5 Tips for Creating a Free E-book for Customer Incentives

Offering your customer a free e-book is a great way to drive traffic to your blog, to increase your opt-in e-mail subscriptions, and to promote your affiliate products. You can offer your e-book in exchange for something — like an e-mail address — or you can offer it as a way to add value to your site, establish your authority in your niche, and encourage return visits to your site.

Creating a valuable e-book takes a lot of time and effort that some blog owners just don’t have between all the other tasks they oversee to grow their blog. However, there are a lot of ways that you can create a quality e-book that don’t require you to spend hours and hours writing hundreds of pages. Here are a few ways you can create a free e-book quickly and easily to offer your customers:

Recycle Old Blog Posts

You’ve already written dozens of pages of content, so why not use it? You may reason that readers can just browse the archives to get the same information, which is true. However, it is also true that most readers won’t want to go back through your archives to get it.

Readers will appreciate a reference guide that has compiled the best information from your blog and been revised to create a comprehensive resource.

Use PLR Content

PLR content — or “private label rights” — is content that you buy that you can then package and redistribute as you see fit. You can even sell it under your own name. You are essentially hiring a ghostwriter to create your content for you.

In some cases, you can purchase unique content. In most cases, you will need to revise the content yourself. Be sure to check the rights when you purchase.

Hire Someone

Rather than buying content from a directory, such as PLR content, you can hire a freelancer to write exactly what you need. You can provide specific instructions on what should be included, and you can even get the book formatted and illustrated.

This will be the most expensive of your options — with the price going up with the length and the amount of graphics included — but it will also be the option that gives you the best quality with the fastest turnaround time.

Create a Resource Directory

E-books don’t have to be lengthy treatises. A simple guidebook or directory is often useful for readers. You can create a short directory by compiling information that is already available on the web. You can create a list of useful websites within your niche, tools like software of applications, books, or even other blog posts. The idea would be to create a reference, not to provide the content yourself.

Write a Short, Focused Study

Finally, an e-book doesn’t have to a book at all. Many “e-books” are as short as 5 to 10 pages. You can write a short but focused study that offers your readers great value. Think of a topic in your niche, then think of  how you can focus in to make it as specific as possible. The more narrow your focus, the more concrete you can be in your feedback for your readers.

Have you created an e-book for your readers? How did you go about putting together the e-book, and how did you offer it on your site? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Catie Keeler is the primary researcher and writer for mortgagerates.info. Her current focus for the site involves mortgage rate trends and current mortgage rates nj.