3 Reasons an eBook May Be The "Just Right" Content You Need

Over the past few weeks, I've had a similar discussion with two separate clients over what type of content I was going to generate for them. The question: Blog, eBook, or white paper? The more we talked, the more I felt like we were revisiting Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know the story. The little blonde breaks into the Bears' house looking to eat, rest her feet, and ultimately get some shut eye. As she wanders around, she finds bowls of porridge that are too hot and too cold before enjoying the "just right" temperature of Baby Bear's. She follows a similar process with the chairs - too hard, too soft, then just right. Up to the bedrooms for the same analysis - too high, too low, and finally, just right.

What does this have to do with copywriting?

Working on content development with clients, I'm finding more of them are focused mainly on the message they want to get out and not so much on the type of content vehicle they will use.

Some feel they need a white paper. After talking about their target audience and goals, we often come to the conclusion that  a white paper isn't the right choice. It may be too formal or technical for what they hope to accomplish. Now don't get me wrong. White papers, as I've written before, are still a popular and effective content marketing tool. They're more appropriate further down the sales funnel - when prospects have already made up their minds to buy and they need more detailed information.

Often the request is for a blog post. Again after finding out the amount of content they hope to squeeze into what what should be 500-1000 word post, it becomes clear that a blog post isn't quite right either.

So what's the answer? In many cases the "just right" choice is an eBook. This is especially true when you're focusing on top of funnel activity trying to build brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and generate leads.

That could be why ebooks are exploding in popularity. 

In 2010, less than one in ten marketers were using eBooks, according to the annual B2B Content Marketing survey from MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute. In the 2014 survey, that number had jumped to more than one in three. In the past four years, eBooks have leaped over print newsletters, digital magazines, podcasts, and virtual conferences as a content vehicle of choice for marketers.

Here are three reasons more businesses seems to be jumping on the eBook bandwagon every day.

1. Length. Most of us skim blog posts trying to cull out the relevant data we need. But sometimes we want a little more depth and the eBook provides that. I actually describe eBooks to my clients as expanded blog posts.

Lengths can vary - I've done some as small as 1200 words and others as long as 8000 words - but the most popular eBooks tend to be in the 2000-4000 word range. That translates to about 10-15 pages depending on the graphics. (We'll get to that in a minute). As a rule of thumb, if your goal is brand awareness or lead generation, you should shoot for an eBook a reader can finish in one 30 minute session.

Again that's just a guideline. If you're exploring a topic in depth, it can be much longer. The point is that you have the flexibility to make it the "just right" size for your needs.

2. Tone. You also have flexibility when it comes to the tone you use in an eBook. car rental Appropriately, white papers usually focus on technical issues and tend to use a more serious voice. They're usually written in the third person: "The growing omni-channel world of the empowered consumer is forcing retailers to examine their entire IT infrastructure."

You can be more informal in an ebook and address the audience directly. The same point in an eBook could be written like this: "Hey retailer, are you looking for your customer? Well they're everywhere - in your store, on line, or talking to their friends about you on Facebook. Is your IT system ready to help your business respond to them?"

Again, the key is developing the right tone for the right audience. Here are two separate eBooks with the same basic goal of presenting "How To" information. This one on Mobile Marketing and PPC is fairly straightforward and gives the reader a step by step guide on what they should be doing to adapt their paid search to users with mobile devices. This one, The Wizards Behind Google Apps, provides tips and advice on managing Google Apps installations, but the tone is much more whimsical. Both get the job done but knowing your target audience is key.

3. Visuals. Probably the biggest advantage of an eBook over a white paper or blog post is the flexibility - there's that word again - it gives designers. Most engaging eBooks have interesting graphics throughout to draw the reader in and break up blocks of imposing text. According to Content+, articles with images get 94% more views that those without. A well designed eBook enhances the information presented and encourages downloading and sharing. Take another look at the Wizards Behind Google Apps. The graphics are captivating and inviting.

eBooks are not about to replace white papers, blog posts, case studies, infographics or the many other useful content pieces that make up your content marketing portfolio. In many cases however, it may be "just right" for you.

What is your experience with eBooks? How effective have you found them to be?

It's Spring! Time to Content-scape

Only a few weeks ago I sat looking out my window at a yard covered with several feet of snow. The white blanket has finally melted away but it's revealed a lawn beaten by a long, hard winter. It's not very appealing right now, but after a few weekends of cleaning, raking, and feeding, it'll be back to its familiar, green self. Unfortunately, you won't get a similar stark wake-up call when it comes to your content. But if you take a close enough look, you'll likely find things aren't quite as lush there either. Time to get to work on that too. 

Spring is a time for growth - an appropriate time to re-evaluate your business and make some positive changes. While you're getting ready to landscape your yard, plan to do some content-scaping as well. Both tasks can seem overwhelming, but they don't have to be. Take small steps now to make a big impact later.

Here are three things you can do to get started.

1. Evaluate your tools - Start with your basic tools. Thankfully I found my rake buried behind the snow blower. Good start.

How about your content marketing tools? Determine what you have for eBooks, white papers, case studies, and other engaging content that can attract leads and new clients. Begin with a simple inventory of what you have and what you think still works. 

2. Do a cleanup - The next step is a good cleanup. I need to pick up the leaves I missed last November and rake the dead grass that's stifling new growth. No worries. I'll just get the leaves this first weekend.

Same thing for your content. When was the last time you did a thorough clean up on your web site? Are you still showing that case study from four years ago for a product you don't carry anymore? Is your most recent blog post dated last August? None of that will help promote growth or be of interest to visitors to your site. Start small. Get rid of anything that's out of date, irrelevant, or would lead a visitor to think you haven't been paying attention.

3. Start planting - You reap what you sow and this is the season to seed and feed that lawn. That'll be the biggest payoff when it comes back to life in a few weeks.

Time to plant some new content as well. The cleanup was good, but if you don't replenish your site with fresh material, it's going to look pretty barren. Generate new content by posting a recent customer success story, a white paper on a hot topic in your industry, or an eBook that provides valuable information that your prospects can use in their businesses.

Landscaping and content marketing can be hard work, but the rewards are well worth it. I'll be enjoying my lush, green lawn this summer and hopefully you'll be proud of a healthy crop of new prospects and customers.

So what are you doing to promote your growth? Could your content use a good spring cleaning?

Anatomy of a Meltdown: Lessons in Crisis Management

Have you seen my website lately? Neither have I. Actually it's back up now, but due to a massive crash at my hosting company - IX Web Hosting - my site was down from Sunday morning through Thursday afternoon. That's right. Four days.

In my prior life as VP/GM for a global supply chain company, one of the first things prospective customers would grill us on was our IT disaster recovery plan. Apparently IX didn't get the memo.

Don't get me wrong. I understand nothing in life is perfect and "stuff" happens, but to be down that amount of time in this day and age is mind boggling and inexcusable. Luckily only my site is on IX and my email is on a different service so my business was only marginally interrupted. Many other IX customers weren't so lucky, as the screams of pain on the IX incident status page illustrated.

Despite the angst - and thousands of dollars in lost revenue from many customers - there are valuable customer service and crisis management lessons to be learned from this mess. I'm not just talking about the technical aspects of proper backup hardware and an effective recovery process. That's a subject some one else can handle better than I can. I want to focus on the way IX handled the crisis from a customer perspective - not good to start, better near the end. Here are my takeaways from the event.

1. Communication is key - No matter how bad the situation, always be open and honest about what happened and what you are doing about it. To their credit, IX had people handling the irate messages on their status board on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, for the first couple of days of the incident, it appeared management was simply pushing these poor people up out of the trenches and into the line of fire without any ammunition.

Customers wanted to know what was happening and more importantly, when they were going to be back on line. The only answer these unfortunate folks were armed with was "we do not currently have an ETA." After a couple of days of that response, angry customers were doing everything but marching on IX with pitchforks and torches.

Finally on Tuesday, two days after the crash, IX posted a schedule for when each server would be restored and a way to determine which server you were on. Mine was scheduled for Thursday at 3 pm. I wasn't pleased, but at least I knew where I stood. Telling people what was actually going on and how long it was going to take had to be painful for IX, but it let customers know the end was near. My site was actually up a couple of hours earlier than promised, so there's that.

2. Focus on the problem.  In the first hours following the crash, the IX folks got sucked into dialogue about compensation and arguments over up-time claims. That did no good for either IX or the customer base. The message needed to be "all our effort right now is on solving the current problem."

3. Be honest. Quickly.  IX eventually put up a pretty detailed explanation of what caused the outage, but until they did, people were spewing all kinds of sinister theories. Sabotage, terrorist activity, disgruntled employees, plagues of Egypt. The lesson here, despite what Colonel Jessep said in A Few Good Men, is that people CAN handle the truth. And if they aren't told the truth, they will invent scenarios and theories that would make the folks at TMZ blush.

4. Provide corrective action. The damage that this crash caused to IX's business will be enormous. They might be able to stem the exodus of customers if they quickly come out with a detailed plan on what they are going to do to prevent this from ever happening again. When we had a problem at our supply chain company, customers would ask, "How did this happen? You're ISO certified!" I would respond that indeed we were but that certification didn't come from the Vatican. We were not infallible. However, we would correct our processes and guarantee that the problem would never happen again. IX still hasn't explained this final step. Their incident status page simply says "resolved" and the latest on the company blog is a Happy Holidays post from December 26th.

My reaction during the outage was that I was going to move my site off of IX as quickly as possible. Now that it's back up, I'm not so sure. If IX can provide a clear, reasoned plan on what happened, why it happened, and what preventive measures they plan on putting in place for the future, maybe I'll reconsider.

Have you had to deal with a serious issue from either the customer or vendor side? How did you handle it?

Photo Credit: Jenn and Tony Bot via Compfight cc

Upon Further Review…5 Tips for Effective Proofreading

The photo above received a lot of play in the Boston newspapers several months ago. Four letters. Two wrong. Not good. It's bad enough that someone painted the sign incorrectly, but then a crew went through the trouble of actually hanging it up. Mind boggling.

A couple of weeks later during one of our all-too-frequent snow storms here in the Northeast, I drove past a restaurant with the following message displayed on its outdoor sign:

"Closed Due to Inclimate Weather"

Which prompts the question: Whatever became of proofreading?

As a copywriter, I'm deathly afraid of submitting or posting copy with typos or missing words. Writing is my stock in trade so if I can't deliver error-free copy I'm not going to be instilling much confidence in my clients.

I don't think people - whether professional writers or not - realize the impact that misspellings and other mistakes have on their readers.

In my prior life as VP/North American Operations for a global manufacturing/fulfillment company, I had the pleasure (?) of reviewing hundreds of resumes. The first things I looked for were typos. If I found one, the applicant was on thin ice. Two, he or she was slipping into darkness. Three? They hit the discard pile.

And that was even before I got into the meat of the person's background. I just felt that if the applicant couldn't take the extra time needed to proofread probably the most important document in his or her life at that time, how conscientious of a worker would they be? In my mind, not very.

Whether you're sending an email, writing a blog post, or preparing a business plan for investors, the content you put out directly reflects on you. It goes a long way toward forming your reader's opinion of you - for better or worse. Your content must be credible to be effective. And nothing destroys your credibility faster than a careless typo or two.

Here are five tips you can use to make sure your copy is correct before you hit the send or print button.

1. Sleep on it - My first rule is to never proofread anything the same day I write it. After spending several hours composing a piece of content, I'm just too close to it to be able to switch gears from creation to detail checking. It's almost like snow blindness. I just can't see the words anymore. I have to let the piece simmer overnight, get some separation, and then attack it with a fresh set of eyes the next day.

2. Proofing is hard (copy) - I know it's not very green of me, but I nearly always print out a hard copy to proofread one of my pieces. This is a technique I picked up from my days as a proofreader in a printing company many, many years ago. I was trained to use a ruler to block out every line but the one I was proofing. The most important thing in proofreading is focus. By highlighting one line at a time, I force myself to focus only on the words on that line. I suppose I could try to use that technique on my iMac screen but I don't think it would work as well.

3. Don't trust spellcheck - President Ronald Reagan once said when discussing negotiating with the USSR that we must "trust then verify."

I feel the same way about spellcheck. As we all know, if you spell something wrong enough that it becomes another word, spellcheck will let you proceed on your merry way without displaying the deadly red squiggly underscore. SpellCorrect has made the problem worse by changing a word you want into something else entirely without even letting you know. And you're well aware of the trouble with homonyms like "there and their" or "too and to." Spellcheck will never catch those mistakes. This is one area where technology can't help you.

4. Strunk and White are your friends - I know. Seeing those two names gave you nasty flashbacks to high school English. I'm sure many of you have a pristine, uncracked copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style stored somewhere in the attic or basement. If you're going to be doing any writing, do yourself a favor and dig it out. It was originally written over hundred years ago by William Strunk and then updated by E. B. White. It's just under 100 pages and is the best reference book you could ever have.  It's basic training for writing covering proper usage, form, words and expressions. I refer to it at least once a day.

5.  I can't hear you - Once you've written your piece, let it sit over night, and proofread it thoroughly, you're done right?  Wrong. Go over it one more time. This time without the ruler but instead read it out loud. This may make your fellow house members think you've lost your mind, but this is a critical key last step. Reading aloud will help you catch the rhythm of the piece and alert you to missing words, double words, and clumsy phraseology. I promise that you'll find at least one more thing that needs correcting.

Finally, for those of you furiously rereading this piece to uncover a typo so you can rub it in my face, I have a treat for you. I intentionally included one for you to find so you wouldn't be disappointed. It happens to be one of the 100 most incorrectly spelled words in English according to yourdictionary.com. It also happens to be my personal demon. I nearly always mispell it but I catch it in the proofreading stage. If you find it, congratulations and let me know.

How about you? Do you proofread thoroughly enough? What tricks and tips do you use?

(Photo credit: Rich Shertenlieb on Boston.com)

Keys to Writing a Better Bio

Former Red Sox first basemen Kevin Millar was once quoted as saying, "Enough about me. Let's talk about me." Most people are not as comfortable talking about themselves as Millar is, but in today's world, you sometimes have to do it. For many of us that comes in the written form of a "Bio" which pops up everywhere from blog  posts to LinkedIn profiles to web sites. Many times it's the first thing someone reads so you'd better make it as good as it can be.

For some ideas, check out this blog post from Deanna Layton of Layton Squared titled Write a Better Bio by Focusing on Benefits.

Don't Drop the Ball on Your Content: 3 Simple Questions to Ring in 2014

Happy New Year! Are you already sick and tired of the avalanche of advice on reevaluating the state of your business and things you should be doing to succeed in 2014? The barrage of ideas can be overwhelming and confusing.

I'm offering only one suggestion. Clear out the clutter and keep it simple.

A project I did with one of my technology clients a few months ago illustrates the point. The process we went through was basic but effective. The result is three simple questions that you should ask before starting every content project in 2014.

1. Who are your prospects/customers?

My client was producing a ton of good content as part of the company's marketing program. That put them in the majority since according to the 2014 benchmarking report from the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, nine out of 10 B2B marketers use content marketing to help drive their business. But my client wasn't satisfied with the download traffic or lead generation activity generated by her content. So the first question we asked was: "Who is the target for all this content?"

After some discussion, we determined that the hands-on IT staff would be the ones most likely to research the problems my client's product solved. They would be the ones googling for additional material, visiting relevant sites, and downloading content that would address their problems. These operators would be the ones generating traffic and leads for my client.

In reviewing the existing content we realized that it was aimed primarily at the more strategic IT operations people - folks at the higher levels of management. My client's company was not going to show up in searches aimed at detailed problem analysis and solutions with that type of information.

I suggested we shift the content focus to the IT folks in the trenches.

2. What's important to them?

Once we identified our target, the next step was to create appropriate content. What was relevant to them? What challenges did they face and what possible solutions existed to overcome them? What kind of information did they need to help them do their jobs better?

Looking at the current content we discovered that much of it centered on the business benefits of the products. That was obviously important to the more senior level IT managers who were concerned with ROI and strategic edge.

However we realized that while the IT staff running the data centers surely appreciated the financial benefits of the product, they were more focused on the functionality and productivity improvements it could bring.What products would solve their problems? How could they free up resources that could be used to allow staff to tend to other urgent daily tasks? What would help get the business owners the information they needed in a more timely fashion? Those were the issues IT staff faced every day and the ones for which they needed answers.

3. How do you reach them?

Once we nailed down the target audience and what was relevant to them, we needed to determine the best way to get to them - to attract them to our site and our content. My client had been producing blogs and eBooks which provided a higher level, strategic view of their product.  We realized that the folks we were trying to reach would not likely be downloading those pieces of content. We needed something that would appeal more directly to their needs.

We ultimately determined that our tactical audience was more likely looking for in depth information that addressed their issues and discussed possible solutions. I ended up expanding on some of their existing content, developing several detailed white papers and case studies. These pieces effectively framed the challenges IT staff faced and outlined potential solutions available in the marketplace. This new content also outlined how my client's product was a particularly effective solution and one they should consider. I followed that up with a series of blog posts that linked back to the various white papers. The result was a dramatic uptick in traffic, downloads, and overall lead generation activity.

This exercise shows that your content marketing plan doesn't have to be overly complicated. Outline your goal, determine your target audience, find out what's important to them, and use a content vehicle that will best reach them. Use this simple process as you begin work on any piece of content and your chances of success will increase significantly.

How do you determine what content you're going to produce and the best way to reach your prospects?

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