5 Reasons Why You Should Turn Your Articles Into an E-Book

There's no way to get around it--marketing a website means creating content on a continual basis.

It can be content for articles in article marketing, blog content, a Squidoo lens you're creating, ezine content, or any of the other limitless types of marketing content designed to drive traffic to your website.

The options are endless, but where in the world do you find the time to do all this writing? On top of marketing your website, you have a business to run, right?

The bright side is that if you're clever you can train your marketing content (namely, the articles you create in article marketing) to do double, triple, and quadruple (or more) duty by re-purposing the content to suit different marketing tools.

One of the most effective ways to multi task marketing content is to use your article marketing articles as the basis for an e-book.

Here are 5 reasons why you should create an e-book from your articles:

1) It's easier than you think.
I know what you're thinking-- "Write a book? That sounds a bit over my head."
I hear you, but please be assured that writing an e-book is much easier than writing a novel or a book that's sold in the bookstore.

Really, if you can write an article, you can write an e-book. An e-book is just a collection of articles (or chapters) on a central topic.

You can make your e-book as long or as short as you like--there's no need to go to a cabin in the woods and hunker down as you spend years crafting an epic novel.

The more information you provide, the more valuable your book will be, but even if you provide only a dozen pages of useful information on a topic of interest to your target market, your audience will appreciate it!

2) You can morph your book into an marketing resource for your affiliates.

Imagine that you've created a 40 page book that is chocked full of valuable information. You give it to your customers and potential customers, and they love it, but then your affiliates (if you have an affiliate program) start contacting asking you if they can use the e-book as a marketing tool for your product.

This scenario has actually happened to me before, and I ended up taking that original e-book and creating another book for the use of the affiliates where they could re-brand the content and offer it on their websites.

3) If you offer the e-book in your resource box, it gives the reader a great reason to click through to your site.

This is HUGE--whenever you're writing a resource box, you want to be sure to offer the reader a reason to click through to your site. If the reader has found your article useful, what better gift to them than to offer a book on the same topic that gives much more information.
Your resource box could say something like, "For more tips on this topic, please pick up your free e-book at [your URL]."

And then at your website you could capture their email address and then deliver the book to them.

This actually accomplished two goals--
*Luring the reader back to your website
*Building your list

4) An e-book demonstrating your knowledge can build customer confidence (which makes sales more likely)

Article marketing entails writing articles on your topic of expertise (the topic of your website). People find your articles when they're looking for information about your topic.
Rather than hoping that your readers will somehow find each and every one of your helpful articles, why not collect all that valuable information and put it all in one spot (an e-book)?

5) You get more mileage out of your marketing efforts.
Obviously, right?

This is why morphing your articles into an e-book is so advantageous--you can kill two birds (or more!) with one stone. You can get multiple uses out of one piece of marketing content, which saves you time and increases the exposure and reach of your marketing efforts.
Are you convinced yet?

First, start writing articles for article marketing, then when you have 10 or more articles written on a topic that will appeal to your target readers, start assembling your e-book.
Before you know it you will have an arsenal of marketing resources that will be steadily working to draw targeted traffic to your website.

E-Book Revolution

Ebooks are electronic way to read books. There's no paper, no binding. You can buy ebooks over the Internet from ebook publishers. Ebooks can be read on a Kindle or a similar ebook reader. So what's the appeal of an ebook?

Ebooks appeal are two fold:

First, there's no paper.

Second, they are a quick way to purchase a book.

The book downloads immediately to your computer or your ebook reader and you can begin to enjoy what you purchased over the Internet right away.

So what's happening in the world of ebooks?

Amazon release kindly 2, on 24 February and it's having a new "controversial" feature - text to speech. What's text to speech? It's where the Kindle will read the text of the book out loud in a computerized voice.

The Author's Guild calls this a violation of copyright law since only an audio book has rights to read a book out loud. But do audio books have the only rights? That's what the Author's Guild claims. Amazon says this is different. This is a computer reading the book, not actors giving voice to a story. Amazon and a lot of the experts in the field think they have the law on their side, but if they go ahead with Kindle 2 then there might be a lawsuit from the Author's Guild.
So why buck the trend? Are ebooks the next BEST Thing?

There was unhappiness with CDs and the Internet when they first started out, too. A lot of the Author's Guild complaints stem from the fact that they don't want to open the gates to an area they can't control. Even the publishing houses are afraid of change. Revenues generated from ebooks wouldn't be channeled to the traditional publishing houses

Think of it this way - if you self publish an ebook and offer a book through your website - you take 100% (or most of) the profit without having to go through the publishing gatekeepers.
Is that cool? Well - self publishing doesn't have a good rep. Sadly, most of what is self published is not up to par, suffering from editorial and proofreading mistakes. Self published books like "The Shack" are few and far between. Until self publishing gets a better reputation, ebooks (at least the self published ones) won't take off. The challenge: Most ebooks are self-published. Traditional publishers are afraid to go there - yet. That said, if they could jump on the techno bandwagon and start to offer ebooks, they might see their profits increase at a time when the traditional market is suffering right now.

Ebooks is be an avenue to explore