Like any piece of content, your ebook needs to read well, look good, offer something useful and inspire action. But first, you need a topic to write about – and ebook ideas don’t exactly grow on trees.
The best place to start is at the end. What do you want the ebook to achieve? Nine times out of ten, the answer is: attract more business leads. So, your ebook ideas need to relate to your target audiences’ needs and interests. To narrow it down even further, pick a topic that you can talk about.
Here are some mental exercises to get your brain working in the right direction. What comes to mind when you consider the following three frameworks?
- X Best Practices for (insert industry/ topic)
- An introduction to (insert industry/ topic)
- X Common questions about (insert industry/ function) answered
If you’re still hitting your head against a brick wall, please stop. Our inbound marketing agency skills can help preserve your sanity. We’ve been creating ebooks for some time and have picked up some tips and tricks on how to generate the best ebook ideas for your audience.
Ready to get started? Download our guide on How to write an eBook
1. Work on your personas
The people who interact with your customers the most, will know them best: often these are sales and support staff. Ask them to share their knowledge with you. .What pain do the customers feel that you can help them remedy? Would advice on overcoming these business hurdles make for good ebook content? Probably yes! Even if the customers’ pain isn’t directly linked to the product or service you sell, there’s no reason not to target customers at a higher stage of the sales funnel.
Work on building these pains into comprehensive customer personas – the better your personas, the better you’ll understand your customers and the kind of information (read ebooks) they need to help them overcome challenges in their personal/professional lives.
Take a look at this guide on how to on build buyer personas to get you started.
2. Check existing internet forums
Use good old Google to check external forums and sites for some relevant topic ideas. Quora is great for B2B marketers; it’s a place where anyone can ask anything.
3. Review old blogs
Existing blog content is a great source of ebook ideas. You can also use historical data to check out which topics got the most attention.
4. Experiment
You can read up on this stuff until the cows come home but the sooner you start trying, the better. So why not carry out an experiment within your onw business, and then use the results as ebook content to share your learnings with your audiences? For example, if you want to write an ebook on how to improve staff productivity, you can test the measures you’re planning to include in your ebook on your own employees first and record the results. That way you’ll know what really works, and what doesn’t and you’ll be able to provide more in-depth advice.
5. Blog topic generator
If you’re really stuck, you can try an online blog topic generator, like this one from HubSpot. The tool asks you to enter up to three keywords or themes that you want to write about and then spits out some blog topic ideas. For example, if you enter ‘marketing’ and ‘writing’ the topic generator might suggest topics like: ‘the 15 best marketing blogs to follow’ and ‘your writing cheat sheet’. Some of the best ebook ideas come from blogs so give it a go!
And now the real fun starts…writing the ebook! If you’re feeling a little energy-sapped and need some more help, download our guide: How to write an eBook. Or give our team a call today.