It's not enough to write compelling content. Author the shortest and sweetest post-or the longest longform-and it's still only one post. A one-time shot. The best you can hope for is a spurt of interest when it's published, viral traffic as it hits social networks and gets quoted on other sites, then long-tail traffic as Google starts ranking your article for relevant keywords. With a bit of luck, your article is the buzz of the week day-and that's about it. Or, you could do more than just write a blog post. You could plan an entire series of related content, get each post ranked high for its own keywords and shared for its own benefits-and then turn all that content into a book. Publishing a book-in this case an eBook-is perhaps the most extreme content marketing idea possible. Books must extensively cover a topic and typically include over 10,000 words, two tasks that take considerable time to complete. But it's worth it. Data has been generated with t he help of GSA Cont en t Generator DE MO.
Over the past year, the Zapier team has on average published one book every 90 days. These books have been downloaded more than 15,000 times, have helped us gain more than 10,000 new email subscribers and grow our Learning Center from around 10,000 pageviews per month in July 2014 to more than 100,000 page views in July 2015-and our books in the Kindle and iBooks stores have on average brought in over a dozen new readers per day. Books work. Here are 10 of the best tips we've learned about how to effectively write and self-publish eBooks, so you can promote your content and grow your audience organically. You could set out to write a book, jotting down words page by page until you have enough content to publish on its own. That's the typical way to write a book, and it works. But it's incredibly tough to find the time to research, write, and edit, and then turn all that into a book.
That's why blogging is such a popular marketing medium. It's easy, requiring only a few hundred words and perhaps a few images, and is a reliable way to generate traffic. Writing a book is too much work for less concrete results. But the authority and new distribution channels a book brings makes it hard to rule out. So combine the two. That's what we've done at Zapier. We have an active blog with new articles every week, plenty of which are in-depth enough to stand alone as book chapters. For our first blog-powered eBook, The Ultimate Guide to CRM Apps, that's just what we did: we pulled together a meager four blog posts and turned them into a book. That was our first try, and it worked. It wasn't perfect, though-we had to edit articles extensively to turn them into book chapters, and didn't have as much unique content as we'd have liked.
That's where we learned planning comes into play. With our later books-especially our recent nine-chapter The Ultimate Guide to Forms & Surveys-our marketing team of four met and outlined the content we'd like to see in the book. We then pulled our best resources together-with writing commitments from a survey expert and our on-staff statistician-and set out to make an authoritative guide to forms and surveys. Planning helped us make a better book, one with over a dozen chapters that in just over a month has been read by more than 36,000 people. Sound like an idea you'd like pursue? Before you start writing, you must identify topics worth expanding into book chapters-information that will not only be relevant to your readers but will also help your team accomplish its marketing goals, too. At Zapier, for example, the content that fits best in with our marketing strategy involves writing about apps that integrate with Zapier, tips on automation and coding, and information on running a remote team.
