Everyone knows that ebooks work like crazy when it comes to getting leads and customers….
Every downloadable resource you have and promote has a multiplying impact on lead generation.
So, why doesn’t every company have dozens or at least one???
Mostly because people think that writing a comprehensive ebook or book is hard…and that getting it in front of the right people is even harder.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Over the past year our ebooks have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
Want to know EXACTLY how we do it?
Today, we’ll show you the exact step-by-step process on how you can create an amazing (and valuable) ebook/content offer funnel.
That’s right. We’ll show you how to write an ebook, without writing a single word.
Yes, this is a real and secretly used tactic by not only the top companies and marketers, but even seasoned authors.
At Uhuru, our team is exceptional at implementing the inbound methodology, which at its core is education-based marketing. Provide great and valuable content upfront with no-obligation in the early stages of the buyer’s journey, and you have a better chance of converting them down the line.
Therefore, it’s really important to be able to create an ebook, a print book, or some form of content, to build up these buyer-generating funnels.
But the vast majority of people are not really comfortable writing something so comprehensive, even if they have the knowledge to do so and are aware of the fact that it would be beneficial to their clientele, as well as potential customers.
Despite the hesitation of many, it’s a critical necessity to be able to create these documents. That’s why we’re going to walk you through the process. We want you to become more familiar and less hesitant when asked to step up and write something that you’re well versed in or that you’ve mastered.
This strategy is aligned with how you can quickly crank out an incredible book that really helps people without ever having to write a single word. So those with a writing background, I’m very sorry, no disrespect.
Article Contents
Step One
We’re going to start with walking you through the following graphic.
If you’d like to be participatory during this part, grab a white piece of paper. Draw a frown emoji on one side and a smile emoji on the other, then draw a line across the page from one to the other.
Now the frown is the current state of your reader, aka the prospect. The smiley face represents the prospect after they have read what you’ve provided. So you can see that there is a gap between where they are now—upset, sad, confused—and where you want them to be—happy, enlightened, engaged.
Now what you need to do is identify four or five big concepts that need to happen in order to get from the frown to the smile. These should be big things, not necessarily specific action items, and they should be consistent. Write each of these things along the line between frown and smile. These are the big things you need to achieve along the journey.
Step Two
Next, you want to create a box for each one of the big concepts on another piece of paper. Within each box, write five action items that will allow you to complete this big thing.
Take each box with its five action items and convert it into a PowerPoint deck, Google Slide presentation or Keynote.
Step Three
Then you do what everyone should be doing: You record it.
Record yourself presenting this information, with a goal of talking for two to four minutes per action item. Present it as if you’re teaching a class, explaining each item or step in detail and using examples.
Once you’ve recorded the audio of this presentation, you say, “Well why not the video?” Remember, our goal here is to create an ebook. This makes video an unnecessary step, just one more thing you don’t have to do on your journey to creating an amazing ebook.
For a more thorough instruction on recording your presentation, there is a complete section below detailing options.
Step Four
Now it’s time to take the audio portion of your presentation and have it transcribed. While that may sound old-fashioned—like a scene out of “Mad Men”—it’s an effective way to meet our end goal of creating an ebook.
I know, you’re wondering how a simple PowerPoint presentation can become a comprehensive ebook that potential customers will find useful. Let’s take a look at what you’ve achieved so far. You have 5 major concepts, which will be your chapters. Each of the 5 concepts has 5 action items, so 25 items total. If you’ve spent a minimum of two minutes per action item, you will have at least 50 minutes of content recorded. That typically converts into over 60 pages once transcribed, more than enough for a comprehensive guide or ebook.
There are a variety of ways to go about having your recording transcribed. There are free ways, such as using Google Docs, where you can record and transcribe anything you want and use it for later review. There’s also services like Rev.com, which will translate for a fee (approximately $1 per minute). We’ll be concentrating on using a company like Rev.com, as it’s an easy way to get you started.
Step Five
Once your presentation has been transcribed, it’s time to hand it off to an editor.
Now the secret here is not to look at your transcription. Really, no peeking. For most individuals, the transcription will be a mess, possibly hard to read or difficult to understand. That’s because our recording was somewhat extemporaneous and we tend to speak in run-on sentences. So just hand it off with apologies.
A professional editor will clean it up, provide structure, make recommendations, format it, get it to where it needs to be, and maybe expand on clarity or identify areas of improvement. The first few times, you may need to provide some additional information to the editor to flesh out the document or at least answer questions. But as you get better at this process, there will come a time when it can go straight from the editor to a designer.
Which brings us to our next step…
Step Six
Now it’s time to present your content professionally.
If you have a designer on your team, this step is simple.
If you don’t, you’ll send it off to a designer who will provide a layout, cohesive fonts, necessary graphics, and every element that takes your words from a simple Word document into something professional that speaks to your ideal target.
Before assigning to a designer, read: 11 Rules for Effective Branding Design: An Actionable Guide.
And there you are, you’ve just created an ebook, without writing a single chapter. Yes, you had to write 5 concepts and 25 action items, but that was a lot easier than writing 60 pages, wasn’t it?
Now, let’s look at putting this into practice with an example.
Example
What does it actually look like when you do it? Let’s take a look at my example. It will go from chicken scratchings to something really beautiful.
Here’s my piece of paper.
On the left, next to the frowning emoji, we have marked “No sustainable, predictable marketing process to increase sales.” On the right, with the smile emoji, is “Sustainable, predictable way for marketing to increase sales.”
That is the main concept, something that our potential clients want. Many of our prospects tell us that marketing isn’t really contributing to sales or that they haven’t been able to tie marketing activities to sales. It’s a common thread. So we need to get them from Point A (frown) to Point B (smile). We want to write a full funnel strategy and plan for moving ideal buyers from strangers to delighted customers.
So the five major concepts that I’ve listed on my timeline from the frown to smile are:
- Build a strategy document.
- Produce and publish useful content that educates buyers.
- Automate communication to nurture prospects.
- Put useful educational content in front of buyers.
- Continuously analyze performance, improve strategy, and execute the plan with monthly campaigns.
What I’ve done is describe the full funnel of marketing, the full BA. Then, under each concept, I’ve listed out the action items. Some are in the form of questions, which may need to turn into statements. We’ll clean those up when we put them into a presentation.
1. Build a Strategy Document
So what are you going to provide as an offer?
Where are you versus your competition?
Who are the ideal buyers of your offer?
List the triggers that occur at each stage of the buyer’s journey. What is the educational content that solves these problems? List them out.
How best to automate, given your industry vertical and capabilities. And then where are they? Where are the prospects? What channels, where do they go?
This is where we like to have a discussion with prospects and they’re like, “Hey, our prospects aren’t on Facebook.” Well, we can prove that they’re on Facebook, so we just need to show them that they are, that those demographics are on Facebook…or LinkedIn or Twitter.
2. Produce and Publish Useful Content That Educates Buyers
Here we’re gonna write keyword-researched articles. We’re going to draft an outline, create a first draft, then pass it off to an editor. Then we’ll have a final product.
Now the document is ready for design, where we add images, social sharing images, and if it’s going to be in a downloadable resource, we make it into an ebook, add a cover, and include a call to action.
Since we’re going to have a landing page for the ebook we’re writing today, we want to link to it in all of these articles. If we write a power post—a super-sized version of an article that educates—then we use links as well.
So all this content goes into big bucket, and we publish this useful content that educates the buyers on topics related to our ebook.
3. Automate Communication to Nurture Prospects
This step is crucial for an effective way to communicate with your prospects. You want to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible when disseminating your communications. So, first you have to have the appropriate software.
You have choices in this area, with companies like HubSpot, Marketo, Fusion Soft, Pardot, and more. You need to find the one that works best for you. Then you will create a welcome series for the first email capture. So the first time they make contact—maybe when they download an offer—you capture their email address.
Then you will want to deliver content based upon where the prospect is in the buyer’s journey. You will use a call to action to push and nurture this prospect into a later stage of the sales funnel, by offering more items that they need.
4. Put Useful Content in Front of Buyers
How does this happen? Well, we do that in a variety of ways, from social media to email, and everything in between.
We use Facebook organic and Facebook ads, LinkedIn organic and LinkedIn ads, Twitter organic and Twitter ads. We’re gonna publish on third-party sites. We might publish on Medium or distribute our content via Alltop.
Content amplification is key and it deserves more emphasis than we have time for in this guide. Check out: The Definitive Guide to Content Amplification [EBOOK].
We’re also going to email and make sure to have our content nested within the templates of our sales team for when they do outreach and prospecting. And we’re gonna use STLs and make sure that the resource has strong keywords, created in a way that enables it to rank and drive traffic.
5. Continuously Analyze Performance, Improve Strategy and Execute the Plan with Monthly Campaigns
We’re going to do monthly reporting to see how effective our efforts have been, so we will implement a structure for that. We will do weekly monitoring in the Agile format. We also like time and investment tracking as a piece of this, something that we would recommend.
We would launch new campaigns based on the gaps in the funnel and sales objectives. And then, lastly we’re going to have an agile ritual/cadence of optimization for all our efforts.
When we have all this done, you will have what you need to build the sustainable predictable way for marketing to increase sales.
How to Go About Self-Recording
The premise behind this post is to write an ebook without actually writing it. That necessitates recording your presentation so that it can be transcribed, as previously mentioned. We’ve investigated and found what we think is the best and most effective way to record and transcribe your presentations.
First, you will start with recording yourself, be it on GoToMeeting, Eat Breakfast with…, your phone, or any other medium. What you have when you are done is a recording of your voice that now needs to be transcribed. Rather than send out the recording to be manually transcribed, you can easily turn the audio recording into the written word.
We use a technology called Soundflower. It’s downloadable software, compatible with Macs, that will enable you to change the input and the output of your Mac. By changing the input/output to Soundflower channel two, your Mac will now use its microphone internally to listen and to pull and extract the input of your speaker. So, basically your computer is talking to itself. This is a trick used by YouTubers and vloggers to create their closed captions for their videos.
Pro Tip: Clarity of voice is important with this technique. So just make sure you talk a bit slower than normal and as clearly as possible. It’s less effective is you’re rushing through or if multiple people are talking.
Once you set up the audio recording and Soundflower, you go to a Google Doc, then the Tools menu and activate Voice Typing. By activating Voice Typing, you can now take the audio recording, which is playing through Soundflower on your computer and make a written document.
Don’t want the hassle of hacking together GDocs, go to Rev.com.
That document then goes through the production process (Step Two of our initial five stages), then on to design.
Et voila! You have just leveraged your voice to write and produce an ebook (or other valuable resources).
Brief Summary
To recap, you write out the four or five big ideas and list a minimum of five action items per idea. You then convert that into a PowerPoint presentation that you record via GoToMeeting, QuickTime, or other sources. You then turn on Google Voice Typing and let the audio run to create a written document of the recording. You take this resource and the audio, because technically it’s good to send the audio as well, to the editor. The editor cleans it up and organizes it into a cohesive document. You can then review and enhance, if need be, and then send it off for design.
Note: This resource was created following this process.
You now know how to leverage simple steps to create an EPIC ebook that you can use to increase leads and convert more customers.
To your success,
Peter
