You want to write an ebook. Maybe you need a website or campaign give-away. Perhaps you want to sell it as part of your money-making website. All you need to do is choose a topic.
Simple, right? Not so fast.
An ebook is your time to shine: to demonstrate your expertise, provide value and insight, and create a relationship with your reader. To do this, you need a quality work. That begins with the right topic.
Here are a few simple steps to follow to ensure you choose the best topic when you want to write an ebook.
Get Yourself in the Right Frame of Mind
An ebook is not the place to step into a new subject.
Authors write about what they know, not what they don’t. If for some reason you do plan to write about a new subject, you’ll need to plan plenty of time for research.
A strictly business mindset is the best frame of mind for choosing an ebook topic. At this point, you need to eliminate emotion and creativity and be all business.
Identify the Purpose of Your Ebook
With your business mindset in place, you want to first determine its purpose. If you’ll use it as part of a marketing campaign (freebie), map out its role.
Will it be an added bonus with the sale, or an item to move your prospect closer to the sale?
Knowing the purpose of your ebook will help determine the topic.
Accept That You’re Not Brainstorming
Once you know where and how it fits, you need to make a list of ideas. This isn’t a brainstorming session. You already know what you know and those are the topics that will populate your list.
Unlike ad, article, or blog writing, ebook writing isn’t a creative effort. You are taking what you know and building on that. A book should be a detailed exploration of a topic and while the writing should have energy and solid story-telling, your ebook is where you prove your expertise and value. This means writing what you know.
The good news here is you should already have plenty of material and research on whichever topic you choose.
Narrow Your List of Topics
Once you have your list, narrow it with topics that best match the campaign or add value to the sale.
If it will be a stand-alone item, your list will contain those topics of greatest interest to your audience. If you don’t know – stop! – and do some fact-finding first. Send a survey. Invite them to reply via email. Before you invest the time into writing an ebook for profit, know what your audience wants!
Evaluate the Data
Review any and all customer data you have regarding your audience’s engagement with your topic. Specifically, you want to find out:
- What about it most interests them.
- What they are least interested in.
- Where they go after reading about it on your site.
- How your competitors talk about it.
Your data will help you build out the chapters of the book and hone the topic.
Finally, Figure Out the Distribution Channels
It might seem like we’re putting the cart before the horse, but for the greatest ease in writing your ebook, you want to know exactly how it’s going to be distributed. This way, you can weave it into a campaign, such as with a related title, and reduce the number of future edits you may need.
By defining how and where it will be distributed, all you’ll need to do is sit down and write an ebook. We’ll cover more on that in the next post…