Quick Tips for Writing Your Business Ebook
If you’ve decided to incorporate a free ebook into your business marketing strategy but you don’t already have a body of content from which to construct your ebook, you probably fall into one of two categories. Right now you’re thinking:
Writing is going to be the best part of this project!
Or…
Writing this is going to kill me.
Don’t worry, it’s normal. That is, both responses are normal! Every business owner does things that aren’t fun, and every business owner has passions they get to employ on behalf of their company. Whichever camp you fall in, you have options. You can forge ahead or hire it out , but you can — you really can! — birth this baby.
Here are a few writing tips for writers and non-writers alike.
Choose a subject and “finish by” date, and stay on target.
Set a solid subject for your ebook, write an outline for the contents, and don’t let yourself get distracted or wander away (in your writing or your working) from your business goals.
Set the date you plan to finish your ebook so that your marketing support systems can also be developed so that they are ready to launch your ebook into the world at the best possible time. If your business spikes at a particular time of year — everyone wants to lose weight in January, people purchase swimsuits in May — your ebook should be ready to take advantage of the naturally increasing interest resulting from that spike.
Write from the position of your audience.
You need to be able to view things from the point of view of your audience or target market. If you try to write for “everyone” then your chances of actually reaching “teenage gamers” is dramatically reduced. Develop a detailed audience profile, and keep it firmly in mind as you write your ebook for them.
Consider what problems of theirs that you are solving, address their urgent needs, let them feel confident in your ability to meet those needs. Show that you know them, and show that you can help them as well. Be generous in the giving of your help.
Don’t format as you go.
If you start with a solid outline you will already have a good idea of how your content will flow. That’s the single most important consideration as you write your ebook, so don’t allow formatting issues to distract you from the main task at hand.
Try writing in a simple text editor rather than a hefty word processing program; it will force you to concentrate on content rather than formatting.
Leave headers, footers, quotes, photos, illustrations, charts, links, colors and everything else for later — you’ll get to it once the main content is in place.
Limit your editing.
Following the same principle as the “don’t format as you go” idea, you should limit your editing during the time you are producing the content of your business ebook. Some editing is okay, but spending a half hour trying to track down something in the AP Stylebook, or obsessing over just the right adjective to describe your product is not going to be a productive use of your time.
Get the content on the page, and you can edit it later.
Save often, save to multiple places.
I prefer to draft content for ebooks in Google Docs, which has an auto-save function that works without me having to think about it. And until Google accidentally ate one of my major documents I was contentedly remiss about saving to a different location. As it turned out, there was a bug affecting a number of Google Doc users that caused certain docs to be moved to the Trash, and following a frantic search through various troubleshooting forums, I found my own missing document there (whew).
Now I regularly download my important documents from the cloud to a PDF file on my desktop. Smart people also make full backups of their computers on a regular basis.
Need help putting together your business ebook? Contact Calvert Creative today! We help businesses build content that drives revenue. Call us toll-free at 877-495-6851.
