WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
It’s no doubt that we are living in an age where people look for solutions to their everyday problems online. They depend on computers and smartphones for their daily dose of information, entertainment, and education.
This gradual shift toward electronic devices was noticed way back in the timeline by experts. They felt the need to upgrade with the changing times. And so, the concept of eBooks came into existence.
And then, eventually, the idea grew in the eLearning market as well. eBooks are a great lead magnet that helps establish a brand’s online reputation. We now have proof that eBooks are an effective marketing strategy for eLearning businesses. I can’t wait to tell you all about it!
Since most businesses understand the importance of content marketing, simply creating blog posts isn’t enough.
Most businesses are well aware of the importance of creating a successful content marketing strategy. Creating relevant content as per buyer persona is the best way to reach out to prospective leads and buyers.
Many eLearning businesses use eBooks for high-quality lead generation with great success. It helps them generate leads as these eBooks offer customers a chance to opt-in by entering the contact information. Writing an eBook can also help eLearning companies establish authority on a topic in-depth, which may not always happen with simple blog posts.
A good marketer can use several strategies to promote an eLearning business’s eBook. One of them is separating your eLearning eBook into posts that link to it.
Hold on. We’ll analyze more about how to successfully promote your eLearning eBook in the next chapters.
eBooks come in handy during the “attract” stage of the sales funnel. It creates brand awareness and offers value to potential customers. How? By solving their problems or answering their questions. If you manage to create an eBook that compels your prospects to download it, you can turn those downloaders into leads.
This is one simple way of pushing them toward the convert stage.
Also, writing an eBook allows you to stand apart from the competition. It solidifies your status as a knowledgeable eLearning expert. Most importantly, an eBook establishes you as an eLearning industry leader.
It can help your company become a go-to solution during a crisis situation. If your eBook is helpful, your prospects may feel eager to know more about the topic. This will bring them to your eLearning portal.
Very clearly, an eBook can give you the power to turn a stranger into a loyal customer.
For a good idea, let us have a look at the following list of features:
According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, within the next couple of years sales of eBooks in Britain will zoom ahead of the printed as well as audiobooks. The reason for this magnificent success is that eBooks give brands and entrepreneurs a new channel to connect with their audience.
Brian Carter, speaker, consultant, and author of many PDF eBooks and the proud writer of two amazon titles, says “eBooks are one of the best ways to generate leads for business.”
As per him, the only more effective content marketing strategy is webinars. And, we can’t agree more.
As an eLearning marketer, you should know how to leverage such a content marketing strategy for your business. You must know about the correct methods to funnel your content. A flawless and well-executed plan can do wonders for your company, catapulting it into the big league.
You just need to acquire that knowledge and see what works in your niche. No worries. When it comes to eBooks for eLearning businesses we’ve got your back!
Does creating eBooks seem difficult to you? It shouldn’t. You are an eLearning expert. Creating eBooks for eLearning will be a piece of cake if you follow the right tips.
As you scale the ladder in your niche there comes a time when you have to think proactively. You don’t want your promotion process to become stagnant and lag behind the competition. So, what else can you do to improve your status as a reliable resource?
By now you must have mastered the art of creating compelling content pieces for your eLearning brand. I bet you have built a stupendous portfolio to present in front of your eLearning audience. But, with eBooks, you can offer more while establishing your authority in the eLearning industry.
Creating eBooks that target the right eLearning buyers should be your goal. Put on your seat belts my friends, here’s everything you need to know about writing an eBook that can establish you as a thought leader in your niche.
1. You need to pick the correct topic.
2. The written content should be backed by thorough research and fact-checking. You don’t want to face the implications caused by providing false information, right?
3. The last thing you must do is to promote it to the right audience. The best choice will be the influencers who could spread the good word about your work.
Creating eBooks for eLearning is not that hard. Especially if you use the right content marketing strategy to attract eLearning prospects. The points we mentioned above will help you become an informed opinion maker and the go-to company in your field of expertise.
You will become a trusted source that could move and inspire others with head-turning ideas and know-how of transforming them into reality. If you go this way, eventually you will have a dedicated group of fans and followers. You could be the one who could help bring their thoughts alive in the real world.
Thought leadership is one of the best marketing methods to expand your eLearning business. Instead of focusing on a quick conversion or a sale, concentrate on creating eBooks that build up your brand.
By creating eBooks or any other form of evergreen content, you try to gain the trust of your audience. In return, after some time, you will become a significant authority in your niche.
A few years ago, the term “Topical Authority” was not as popular as it is today.
It became a buzzword in the content marketing world after Google’s Panda 4.0 update in 2014. It caused a change of focus from a website’s popularity among visitors to its topical authority in the niche. Google started evaluating the entire website to decide the quality of pages for ranking them.
Just imagine yourself running an eLearning website, where you provide content and information on various topics. Even if you are very proficient in your area, your eLearning audience may not truly rely on your work. This will be for the lack of certifications. You’ll just remain one more eLearning website to them.
However, picking a particular niche will be way better than this. It'll enable you to excel as a niche leader. As a result, a large number of prospects will start connecting with your eLearning brand. They’ll feel more eager to learn more and understand better your brand and its products.
If you are searching for an easy and sure-fire way to increase your brand authority in the eLearning field, writing an eBook can be a good idea.
Here are 3 reasons why you should start creating eBooks:
You can educate your eLearning audience and help in solving their problems. By helping them, you can win their trust as an expert. It will help you become a leader in your niche.
Your eBook can be an effective lead magnet that can allow you to create an email list of potential customers.
When you offer an eBook, you get something more valuable in return: leads. The more you know your buyer personas, the better for your eLearning business.
This is when the subscribers allow you to send them your marketing material.
After offering a few eBooks for free, you can start charging a certain amount for your new learning material. Your fans and followers would not mind purchasing a valuable piece of information for a minimal fee. The eLearning audience loves consuming content. As you can understand, eBooks can bring personal benefits to eLearning professionals as well.
Here are some tips for you to choose that perfect topic for an eBook:
The first duty of anyone who is preparing to create an eBook is to find their niche. If you already have a website or a blog, then most probably you know what to write about.
Otherwise, you can always do some research and find a topic that interests your audience.
Pro Tip: Try to niche as much as you can. The more specific your topic is, the higher the chances of your brand standing out from the crowd.
Before you dive into a search mode for your topic, you can actually make the process much easier by finding out the main problems faced by your readers. You can also ask them what topics they want to learn about.
Social media websites like Facebook and Instagram are good for asking questions via survey or personal messages. You can leverage eLearning communities, like eLearning Industry, for insights as well. Actually, these channels are one of the best sources to find a hot topic about eLearning.
Google forms can also help you find the answers you are looking for. You can simply create a google form to let your readers know that you need their feedback.
It will certainly give you some answers regarding the niche topic.
There will be only a handful of people who will read an eBook to learn something general. The majority of them will read it to solve a problem they might be facing.
Whatever topic you have chosen, try to create a “how-to” guide around it.
For instance, rather than writing on a general topic about content marketing, you can write an eBook on “10 Ways to Use Content Marketing to Become the Leader in Your eLearning Niche.”By directly resolving the issues faced by your audience, you’ll not only get the right topic but you'll also be writing a high-quality eBook.
Content without SEO is similar to fish without water; unfit for survival. Clearly, SEO is crucial for any piece of web content to gain traction. The same holds true for any eBook you create to promote your eLearning business.
Wondering what steps you can take to rank higher in the search engine?
Here’s the answer.
Create Compelling Content
The simplest and most important thing you can do to rank higher is to write engaging content. When you keep your readers’ engagement high, they will want to consume more content. Aim to impress them with your valuable eLearning content and maybe they’ll share it with others. From the details of the layout to the overarching structure, make sure that it is 100% impressive.
Keep A Tab On Keyword Usage
You got the topic covered in your mind, now it’s the time to put it down in words. But hey, before filling your content piece with keywords, you must know how to do it the right way. Your eLearning content needs to have a flow. It also has to be informative while including high volume keywords about eLearning.
Be cautious. Keyword stuffing was a popular trend a few years ago. Then, Google decided to change its algorithms. Now, this technique is ineffective and has almost vanished as a strategy.
Google’s algorithm is smart enough to notice stuffed keywords in your content. This will lead to throwing your website to the last pages of Google’s search results. So, choose your keywords carefully and build your eLearning content material around them.
The best advice I can give you: Don’t write for the search engines. Focus on people. On their concerns. Always remember to create valuable eLearning content for your audience.
Improve Your Technical SEO Skills
Despite being well versed in the basic SEO you may lag behind in understating the correct usage of technical SEO. The thing is that keyword optimization may not work well until your website is indexed.
As writers, some basic knowledge about the google crawler and domain authority can help your creators develop a meticulous content strategy. Adding alt text to images, ensuring that your write up is indexed or optimizing your URLs are some skills one can acquire as a writer.
Following an effective marketing strategy to promote your eBook to the right audience is as important as writing it.
In the beginning, you may have to learn about the various traits of your target audience. What kind of eLearning eBooks they read and what kind of eLearning content they are searching for. This way you will become aware of what your audience wants to learn.
And then, you can collaborate with influencers to boost traffic to your eBook. You can reach out to famous influencers in your domain and tell them about how your eBook is useful for their audience.
Every single mention by a popular influencer has the power to drive waves of traffic to your eBook.
According to the current market trend, influencer marketing has become the fastest way to promote your products. Leverage this opportunity to reach eLearning professionals to all nooks and corners of the world. The results you get with this form of promotion are just mind-boggling.
Expand your reach & generate Qualified Leads from the Largest eLearning Professionals' Community!
You will hardly find companies that have never used an eBook to educate customers, to generate leads, to convert them, or to retain them.
It's certain that eBooks can be useful for eLearning businesses that try to connect better with their audience. What's more, eBooks can also help in retaining customers. But how exactly does that work?
eLearning software like LMSs and authoring tools can be tricky to use without experience. With the sheer number of features that these tools provide, newbies may feel overwhelmed and lost at the same time. This can make them want a refund or make them not buy from you again. Thankfully, we know what you should do.
Providing LMS customers with an eBook on how to make the most out of the product they just bought can save you. It'll satisfy your customers, and it'll keep them from leaving.
Also, you can show off your product's features when thinking of your eBook creation strategy. You can boast about your eLearning product or services in a subtle way. Use the power of content marketing to show prospects and customers that you offer the ideal eLearning solution.
Note: This doesn't mean that your eBook needs to be a sales pitch. On the contrary, it has to be informative. Your eBook should offer value to the eLearning community and let the ideal buyers (or users) know how they can benefit from it. Speaking of how you can provide them with an instruction manual kind of eBook, here are some tips.
- Create a step-by-step guide scenario for the information you want to provide to your customers or potential buyers.
- Don’t forget to use visuals to increase engagement.
- It is very important to promote interactivity by making your readers click on icons to get information or to watch a video.
- In the end, you can summarize the key points and key takeaways from the manual.
- Try to keep it short and simple because a long manual may be too much to read.
- Don’t forget to share tips. Let users know what they can accomplish by leveraging your products. Teach them how to get the most out of your eLearning solution. They’ll thank you for that later on.
What’s the main way you can make a customer become your eLearning brand’s advocate? Clearly, helping them make the most out of your product is of the utmost importance.
Many of us would know how we defend a product that other users aren’t able to use optimally but has been working wonders for us. This works similarly for your eLearning business.
Helping your eLearning customers use your product to its maximum potential is essential. By giving them valuable tips through your eBook creation, you might impress them. And then, they might as well talk about their excellent experiences with your eLearning product.
This might also land you a useful review for your eLearning business. As a result, you’ll get better conversions. Especially if you're running a PPC campaign for your LMS or authoring tool.
Even though “video” is a great marketing technique many new businesses shy away from creating videos. Why?
Well, the cost of creating an animated video in 2019 averages around $2,000 for 60 seconds. A big bummer!
On the other hand, for the same amount, you can opt for eBook creation that will also bring you qualified leads. Consider creating 2-3 eBooks. Always focus on offering valuable content. And then, each of these eBooks can help you retain a number of customers using various products.
According to a Forrester Research study, more than 72% of companies have accepted that improving their customer success rate is their top priority. Clearly, most eLearning businesses understand this fact as well. They are trying to create strategies that work best for their eLearning customers. You could do the same for your eLearning brand.
And creating useful eBooks is one such strategy.
When you care for your customers and create an experience for their benefit, they stay longer, refer your services to others and spend more money on you.
With effective eBook creation and a solid content marketing strategy, you can achieve it all. You just have to solve their problems.
To start with, you can research and find out the problems eLearning professionals are facing. They might be having difficulties using your LMS or they may be struggling with the system’s navigation lay.
By creating a comprehensive guide/eBook you can solve all their queries.
Studies show that 80% of a company’s future benefits come from 20% of its existing customers. And then retaining a customer costs 15% less than what it costs to earn a new customer.
Clearly, customer retention deserves to be one of the primary goals for your eLearning business. Frankly, I can’t imagine an eLearning business that doesn’t want its customers to be happy. After all, happy customers also leave exceptional reviews about products and services they like.
That is, creating eLearning content and eBooks can help retain existing customers.
Creating engaging content is one of the best ways of reaching your target prospects and generating business for your organization.
But, do all forms of content function and perform the same way? Or, can you just stick to one form of content for the rest of your business’s life? Certainly not! Some sort of exploration and experimentation is always important.
As a result, we have eBooks. Experts, like Neil Patel, have long been using eBooks to cater to their audience’s needs. In fact, Neil Patel has even placed eBooks second on his list of best lead generating methods. Thus, creating an eBook is one of the must-use ingredients of a solid content marketing strategy in eLearning.
If you are still questioning whether or not to include eBooks in your marketing strategy these points will help you decide.
eBook marketing is one of the most effective lead generation techniques. It’s considered second only to webinars. By creating an eBook, you establish your eLearning brand as an industry leader. In addition, you get to reach qualified potential buyers when you see fit.
Getting new leads is the ultimate opportunity to reach out to prospects when you have something of value to share. By offering comprehensive guides and free tips you make your readers your biggest fans. You nurture them through the buyer's journey by showcasing your expertise and your unique eLearning services.
Sure, your blog posts might be doing great, but as mentioned earlier, only one form of content is not enough. Simple posts can’t help your eLearning business reach its highest potential. This is why eBooks should be a part of your content marketing strategy.
Brand authority and trust have become top priorities for all businesses. According to a study, almost 65% of customers prefer buying from reputed brands only.
So, what can you do to become a renowned brand in the market? Well, can you show how reliable you are?
If you think yes, creating eBooks can do the trick. Writing an eBook that educates your prospects and customers about something that they might have been struggling with for a while will establish you as a niche leader.
Plus, a content marketing eBook can be your pathway to promoting your business at a low cost. Brand awareness is key to business success and you can accomplish that by using content to your advantage. By leveraging a content marketing strategy that includes an eBook, you can create evergreen material.
It is essential to share valuable eLearning content with your audience. Focus on eLearning professionals’ pain-points. Try to understand their struggles and give solutions to your prospects’ problems. These make excellent eBook examples.
Creating an eBook that focuses on solving issues and giving advice can enhance your brand image. As a result, it’ll make your prospects see you as a go-to eLearning brand for all their queries.
eBooks are great for creating email lists.
Every prospect visiting your eBook’s landing page will have to fill in a sign-up form to download your eBook, right? (Gated content. How can we not use it?)
This way you will have guaranteed access to the email addresses of the people who downloaded your eBook.
Now, you can use this list to take these prospects to the next stage of the funnel.
A recent study indicates that carefully planned emails can produce a better Return On Investment (ROI) than any other marketing channel. And creating an email list is the first step toward successful email marketing.
You created an informative piece of eLearning content, uploaded it on your website, distributed it everywhere, and used SEM to promote. And, then you wait for the results.
But, guess what? Only a handful of people show interest in your eBook.
That’s what happens when you create an average eBook. Something that isn’t bad, but isn’t too good either.
But how do you know what’s great and what’s average? Well, here’s a table to help you decide.
No matter what piece of content you create, strategizing a structure and layout for it is important. That’s how you can define a flow for the entire piece, taking the reader through it step-by-step.
Here’s a bunch of topics to help you write and structure your eBook:
The main purpose of your eBook is to generate leads for your eLearning business. This can’t happen if your eBook’s topic doesn’t resonate with your audience.
Think of something that most of them would want to learn about. A topic that has the potential to engage with most of your prospects; something that’s really useful to them.
It is important to set a tone at the very beginning of your eBook. The introduction should tell them about the existence of your eBook. In the next few lines, you can explain how this eBook will help them with their problems.
The general belief about eBooks is that it’s a series of comprehensive blogs stitched together. While this may be somewhat true, you should remember that all those blog posts should complement each other.
This is important for a steady flow.
Wear your writing cape and go on a writing spree!! With an eBook, you can approach every chapter like a long and informative blog post.
Here, each chapter can be divided into bullet points or smaller sections. The best will be to have a structure/layout for all your sections and subsections which stays the same throughout each chapter.
Generally, writers take time off after finishing an eBook before proofreading it.
Considering the average length of an eBook, it makes sense. But more than that, it’s important for having a fresh perspective while proofreading. The point is that you can do this too.
Go back to your eBook two days after writing it and go through it slowly. This will make you aware of the mistakes that you made while writing it, and you’ll be able to correct them.
Here’s how you can optimize your eBook so that it performs well in search results.
If you want results from SEO, the first thing you’ll need to do is find the right keywords.
Keywords are the terms that a user uses to search the web.
So, if your eBook isn’t ranking for a keyword that a user is searching the web with, you are missing out on opportunities.
Your best bet? Spending time on keyword research. Optimize your eBook for keywords that your eLearning prospects are searching for.
The content of your eBook will perform better if you garnish it with a sweet mix of LSI keywords, related keywords, and direct keywords.
LSI keywords: Latent semantic indexing keywords are the keywords related to the topic that your page is about
In the following chapters, you’ll find several eBook examples and topics that will help you decide how to educate prospects. You’ll also understand how content marketing works.
eBooks can be a constant lead generation machine. All you have to do is follow the best eBook creation practices to get the right leads.
Expand your reach & generate Qualified Leads from the Largest eLearning Professionals' Community!
So, you want to create an eBook. As yours is an eLearning business, your eBook will be targeting an eLearning audience. For example, businesses that are looking forward to buying an LMS or authoring tool, businesses that may outsource their eLearning business functions to you, or businesses that just want to upgrade their current eLearning courses.
Clearly, your eBook can’t interact with your audience until you really know them. So, we have decided to provide help.
Here you will read about the 5 key audience facts that you must know before planning to create an eBook.
Before you create an eBook for your eLearning audience, here are the metrics you should check for your prospects.
You may target individuals or organizations with your eBook, the industry that they belong to will always matter. For example, an eBook that guides companies on how they can make the most out of their employee training programs will lie in the human resources industry. Similarly, for all industries, titles, target audiences, and marketing techniques will vary. Your eBook creation efforts can only function well if you focus on the ideal buyer personas, addressing their specific industry needs.
To have a rough idea of eLearning Industry’s audience demographics, you can check the following image. This highlights the top industries our eBook downloaders work for.
No matter what business you do, as your team grows, your responsibilities will grow too. Plus, a bigger team may also require a different and wider set of business functions.
This simply means, even while planning to create an eBook, you must keep the target company sizes in mind.
For example, the business functions your eBook talks about may not be present in organizations that are bigger or smaller than your target audience. And so, the content of your eBook will vary. So are you aiming to reach SMBs or large enterprises?
Company size can also help you build different content marketing funnels. This will allow you to create a series of eBooks to better nurture potential customers.
You can check the following image to get a better understanding of eLearning Industry’s audience demographics. This illustrates the top industries in which our eBook downloaders work for.
The third factor that matters when creating content for your eBook is the job levels that you are targeting. For example, if you are sharing an eBook within a group of eLearning professionals or another eLearning platform these audiences should match your buyer personas. If not, they won’t show interest in downloading your eBook.
If you want to get conversions and increase revenue for your eLearning business you might need to reach senior to C-level professionals or managers. Why? Because their job level also defines their purchase authority. If you want to increase brand awareness then you should aim at eLearning professionals who can solve their problems with your eLearning solutions. Share valuable information with them to help them become better at their jobs. Remember to always offer value to your target audience.
So, who do you need to target? Are they executives, managers, or simply interns? The higher these people are in the business hierarchy, the bigger purchase authority they have. Targeting your ideal buyer personas is key to getting the word out about your eLearning product or service to the right people.
As the image below signifies, eBooks on eLearning Industry’s platform perform the best among managers and supervisors.
By making such clusters when planning to create your eLearning eBook, you can offer valuable content to specific audiences. Consider checking what eLearning professionals are looking for when surfing the internet. After a thorough keyword investigation, you can serve prospects valuable eLearning content that gives answers to their pain points.
eLearning Industry’s data shows that 14.5% of individuals who download an eBook are related to the Instructional Design field. The number is followed by the “instruction/teaching/training” field which takes up 11.2% of the chart.
So, you see how some audience factors influence the content for your eBook.
By focusing on specific buyer personas, like the ones above, you can make your eLearning content tailored to their needs. For example, an Instructional Designer would find “Instructional Design Ultimate Guide For Effective Courses” more appealing due to their job focus.
eBooks are great for marketing and have great potential for influencing buyer and prospect decisions. But is that enough evidence?
Below we mention some important eBook marketing stats/reports for our in-house eBook marketing projects. Take a look and you’ll never have to doubt again.
Before creating any piece of content, it’s important to find out all you can about your target audience. In this chapter, we revealed some eBook performance stats based on our own research and campaigns.
Depending on your buyer personas you need to create interesting content to guide your leads down the funnel. If you find that your business needs and target audience matches eLearning Industry’s community, we’ll be more than happy to share our expertise on how to create your own eBook success story!
Hopefully, this helped you. To learn more about choosing the right kind of topics for your eBooks read the next chapter.
Most businesses find it hard to choose eBook topics. The same goes for any content material you’d like to share with the world. There are so many subjects that you can pick.
But, what would be the most engaging topic for the eLearning audience? How can you align your eBook topic with your eLearning business’s goals to drive conversions?
No matter what form of marketing content you create, one thing that matters the most is its topic.
It is the first thing that your prospects will notice. The first thing that’ll cast an impression in their minds. The first thing that’ll get your eBook clicked open by your prospects. Clearly, a lot rides on it.
But, are we doing it right? Maybe, maybe not! The point is, there’s room for improvement, and we’ll work for it.
Here’s how you can find an eBook topic that earns your eLearning brand the right traction.
It goes without saying, there’s no point in creating an eBook if you don’t know what you want to achieve with it.
For example, an eBook can help you achieve a number of marketing goals.
By using the ideal eBook topic you can satisfy your brand awareness campaigns. It can boost sales for your new products and services and can also earn you a spate of leads. But, not if you don’t know what you want.
So, your eBook topic has to vary with the marketing goals that you are trying to achieve.
An eBook for spreading brand awareness can talk about the range of eLearning products and services that your company sells. While an eBook for promoting sales of a product can talk about how the idea of that product is useful for your prospects and/or their audience.
The possibilities in eLearning are endless when it comes to eBook ideas. But first, you need to know your ideal buyer personas. As your eBook is targeted toward the eLearning audience, before deciding its topic you must find out what they want.
For example, if your customers need training for using your LMS, you must create an eBook that trains them for that. If your customers want to know how to create epic course content with your authoring tool, you should write an eBook about that. Or if your prospects are facing a problem that you can solve, you can write an eBook about that too.
Creating content gets so much easier when you know what you want to accomplish, but also when you know who to target. The point is, your audience and their needs are crucial. So, take that into consideration while picking a topic for your eBook.
Speaking of how you can find out what your audience wants, the next three tips will guide you through.
Analyzing your competition is crucial for outranking them in the search engine. And the best way to start off is by keeping an eye on their content assets. This is a great opportunity to find eBook ideas. Consider searching for keywords as a treasure hunt. Which keyword phrases does your competition target? Are these keywords of high volume and low difficulty? Does your competition rank on the first page of Google for specific topics? Which buyer personas do they focus on?
Go through their videos, blog posts, infographics, and facebook posts—everything that you can. Study your competition’s every move and then create your content marketing strategy. Planning is important, but SEO optimization is the essential ingredient that will make your content stand out. A thorough keyword investigation can help your eBook reach the top positions in Google’s SERPs.
The idea is to make a list of their top-performing content assets. For example, posts that received the highest number of shares, videos with the largest number of views, or social media posts with the highest number of likes.
This list will be your ultimate resource for interesting topic ideas that’ll intrigue the eLearning audience.
Pro Tip: You can also use tools like Ahrefs to find out how well a content asset is performing for your competitors. This will also reward you with rich volume keywords to include in your eBook.
Your competitor’s content assets are nothing short of gold mines. 100% correct. But, are your content pieces worth any less?
Think about it. Is the evergreen topic you’ve spent hours brainstorming on worth only a social media post? Or only a blog post? Or just a video for that matter? The question is: Can you squeeze more traction out of it?
Well, if you can, you have a topic for your eBook. All you need to do is go through your content assets and make a list of pieces that have performed the best for you. Just like you did for your competitor.
And then, repurpose your existing content into an eLearning eBook.
If your company has been using email marketing for a while, you’re in luck.
As you’ll have acquired some data with your old campaigns, scanning your successful email campaigns can help you find interesting eBook topics.
The aim is to find emails and campaigns that your subscribers responded the best to. This will help you with more eBook topics that your customers and prospects may be interested in.
It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Well, it gets better with implementation.
For a better idea of what your eBook should be about, here’s a pie chart. Go through it to find out the most popular eBook topics for eLearning businesses.
As the pie chart depicts, eBook topics about “microlearning” come off as more interesting as opposed to eBooks about “digital badges and credentialing.”
However, if you want to write an eBook about a topic like that, you can make it intriguing by adding exclusive pieces of useful information.
While eBooks are considered evergreen pieces of content, their success is largely determined by the topic that they try to analyze.
Coming up with interesting eBook ideas that entertain audiences is crucial.
Move on to the next chapter to learn more about what to do after your eBook is ready.
Expand your reach & generate Qualified Leads from the Largest eLearning Professionals' Community!
So, you have created your eBook. Congratulations!
But, does the hustle end here? Or does it even halt?
Once your eBook is ready, it’s time to distribute it correctly, make it reach the right eLearning audience, make prospects click open and read your valuable content and, finally, it is the time to focus on your eBook promotion strategy.
Here are the 4 steps to follow for your eBook promotion after your content is ready for distribution.
After writing your eBook, you need to choose the platforms to promote it so it reaches your target audience.
Make sure to check the following channels for your eBook promotion:
One of the most effective and most economical marketing channels for your content is your own website and blog.
You just have to learn to make the most out of it. For that, you can go through the following tips.
Do you know about popup banner marketing?
Well, it is one marketing technique that has constantly produced good results for eLearning businesses across the globe.
There are two ways of approaching this. Either you can incorporate your popup banner marketing strategy on your own blog/website or you can reach out to other influential eLearning businesses to do that for you.
To learn about using popup banner marketing for scaling your eLearning business, check out our eBook.
Blogging is another great marketing technique that can help with your eBook downloads/sales.
One simple way of approaching this kind of eBook promotion is by creating useful blog posts and infographics for your blog. Don’t forget to use actionable CTAs in all your promo content.
If your blog post is useful to your audience, they want to download your eBook for further learning. Or they might even share your dedicated eBook promo post with their peers. Imagine how much shareability good content creation could bring to your business.
Note: Maintain relevance between your eBooks and the blog posts that you use to promote them.
Marketing is something that works best when synced across various platforms and content forms.
In simple words, if you want your eBook to perform better than your best content pieces, you’ll have to market it the same way.
So, don’t stick to creating only blog posts, videos, or social media posts. Expand your horizon and explore more content forms like slideshows or webinars.
To adequately promote your eBook, you’ll need a well-implemented, all-round marketing strategy.
As mentioned in the section above, your marketing efforts have to be sprinkled across different channels. And so, social media becomes crucial.
Here’s what you need to keep in mind while promoting your eBook on social media.
Looking for an evergreen marketing technique? Email marketing is something you must use in your eBook promotion mix. In fact, 40% of B2B marketers say that email newsletters are most credible for their content marketing success.
So, what are you waiting for? Get on it. Start creating a newsletter to bring conversions through your email marketing eBook promotion. Spread the word about how it can help businesses and/or individuals in your eLearning niche.
And, in case your email list is limited, you can partner with other relevant list owners, like eLearning Industry. Remember, content marketing is successful only if you target the right audience.
As you implement your eBook marketing strategies, you are going to need a team. How much can a person do on their own? But, who are you gonna need on your team? Well, here’s a list of people you must have.
Visual content is one of the most useful forms of marketing content nowadays. Whether you consider the time taken to process or whether the visuals are memorable, in all ways visuals prove to be valuable.
This is why it’s super important to have a skilled graphic designer on your team. So, add this to your checklist.
If you are planning to prepare a paid marketing campaign for your eBook promotion, you will need a professional to manage your paid ads.
Someone who can look after Adwords, Facebook ads and all other paid campaigns and optimize them for better results.
So, make sure you have someone for this role.
A social media manager can boost traffic to your eLearning brand’s website by creating engaging blog posts. They would be a great addition to your marketing team if you want to enhance your online presence.
Such a professional can combine forces with your ads managers and bring even better results for your eBook promo efforts. As you look forward to targeting various marketing channels for your campaigns, this will help immensely.
What’s more, your social media manager can solve any questions your followers might have or suggest interesting content for them to read. They can represent your company across social channels by being the voice of your eLearning brand.
An SEO manager with experience will be a key addition to your content marketing dream team.
This person’s job will be responsible to look after all your company’s SEO and marketing projects, making sure they are moving in the right direction.
Such an individual can help keep track of competition and help decide the most interesting keywords to include in your content creation. An SEO expert’s insights will be valuable for your paid ad campaigns as well.
Apart from having all the other people on your team, it’s important to have a content strategist by your side.
The content strategist will craft cutting edge content pieces for your brand, from writing ad copies to email drafts to outlines for your infographics. All of this can be looked after by a content strategist.
A content strategist can do miracles for your brand if they have the right SEO guidance.
For every marketing campaign in the world, a landing page is crucial. This is the page where conversions happen, where your users are compelled to click through, and where you finally get the chance to turn your prospects into long-term customers.
No wonder it needs to be totally spot on. And how to make that happen? Well, here are the tips.
Do you know about repurposed content? Do you know how the deal works?
For starters, you take a piece of content and recreate it using a different content form.
For example, to repurpose your eBook, you can transform it into a long webinar, a number of social media posts, or a comprehensive infographic.
While completing your eBook may make you feel like having achieved a big goal, a sea of challenges stands right after it.
And the big fish is eBook promotion and distribution.
So you have generated a ton of leads through your eBook, congratulations!
But did you get paid for this? Clearly, there’s a big difference between generating leads and turning them into customers. But the gap has to be bridged, right?
Well, that’s what we are here for.
One of the worst conversion practices that can cost you a myriad of sales is giving them time to wander. To effectively convert leads into sales you have to nurture them through the buyer’s journey.
Think about it. You wrote an entire eBook for boosting your company’s sales. Earned a large number of leads through it. And then, gave up on the lead for a day?
This is the time when your prospects have already shown interest in your product. Proof: they signed up as a lead. But does this mean their interest is unconditional? Obviously not!
Your competitor’s ad shows up in their browsers and you may just have lost them for a good time. And all of that because you didn’t get in touch with them in time.
One simple way of solving this problem is by setting up an automated email responder. This system will send welcome emails to every prospect that signs up. Receiving an email right after signing up will give your leads a feeling of comfort.
A marketing qualified lead is different from a sales qualified lead. While a marketing qualified lead may download your eBook, a sales qualified lead will be more interested in setting up a meeting or a phone call. All of it depends on the stage of the buying cycle that your prospects are in. So, before you try to convert a lead into a sale, make sure you categorize it correctly based on the funnel stage it is in.
Every seller has once been a customer. And so, every seller knows how great a discount offer feels.
It’s obvious. You know many of your prospects will love free stuff. But have you used this fact for your benefit? If you haven’t by now, this is when you do it.
Discount coupons. Free gifts. Free week trials of your software’s premium version and anything else that you think will attract your prospects. All of these can help you compel your eBook leads to actually spend money on your products.
Also, this doesn’t mean you should shell out $$$ or even $$ providing free stuff. The idea is to give your prospects a teaser which compels them to buy from you.
Different organizations approach sales processes differently.
Some of them divide their sales teams into two (one for handling new customers and the other one for keeping the old ones). While some organizations divide their employees into different departments both for retaining and acquiring business.
However, despite the difference, their main goal is to monetize as many leads as possible. In order to make this happen, a defined sales flow is a must for all organizations. This flow will determine the steps that are to be involved in the sales process.
For a better understanding of how this can be done, here are a few steps that you should consider:
Having a defined flow for your sales processes will enable your sales team to quickly commence and implement the entire sales process. The result—more sales in less time.
While it’s important to not let your leads wander, you must also realize the importance of taking things slow.
As you try converting your leads into sales, you must know that not all of them may remember about your eBook. So, whether you plan on calling them or sending them an email, take things slow.
Start with a small introduction to remind them about the eBook that they downloaded. Then move on to asking how they found it. This may also encourage them to read it if they haven’t by now.
Considered the second-best marketing technique in terms of ROI, webinars can really help you speak directly to your leads.
This is one way of solving their pre-sales queries, doubts or questions that they may have about the product. At the same time, guiding them through your product and how they can make the most out of it.
Webinars have a great influence over the buying decisions of prospects. This is why webinars can be used in different stages of your sales funnel.
Apart from webinars, you can also go on with a simple follow-up. Calling your prospects up or sending them an email asking if they have any questions regarding your product can be a good idea. This will get them back into the purchase mode. Plus, it also makes your sales team look considerate because they were concerned enough to ask questions that might have been bothering your prospects.
A simple follow-up like this can close a good chunk of deals for you.
One main reason why many of your prospects may not be initiating their purchase is that they have unanswered questions.
You should know the most frequently asked questions relating to your eBook or your product. This is the time to put that information to use.
Create an FAQ page with all those questions and your answers to them. Place a link to this page at the end of your eBook and let your prospects help themselves before they seek help from you.
This will at least place many of your prospects a step ahead in the sales funnel. While in the best cases, it can dramatically boost your product’s sales.
While generating leads through your eBook is a challenge, turning these leads into customers is another big deal. So, it's crucial to define your strategy, create relevant content, and use further promo practices, like launching webinars.
Expand your reach & generate Qualified Leads from the Largest eLearning Professionals' Community!
Evaluating and optimizing your eBook marketing efforts is key to a successful content marketing campaign in eLearning. As mentioned in the chapters above, marketing your eBook can be a big challenge, from “making a plan” to “preparing all the content.” All of it can make you sweat.
It’s not always about planning either. You may have created the best plan to make your eBook marketing campaign reach the right eLearning prospects, however, if the budget isn’t set right, you’ll fail at reaching the desired ROI.
Solution?
A precise evaluation of your eBook marketing spend and returns become important here. And to help you with that, this chapter has everything you need to know about evaluating and optimizing your eBook’s marketing budget and ROI.
You can’t talk about calculating your eBook marketing costs without counting values for individual functions. Which functions should be considered for their values?
Here’s the answer.
The length of your eBook can be anything from 5–6,000 words to 12–13,000 words. And then there’ll be outlines for infographics, videos, and your marketing graphics. And all of this will be intelligent content. That’ll cost money.
Content strategists and creators that you’ll hire will have fees that you’ll have to entertain. This cost has to be considered while calculating your “eBook marketing” spend. Also, add up the cost of marketing textual content to this section.
Okay, so you have paid for creating infographic outlines, graphics’ text copies, video scripts, and every other piece of textual content. Cool. But are these visuals ready yet?
This is where the graphic designers and video animators/editors come into play—at a cost, of course.
This will be the cost of visual content for your eBook marketing campaigns. So, consider this cost too. Note that you’ll need a solid strategy on this one. Mostly because it is also going to affect your eBook promotion efforts.
The next cost you should consider is the cost of promotions.
The amount of money you’ve spent on Google AdWords, on push notifications marketing on Facebook Ads or even popup banners all needs to be considered. By adding up all these costs, you will get the amount that you’ve spent on your eBook’s marketing campaigns so far.
You’ve created your eBook with a purpose, be it for expanding your brand’s reach or for selling more of your eLearning products. At the end of the day, it was all about one major goal.
So, what do you think is the best way to find out how successful your eBook was?
It’s simple, track the results. To help you do this, here’s a bunch of useful metrics that can define your eBook’s performance. Most importantly, these metrics will help you understand more clearly what led to your eBook’s success or failure.
The traffic on your ebook’s landing page is a good metric to tell you about how well your first stage marketing spend paid off. In other words, the better the performance, the more traffic there will be on your landing page.
You can calculate this metric by focusing on cost per click/visitor. In fact, the marketing platform that you’ll use may also indicate the cost per click/visitor, so you won’t have to calculate anything.
To calculate this metric, you can use the following equation:
In order to get the word out, you’ll need to promote your eLearning eBook to several channels. But how do you know how well your eBook promo efforts are doing? Another metric that you must measure for evaluating your ROI is the social engagement that your eBook earned.
If your eBook has created a buzz, you’ll find out with these numbers: shares, people talking, comments, likes, and reactions. One simple way of depicting your eBook’s success in terms of social engagement is by looking at the number of shares and comments from the audience. The more they interact and the more they want to know, the better your eBook has performed. This metric is also a great indicator of how interesting your eBook topic was.
One of the most obvious metrics to note for depicting your eBook’s success is the number of downloads.
For a clearer and more specific understanding of how well your campaigns have performed, you can calculate the cost per download. Another good metric is to determine the download rate.
For carrying out these calculations, you can use the following equations:
For Calculating The Cost Per Download
For Calculating The Download Rate
Another metric that can signify the success of your eBook marketing campaign is the number of qualified leads that it generated.
While your eBook may have generated a number of leads overall, all of them may not be qualified. And how can we find out?
Well, going back to chapter 8, here’s an explanation of the difference.
“While a marketing qualified lead may download your eBook, a sales qualified lead will be more interested in setting up a meeting or a phone call.”
Now, whether you want more marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads will depend on your marketing goals. As in, what you want to achieve from this eBook that you created.
A more specific metric to measure the ROI in terms of qualified leads can be calculated by comparing the qualified leads against the total number of leads.
The equation for Calculating the Qualified Leads Percentage
This metric will indicate the success of your lead generation campaign. It’ll encourage you to look into your campaign and its targeting settings for loopholes. This will help you understand what might have led to getting some poor leads.
Once you have calculated all the important metrics as mentioned in the sections above, it’s time for you to put them to good use. Basically, to use these metrics to optimize your marketing spend so you can spend less and earn more.
So, how is it done?
One simple approach is by cutting down your spend in the areas that haven’t been paying off well. Secondly, you should re-analyze your eBook campaign’s targeting settings.
A poorly targeted eBook marketing campaign can result in you throwing away money for nothing. This is why it’s important to go through different demographic sections in your ad manager’s dashboard. For example, you can see how your eBook performed amongst different age groups and people living in different locations.
For your ease of access, your ad platform may even have a breakdown menu showing results for all these demographic groups. This will make you aware of your campaign’s performance for different groups. Based on this, you can optimize your targeting settings so your ads are shown more to people belonging to specific groups of interest.
Doing this can swiftly stop your marketing $$$ from going in the wrong direction.
Managing your marketing finances can be one hell of a task while you try to churn out the best of your eBook marketing campaign. This can cost you a great deal of money. To steer clear from such losses, you must track some useful metrics and use them to optimize your marketing efforts.
In the chapters above, we talked a lot about how you can make your eBook work for your eLearning brand. How can you use it to boost sales? In which ways can it earn you a spate of leads? Most importantly, we analyzed how an eBook can help you establish yourself as a niche leader.
Hush! Looks like eBooks are marketing angels. But do the results come easy?
Not at all! All of this requires air-tight implementation. And as you may be busy handling other important business functions, a need for consulting an expert may occur.
To pick the right content marketing consultant, here’s everything you should know before reaching out.
For starters, a content marketing consultant is a person who develops a content marketing strategy. Some content marketing strategists focus on editorial calendars and lead you to the right content direction. Others might also be able to create specific search engine optimized content for your eLearning business.
As this person will be a professional, they’ll be able to come up with the right content strategy for your eBook. So, whether it is the structure, layout or the content that has to go in, everything will be spot on. A content marketing consultant will have a good approach for distributing your eBook after it’s completed. Most of these content marketing consultants are experts at creating actionable content.
Whether it’s about writing blogs, making videos, creating infographics, planning social media posts or even writing your paid ad copies, a content marketing consultant can do it all. It’s no wonder why the best eBooks are written by such content experts.
For a better understanding of how a content marketing consultant can be helpful, here’s an overview of what they handle:
Content marketing consultants are professionals and work with clear ideas. Reaching out to a consultant with a blurred focus of your own eBook can backfire.
Solution? Prepare before you reach out.
Here’s a bunch of questions you must have the answers to before reaching out to a consultant.
The most important question regarding any marketing campaign is “What is the end goal?” And it makes sense. After all, how can someone succeed if their definition of success isn’t decided?
You get the point, right? Think about it. Think of all the things you want to achieve from this eBook. Be it sales, leads, brand awareness or any other action that can benefit your eLearning business for that matter.
It’s important as any content marketing consultant will only be able to help you if they know what you want to achieve from this.
The next thing that you must know before approaching a content marketing consultant is the product or service that you want to promote with your eBook.
Your eLearning business may have a number of products. One eBook cannot single-handedly promote all these. In this case, a niche-specific approach will be way more beneficial than anything else.
So, think about it. Make a decision about the product that you want to promote with this eBook of yours.
This will enable the consultant to craft a more personalized content strategy specifically suited for your target audience.
Competitor analysis is one of the most important parts of crafting any content strategy.
Whether for finding new keywords or new ideas in your niche, or just to be aware of everything else that’s going on in your niche, competitor analysis always pays off. However, for an analysis like this, it’s important to know who your competitors are and where you stand in this competition. For a content marketing consultant to help you outperform your competitors it is key to know who your competitors are. So, before deciding your content marketing strategy make sure you have enough intel about your competitors.
A content marketing consultant that is also an SEO expert will be able to assist you with your competition analysis. If not, you’ll have to research your competitors and do some keyword investigation on your own. Either way, this knowledge will make life way easier for you and your consultant.
Talk of promoting textual content and you can’t go on without SEO.
Whether you create a blog post, a listicle or an eBook, Search Engine Optimization will always come in handy while promoting it. But, the first question is, how much do you know about your brand’s SEO practices? The consultant that you reach out to may ask questions like these. And moreover, it’s important for you to know about your brand’s SEO practices.
So, find out your current SEO standings. The number of keywords your website/blog is ranking for. How many organic eLearning visitors does your website enjoy per month, per week and per day? This will make the consultant aware of your current SEO standing so they know where to start from.
Remember: SEO + Content Marketing= Success.
So, consider it a bonus deal if your content marketing consultant knows all there is about SEO best practices.
Do you know your eLearning prospects? Do you know who you want to sell your product to? Do you know whose needs your products will suit best?
Well, if you do, then good. If you don’t, find out now.
Any content marketing consultant will appreciate you more when you know about your prospects and their needs. That’s the thing that matters the most. And once you have an answer to such questions, you can actually craft products and services that your audience will fall in love with.
So, get on it. Find out who your eLearning prospects are and what their needs are.
Okay. So, you have made up your mind about hiring a content marketing consultant. But, how can you be sure that the consultant of your choice is your best bet?
Picking the wrong consultant can dramatically weigh down your eBook campaign. This is why it's important to make a wise choice. And to help you do that, we are mentioning a bunch of tips to keep in mind while choosing a content marketing consultant.
Before you anticipate the meaning of “right” in the above question, let us redefine it. Any content marketing consultant you get in touch with will have some experience. But, what’s important is the relevant experience.
In the past, they might have worked on a number of eLearning businesses’ marketing campaigns. But were those businesses your size? Were they from the same niche as yours? Did they demand an eBook? Did this consultant succeed in adequately creating and promoting their eBook?
Asking yourself these questions will help you filter consultants that may be good for other businesses, but not yours.
In the world of internet marketing, everything is results-oriented. A marketer may speak hundreds and thousands of wise words. However, if they can’t reap results, they aren’t really winning.
Understand this. The marketing consultant you just reached out to may be highlighting the tales of their success. For your own good, don’t believe them until they present you with enough proof.
To make it even simpler, ask them for proof. Data matters. All marketers use metrics to track their campaigns’ performances. A successful marketer will be more than happy to share such results with new prospects.
Remember: Don’t invest until your satisfaction level is high enough.
As you are going to make an investment, you will want your consultant to be available and reachable. This will keep you informed on the daily processes and progress regarding your eBook. However, if they aren’t available or reachable, they may not deliver the assigned work on time either.
So, make sure they are reachable. One fine way of doing that is by trusting only professionals with at least a website. And then, one that has a physical office space is the second factor that you can consider.
Apart from that, going through the testimonials (if available) can also save you. Most successful marketing consultants show off client reviews. Reach out to a content marketing professional who has digital proof of their worth.
eBooks are great tools for marketing an eLearning business. 100% true. But do these tools work on their own?
Making an eBook marketing campaign work wonders for your brand will require an air-tight implementation of various marketing techniques and content strategies.
eLearning business owners and managers may not have time for that. This is why hiring a content marketing consultant for your eBook is a good idea.
Expand your reach & generate Qualified Leads from the Largest eLearning Professionals' Community!