Have you got some great ideas for your next e-book or a series of publications online? Then it might be worthwhile brushing up on a few basic publishing dos and don’ts that will maximise your ability to pull in readers and convert them into customers.
While the Internet has allowed anyone to become a published author it’s worth getting some tips from the publishing dinosaurs, who figured out that a good cover, logical layout and attention-grabbing headline are critical to snaring the reader’s interest and, hopefully keeping it.
While it can be tempting to use the phrase whitepaper and e-book as if they are similar or interchangeable, the unfortunate legacy of whitepapers is that they often fail to follow the basic laws of effective publishing, and therefore fail to engage their intended audience.
It’s true that a whitepaper is generally packed with useful and valuable information, but their overly-technical expression, bland layout and inaccessible style mean they have not evolved to a point where they can ‘converse’ with a specific group – it seems more about telling than asking.
This is where e-books have an opportunity to provide value and make suggestions which readers will find extremely helpful and spur them to find out more without any pressure or hidden catches. Used in conjunction with an inbound marketing strategy, e-books can become a highly useful tool for businesses that have more than just a product to offer a potential customer, but a story to go with it.