So you've spent a great deal of time creating an amazing eBook that you're excited to release. You are just putting the finishing touches on it, but now what? Well the reality is, when you're finished putting together you ebook only half of the work is done. The other half is promoting the ebook to drive conversion.

In this blog we will take a look at a number of different ways to help promote your ebooks and drive interest and conversions.

As stated above, creating the actual ebook (we will call it a conversion offer to note any content format) download is only half of the work. When creating a new content offer, the best thing you can do is put together a complete campaign that includes the conversion offer itself along with all the supporting content to help drive your audience to download it.

We are not going to look into the campaign strategy side of things today in this blog, however, we will be taking a look at some of the tactics that can be used in a campaign. Here are some of the most common tactics.

Supporting Blogs

With every conversion offer it's important that you create additional blogs to help support and drive traffic to the site. This can be as simple as pulling a few ideas or points from the ebook and expanding on them into original blog content.

There is no magic number of supporting blogs and usually the more the better. It will also depend on how long you're running the campaign for. As a very general rule of thumb, I'd typically try and create at least 5 blog articles to pair with your conversion offer. Then spread those articles out over the course of the campaign.

With every related blog you create, you will pair these blogs with calls-to-action to download the full ebook to learn more. You will then use the blogs to drive traffic to the site and the call-to-actions to drive traffic to the download.

Guest Blog Post

With each conversion offer campaign you will want to try and secure one high quality guest blog posting spot. This should be on a website who's audience match the audience targeted with your content offer.

Again, this guest blog should be on a similar topic to your conversion offer. It's extremely important that you make sure this blog post is very high quality and is extremely educational. Do not fill it with sales messages to download your offer, rather, simply explain that if you'd like to learn more to download your content offer.

I would also recommend talking to the website in advance and check if it's ok to link to your offer.

Targeted Email Blast

Once your conversion offer is live, it's important to promote it out to your current content database. This could be to help move current leads down the funnel or to re-engage cold leads who have stalled out in the process.
The key is to make these emails as targeted as possible. Start by looking back at the persona the original conversion offer was targeted towards. Then create a very segmented list based on that persona.

Then create a short (less than 200 words) email with information about the conversion offer, picture of the offer and anything else that would speak to this persona. Tailor the messaging around how this conversion offer will help solve a problem for this persona.

Include in Newsletter

You should already be sending out a monthly newsletter to your newsletter subscribers. It's important that you include am announcement about the new download along with a call-to-action to download the offer.

This could be as simple as being included in the right side column or you could even feature a "chapter" of the ebook as the main content of the newsletter. This will depend on the aggressiveness of the campaign strategy.

Social Media Content

Your social media channels are a great way to get the word out about your new conversion offer. You can use social media management software like Hootsuite to schedule out promotional content around your great conversion offer though out the course of the campaign.

Make sure to schedule at various times and with different messaging. You do not want to make the offers turn into spam by posting too much all at the same time. I would suggest 1 post per day depending on which network and how much your use that network.

Simply tweeting out the title of the ebook is not very engaging. Go above just posting about the offer itself and take some of the key tips of the offer and tweet them out (with a link to the landing page).

In addition, use your social channels to help promote out the supporting blog posts through the course of the campaign to help drive interested readers to those blogs.

PPC / Paid Placement

No this is not a typo - PPC and Paid Placements can be an important part of an Inbound Marketing campaign. Many typically do not associate PPC with Inbound Marketing, however, if you think above the traditional uses of PPC and find creative ways to incorporate it into your Inbound Marketing campaign, it can give you extra amplification to really drive results.

Create an supporting advertising campaign around your Inbound Marketing campaign. You can use these ads to gain awareness of your content offers and drive interested audience members to the conversion landing page.

These placements could be PPC, Sponsorship or Social Ads and should be selected based on channels and websites who's typical visitors align with your targeted persona of the campaign. 

There are many other tactics you can include in an Inbound Marketing campaign around a new conversion offer, these are simply the most common. Ultimately the goal is to attract those who may have interest in your ebook offer by giving them other items of value. Give them a small taste to get them excited and motivated to get more (by downloading your ebook).

If you have other ideas, please post in the comments section below. I'd love to hear your ideas.