Congratulations!
If you are reading this, you understand the power of blogging for your small business. You know it helps you with search. You know it’s the anchor of any good social media strategy. You know it helps your site look and feel current.
But you may be looking for even more ways to get some value from blog posts you are publishing now.
Well, you are in luck.
Today we are announcing a partnership with an interesting company out of Ireland that can help you do exactly that by using your great blog posts in a new format.
Create an e-book
Your blog content has value beyond its current location. The people who find your posts helpful, informative or entertaining while scouring the web will be drawn to your ebook for those same reasons. Only instead of offering the content as posts, you can offer it in a high-quality, digitally published format.
Or you can do both.
E-books are easily created from existing blog posts using the online tools from Beacon.by. Beacon converts existing blog posts into professionally designed, downloadable content.
Here’s how:
- First, import existing content from your blog (Beacon.by‘s software integrates with HubSpot and WordPress).
- Then, choose a design and customize it for your brand.
- Finally, you can distribute it anywhere, like on your website or through third-party vendors.
In this new form, your existing posts are marketed outside of your site, increasing their value and range. E-books can be offered as a reward to existing customers or positioned as a lead magnet for future customers.
Visitors to your page won’t give you their email address for no reason. Sending them an e-book by email is just such a reason.
Offering e-books and white papers on your landing page also helps to build your brand’s credibility.
These content collections provide potential customers with solid evidence of your business’ philosophy and your industry expertise. In this sense, your e-book acts as an inbound marketing tool. New visitors to your site provide contact information in exchange for the e-book, giving you the chance to nurture that lead.
Duplicate content?
You may have one technical question about this strategy of re-using your blogs a second time as an e-book: Isn’t that some kind of violation of Google’s rules against duplicate content?
It’s a good question, and publishing duplicate content is a legitimate concern. But in this case, you don’t need to worry.
For one, if you publish the posts on your blog first, it’s only the other sites that would get penalized. That’s why when people ask us if they should publish their posts on, for example, LinkedIn, we tell them that it’s a great idea, as long as they publish the posts first on their own blog and then wait a few days. That way Google’s robots know that LinkedIn is copying you, and won’t think that you are copying something that’s on LinkedIn.
The main point, however, is that the content of the e-books probably won’t be visible to Google’s robots. The best way to use an e-book is to send it to prospects who fill out a form and give you an email address first. Then you can email it to them, or email them a link to a page that has no other links to it.
Now, if you want to publish an e-book not comprised of blog posts, but instead made up of all original writing, then you may indeed want to publish it right on your site so that Google (and, therefore, the world) can see it and it can help your search visibility.
You should have a pretty compelling reason to do that, however. The best thing you can do for your site and your business is to publish the blog posts first, and then turn them into an e-book later.
For that, we think you’ll really enjoy the tools from Beacon.by.
