The e-Book – Should I, or Shouldn’t I?

More and more, SMB’s are blogging, getting involved in social media, creating videos, and otherwise becoming publishers of content. The e-book is a popular format of publishing content on the web, but is it a format that SMB’s should embrace?

This is not a blog dedicated to home-based businesses, or get rich quick schemes.  Nor is it geared towards affiliate marketers, or people who sell exclusively information products. That being said, this is a blog geared towards small and medium sized businesses, and all of the above businesses fit that description, and in many cases, many SMB’s could learn a thing or two from them.

Chances are, if you’ve been looking for marketing advice online, someone has tried to sell, or give, you an e-book that will teach you how to market online.  An incredible percentage of these e-books serve the purpose of teaching you how to create the exact same kind of e-book to sell to make money online.  Others will actually go a little more in depth into broader online marketing techniques.

If you’ve downloaded or bought one or more of these e-books you know their quality varies dramatically.  I will admit to not being a huge purchaser of e-books. especially not those that promise to teach you how to make money online, but I will admit that several years ago, my first foray into online marketing was as a university student looking to make a few extra bucks, and so I bought an e-book for $50 that was supposed to teach me how to make a living as an affiliate marketer.

Most of the stuff in that e-book was not actionable, it was poorly written, and I’m pretty sure some of it may have been borderline black hat, but nonetheless, that was my first exposure to pay-per-click advertising, and the beginning of a path that would eventually lead to a career in marketing.  So, in some ways, that $50 e-book was worth more to me than my law degree (which was considerably more expensive).

The problem with e-books is that no one trusts them, because there are so many bad ones floating around the internet.  E-books can be written on any topic, and while “how to make money online” is often a popular topic, e-books exist on every topic from immigration to pet grooming.  And there is an equal number of really terrible ones on each of these topics, and those probably account for 99% of the e-books on the web.

I’m a big believer in the web as a publishing platform, but despite all the flaws of the traditional publishing model, it has one huge advantage: it acts as a filter. Publishers will only publish something they think is good enough to make them a profit.  Online, anyone can publish anything with nothing more than a prayer that it’ll be read, and if it doesn’t, oh well, no associated costs, so no real risk.  The result is a deluge of terrible works being self-published, and users/readers having to wade through all this garbage to find a few gems.

This is why users/readers are weary of the e-book. They’ve been burned too many times by really bad content, and don’t want to be bothered sifting through anymore.

The age where selling e-books was a profitable online business model is rapidly coming to a close, because there is not enough value in them in general.  While some e-books are worth their sticker price, users will not pay it because of poor previous experiences.

That does not mean, however, that the e-book as a tool is not useful to businesses looking to market online.  While the e-book should not be looked at as a direct source of revenue, an e-book can be used as a lead generation tool.  The idea is to create an e-book that has so much value, and offers so much to the reader, that the publisher actually breaks through the perception of bad content, and builds trust with the reader as an expert in a given industry.  This trust is then leveraged in such a way that the reader can potentially become a customer.

The e-book needs to have great value for a potential customer, while recognizing that it will likely not return significant revenues in and of itself.  However, its value to the business that publishes it as a reputation and awareness builder can be worth far more than a few hundred dollars of revenue from the sticker price.

If this sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it’s because the process is the same as it is for many other forms of marketing.  Instead of writing an e-book, to build that trust, a business can build a kick-ass blog; it can guest post on other people’s blogs like crazy; it can help users in forums; it can participate in social media discussions.

At the end of the day, whether the format is an e-book, a white paper or a blog, the end goal is the same: Provide exceptional value to a potential customer in order to build trust, and to hopefully generate a lead that will be likely to generate a sale.