.

Those who published an article also had an author page and a link to their website.

Once the user journey was mapped out, all that was left was to publish it and start measuring the downloads.

Measurement, cookies and Active Campaign

At first people only had to download the ebook, without leaving their email or anything, but halfway through the launch I started setting up cookies and it gave me a few problems, so I lost part of the measurement.

Because of this I decided to set up tracking through Active Campaign and avoid future problems. If I have the users, in the end it’s just back-of-the-envelope maths.

In total I was able to count around 64 people out of 367 unique views (there are 809 total views), which comes to 17% of the page’s views.

Regarding these figures, the cookie issue also meant traffic data was lost, as shown by the Facebook campaigns I ran, which, to be honest, had dreadful results compared with others I’ve done.

I aimed the Facebook campaigns both at the ebook landing page and at the various posts by all the experts who took part, but through this channel I barely got 3 or 4 leads.

Mistakes and lessons learnt

I think the main mistake was trying to do two things at once.

On the one hand I had the ebook launch, which gave me a few problems because it was the first time.

On the other hand I insisted on relaunching my website with a new design. This website is built on Ghost, so making any change is literally a huge slog. During that time they happened to change the version, so on top of making the design changes I had to readapt the code (as well as the fact that around then I was also writing for Publisuites).

The result was that I had quite a few things half-finished on the website and several things broke, which I fixed as I went along.

As the saying goes, if you bite off more than you can chew, you end up doing nothing well, and I think in the end that’s more or less where the mistake came from.

I don’t think the Facebook Ads campaigns worked because they didn’t manage to get across to the end user what they were about (either that or Facebook inflates the figures a lot).

I have to admit that my strong point is SEO and web analytics, not Facebook campaigns.

I thought about running an SEM campaign, but I couldn’t find the right keywords to target users interested in the ebook either, so I dropped the idea.

Next steps

To be honest, I really enjoy writing and sharing what I know.

When I started the blog I didn’t focus it on SEO, but I think I’m going to start changing that and I’m finally going to apply an SEO strategy.

The first thing I’ll do is create a content calendar and define a strategy for which content to prioritise.

On top of that, for all of this I’m going to rely on the Surferseo tool (I’ve already used it for some articles and the results are good, so I want to make much more use of this tool and see results).