This means just adapting your thought leadership strategies rather than just dumping them completely. Rather than putting out the same 500-word content that everyone else is doing, you need to take a step further and work on truly authoritative content. An e-book is a key place to start.
How Writing An E-Book Factors Into Your Thought Leadership Strategies
An e-book, on paper, is far more time-consuming than writing even a set of blog posts, but it’s well-spent. Being a good thought leader is about being able to not only show your expertise on a topic, but to use said expertise to provide actionable advice to your audience. With the ability to do a deeper dive on a topic or problem than blogs, e-books are the perfect match for those trying to establish thought leadership strategies.
So, how do you get started? The key to an effective e-book for thought leadership is to first start with an effective idea. As e-books become more popular, a lot of the basic topics are already getting covered. The key for you is putting together a set of content that will stand apart. In some cases, this means tackling a topic that a lot of people don’t understand or aren’t aware of. If this isn’t a possibility, try to take a new spin or approach to a common problem that already is written about a lot. You already know your niche well, so figure out what about your viewpoint can make an e-book unique.
The second thing to understand about putting an e-book together is that it can be a daunting task for non-writers trying to get into thought leadership. Not only do you have the typical grammar and spelling to check, but long-form content requires extra attention to structure and style to create something that people will actually want to read the whole way through. This is why your best asset is going to be a solid outline. A good e-book should target a problem, and your outline will both show where you are going to explain the problem, and where you are going to cover the solution. In addition, don’t be afraid to look to outside editing and writing help for your e-books. Most thought leaders have some editorial process before putting their content out there.
E-books have become the base step between your typical content marketing schedule and people who are trying to become full-on thought leaders. However, the work doesn’t stop there. Our full guide on How To Become A Thought Leader will help you with some of these alternative tactics, as well as some of the thought leadership strategies that will help make the most out of your e-books.
David is the Founder and Director of article-writing.co, the fastest-growing content creation agency in North America. He has transformed companies by offering high-quality content that has impacted their SEO ranking, revitalized websites with engaging and industry-relevant blogs and website copy, and championed successful email campaign copy.
