Writing and publishing an ebook is proven success strategy for branding yourself as an expert in your field.
Ebooks offer a significantly faster branding strategy than previous publishing options.
Although success is never guaranteed, the 7 tips that follow, however, will increase the likelihood of your personal branding success during today’s period of rapid change.
What’s changed, and what remains the same
Until recently, it could take years to locate and convince a traditional publisher that you had a sellable book idea.
Then, it wold take even more time for them to edit, produce, print, and distribute your book.
Now, however, you can get your ebook into your prospect’s hands in a fraction of a time!
Speed, however, is no substitute for planning.
Although publishing technology has rapidly changed, the fundamentals of writing and publishing success remain the same.
The trick is to write an ebook that will resonate with your prospects while simultaneously pre-selling your expertise and building your personal brand.
7 tips for writing & publishing a successful ebook
You can heighten the probability of your ebook’s success by addressing the following 7 issues before you start to write:
- Readers. Start by discarding the “best-seller” mentality! Your goal is not to become a bestselling author. Your goal is much simpler: to promote your competence and expertise to your ideal readers–those you want as future clients and prospects. Traditional publishing has always been based on selling a lot of books to a lot of strangers. Your success, however, involves targeting for reader quality, not quantity. This involves creating reader personas describing your ideal readers and their information needs.
- Benefits. Next, make a list of how your book is going to benefit your readers. In order for your book to build your personal brand, it must help readers solve their problems or achieve their goals. It must help them increase their sales or reduce their costs. It must help them save time or increase their productivity. The more benefits you include in your book’s title, the more success you’ll enjoy.
- Purpose. Why do you want to write and publish an ebook? It’s not enough to say, to build my brand. You have to know exactly how you’re going to benefit from your book. The best way to do this is to prepare a mission statement for your book. Your mission statement should provide a roadmap for your career success, describing how you will convert ebook readers to coaching and consulting clients or prospective buyers of your future information products like e-courses, special reports, or videos.
- Format. How are you going to organize the contents of your ebook? Format involves addressing both content and design issues. Content issues involve deciding between a step-by-step, or “procedural,” approach versus a case study approach. You can also organize your book’s contents in terms of questions and answers, or best practices. Design issues involve choosing either a portrait, or vertical, orientation for your pages, or landscape, or horizontal, page layout. Page length also plays a role.
- Promotion. How are you going to promote your ebook? No matter how well your ebook turns out, quality–by itself–is no guarantee that ideal readers are going to discover it. Marketing and promotion are your responsibility! It’s up to you to bring your ebook to the attention of your ideal readers. In most cases, you’ll want to analyze your current online presence and decide if it provides the author platform you need to attract, convert, and upsell your ideal readers.
- Leverage. Look for ways to use your ebook to support every aspect of your career. Instead of parenthetically referring to your ebook in your personal marketing, make your ebook the core element in your personal brand. Leverage your ebook throughout your marketing and activities and keep it as fresh and updated as possible.
- Followup. A single ebook is seldom enough for years of personal branding success. Think of your ebook and your brand as seedlings that need to be constantly nurtured. Each new edition of your ebook, and each followup ebook, will shine more light on your brand. Accordingly, when choosing the title for your first ebook, look for a title that you can support with companion books and ebooks. Think of Jay Conrad Levinson’s 30+ years of success based on over 100 Guerrilla Marketing books!
Perspective
A lot has changed during the past three years of Author’s Corner Personal Branding Blog posts.
The fundamentals, however, remain the same. Writing a book can completely change your life, the same way it changed my life.
However, more than ever, you have to be strategic in your approach. You can’t allow yourself to be distracted by new tools and new opportunities. You must constantly focus on your readers and on your career, while learning from the success of others who have created successful brands in the past.
It’s also important to enjoy the process of watching your ideas take shape on the screen of your computer or iPhone! And, as you move forward, share your concerns, experiences, and questions below, as comments!
Author:
Roger C. Parker encourages you to download his currently-free workbook, 99 Questions to Ask Before you Write & Self-Publish a Brand-building Book. You can also ask questions about writing and publishing below, or using his online form.
