Creating an eBook is a great way to publish research, start a discussion with your audience, and interact with your peers. However, a truly great eBook is more than just an extended white paper. Keep these steps in mind to make sure your next eBook is as powerful as possible.

1. Pick a Topic

While this might seem obvious, picking a relevant topic (and then staying on-topic throughout the length of your eBook) will determine the success of the entire publication. Your topic should be both captivating for a general audience and directly linked to your business goals. If you have one of these without the other, you’ve destined your eBook for failure before you’ve even hit publish. For example, Visually’s latest eBook, How Much is Your Content Worth, both explores an interesting topic (How native analytics can provide a better look at your marketing ROI) and nicely connects with Visually’s new native analytics solution.

2. Decide on Your Tone

Once you’ve settled on a compelling topic, the next step is to choose your tone. Do you want the eBook to be a heavy manifesto aimed at changing worldviews? B2B marketers Velocity Partners did just that in their 2010 ebook, aptly titled The B2B Marketing Manifesto.

On the other side of the spectrum, you can keep the tone light and clever, such as in Marketo’s Big Marketing Activity Coloring Book, which cleverly presents marketing advice in the form of a children’s activity book.

The reality is that your next eBook will fall somewhere in between these two extremes. But no matter which route you take, it is important to decide on a tone and stick with it.

 3. Decide on Your Format

There are multiple formatting questions that will dictate the look and feel of your eBook. The first and easiest to answer is the layout – should it be landscape or portrait? Next, think about how your audience will read it – should it be a downloadable .PDF? Or will you host it online, either on your own website or using a content manager like Uberflip or SlideShare? Or, will your audience be likely to read it on a phone or tablet? In addition to creating online versions optimized for handheld devices, it may be worth publishing your eBook through Apple’s iBooks Author.

The final question to answer is if your eBook will be digital only, or if you should create physical copies. Physical objects  fill a niche within the content marketing landscape, and sending customers or prospective clients your eBook can be a gentle reminder that you’re thinking of them. Examples such as NewsCred’s Relevance Has a Deadline and Millward Brown’s The Business of Brands make for nice coffee table books, too.

 4. Establish Your Marketing and Distribution Tactics

No matter how great your eBook is, getting it in your audience’s hands is at least half the battle. And as with any other marketing campaign, you’ll need a multi-faceted plan to reach the widest and most relevant audience possible. Good first steps include featuring your eBook in your newsletter, promoting it on social media, and linking to it on your website. However, these are all one-time use cases.

Advanced tactics include creating a series of topical blog posts to serve as companion pieces leading up to the eBook’s launch, partnering with influencers within the industry, and sharing bite-sized insights on social media. Teasing your eBook with microcontent is a a great way to easily generate buzz. Perhaps the most important marketing tactic is investing in a well-designed landing page or microsite. Much has been written about landing page design, and the best examples follow visual design best practices. Keep it clean, keep it simple, and ask for only the information you truly need to know. Percolate does a great job of this with the page for a recent eBook, Defining the Modern CMO.

5. Stay Social

Even in an era of social media and hyper-connectedness, it can be easy to forget that digital media consumers are all sharers at heart. Your audience will want to not only consume content for their own personal gain, but also share it with their own peers, clients, and connections. For the digital version of your eBook, make sure to include social media sharing links, links to your web presence, and a call to action.

Examples from two of Hubspot’s publications do a great job of this. Including the ability to share with just one click takes the guesswork out of crafting social media content and increases the likelihood that your content reaches a wider audience. And adding something as simple as “add your thoughts” with a hashtag and URL is a low-pressure way of inviting readers to continue the conversation. While these calls to action are simple and take up just a corner of a page, they can be instrumental in keeping the conversation going.

Now that you know the right questions to ask to make the best eBook possible, there’s just one thing left to do – create all the content, put it all together, and hit publish. Good luck!

This article originally appeared on Visual.ly.

The post How To Create Impactful eBooks For Content Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

Micro-content should play a big role in your content strategy. We’ve already shown you how to create micro-content time- and cost-efficiently using your existing visual assets. Now, we give you five smart tips on making the most of that micro-content:

1. Embrace Images and Keep Posts Short On Social Media

The numbers don’t lie; including an image or video in social media posts can do wonders for your engagement rates. Tweets with image links are twice as engaging as those without. Facebook posts with photos account for 93 percent of the most engaging posts on the platform.

Keep Tweets and Facebook posts down to a sentence or two at most. Facebook posts with less than 70 characters garner the most likes. Couple images with sentence-long quips for maximum social media engagement.

2. Make it Stackable

With so many media options available – from TVs and laptops to smartphones and tablets – consumers are often engaging with multiple platforms at the same time. Millward Brown’s recent AdReaction study found that more than 40 percent of 16-45 year-old multi-screen consumers in the US use devices simultaneously. You can serve this audience well by crafting stackable content that meshes with other platforms and encourages sharing.

Stackable content examples include gaming apps with short – but addictive – gameplay mechanisms such as Dots, short form videos from Vine or Instagram and immersive second screen experiences like The Walking Dead’s Story Sync app.

3. Don’t Skimp on the Copywriting

AMC’s Mad Men shows the power of Madison Avenue copywriters during the 1960s, and today the art of copywriting is anything but antiquated. In the digital age, creating an attention-grabbing headline or first sentence can make or break any blog post, article or tweet. Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich’s blog post on headline copywriting is a must-read for anyone looking to fine-tune their wordsmith skills. For example, his chart below suggests that verbs and adverbs will elicit more engagement than nouns and adjectives. Considering the agile nature of mico-content platforms, this makes sense.

 4. Play to Your Platform and Audience

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the leading social media platforms, but posting the same message the same way on all three is simply asking to be ignored. Each platform skews to a different user base, and each platform posts content differently. Instagram is centered around photos and videos rather than text, Twitter has an exact character limit, and Facebook posts can cleanly combine a user’s comment with an image, title and description of the link that is being shared.

Before you share any content on these or any other platforms, be sure to go through this simple three-step checklist:

1. Determine which platforms are resonating the strongest with your audience.
2. Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
3. Customize your content to fit each platform’s strength.

5. Make the Connection

Micro-content is only as powerful as the connection that it makes back to the brand or advertiser. Content marketing does not exist in a bubble, and micro-content is hardly an exception. With every blog, social media post, app download or micro video, there must be a call to action or larger connection back to the brand. Think of micro-content as the first minute of a sitcom before the theme song – compelling enough to draw you in for the next half hour, but not too informational, as to give away the entire episode’s plot.

Micro-content may be bite-sized, but that doesn’t mean you should spend minimal time planning for it. Tips and best practices like writing good headlines and keeping posts short and stackable and should be part of your organization’s on-going discussion and training as content marketers. Picking the right platform(s) for your audience and planning how to make an emotional connection with them is a bit trickier, but you should be able to uncover the answers to those questions in your strategy planning sessions. When executed with a plan that’s targeted to the right audience, micro-content has the potential to be just as effective as standard and long form content.

This article originally appeared on Visual.ly.

The post Overcome Short Attention Spans with Micro-Content appeared first on Relevance.