“I notice a lot of businesses online use ebooks on their websites. Is that something I can do as a portrait photographer? If so, how do I go about creating one? Why should I do it? I’ve had it in my mind now for quite a while – just want to know your take on this ebook thing.”

eBooks, or electronic books, have been around for a long time. You probably have many of them sitting on your hard drive somewhere. And with Kindle, Nook and other e-reader tablets on the market, you probably bring a bunch along with you every time you leave your home or office.

Yet even if you have a ton of them, read them on a regular basis, you may have never considered having one for your own business. Today may be the day you change your mind.

The Concept

The purpose of an ebook is twofold. One, you can use it as a marketing tool to get your information into the hands of your prospects and clients. In this case your ebook would be for free, and used to direct people to take action in a variety of ways. Two, you can create information of value and sell it on the open marketplace. When you buy a book on Amazon and have it delivered to your Kindle, that’s an example of an ebook for pay and profit.

In reference to the question above, we’re going to stick with talking about a free ebook, one you use as a marketing tool to bring people in to your business.

The Title

The title of your ebook is the most important part of your marketing tool. Without a great title, one that jumps out and people and makes them want to download your information as fast as possible, it will be just another piece of content on your site.

In order to come up with a great title, think about your customers and their pain points. Why do they come to you? What are they looking for in this niche?

We’ll stick with the portrait niche for this example, and I’ll further define it by concentrating on the senior portrait niche.

Senior portraits are marketed to two people – the high school student and the parent. The high school student has to love the work so they will be happy handing it out to friends. The parent has to love it in order to be willing to pay for it. So marketing messages must speak to both. So your ebook title may be something like:

How Facebook Will Kill Your Senior Portrait And What You Can Do About It

It speaks to the kids, who want to share everything they do on Facebook. And it speaks to the parent who has some doubts about Facebook and obviously wants to keep their child safe. It touches on an unknown – which is exactly what your ebook title should do. [Read more…]