Choosing Ebook Topics To Write About? Find Ideas In Blog Posts You’ve Already Written, Competitors’ Ebooks, And What Audiences Want To Have Solved.
Knowledge Commerce is a booming new line of ecommerce. You first discover, and then “productize” your own unique knowledge, talent, skills or passions – into ebooks, courses, memberships, webinars, virtual summits, consulting packages, and a host of other formats.
It’s an ideal business for solopreneurs. If you want to grow yourself into an exclusive and premium brand, and command market-dominating prices, this is your perfect opportunity. So get in early.
Do you know your unique expertise niche thoroughly? Do you know your target audiences well?
If you’ve done your homework, you should be sure you know your audiences’ pain-points, problems, or areas of perplexity or doubt. The first tenet in ebook planning is to take care and choose a topic that aligns with your target audience’s needs or pain-points.
Next, look at what you’ve already written – maybe blog posts, emails, comments on others’ blog posts, or even notes to yourself. There could be a spark somewhere in all that you’ve previously written, which can ignite your new ebook topic.
Further, if you spend a day searching Amazon for various books on a chosen topic, you will see the rich diversity of angles taken by different authors, all tackling the same subject. Use that as your inspiration to come up with a topic angle that you feel will resonate with audiences because they haven’t quite seen things that way before.
On this post, we, at Solohacks Academy, have given you ten smashing ideas to get started with ebook topics. Starting on that ebook you’ve always wanted to write could be the beginning of a journey you’ll learn and earn hugely from.
Contents
- See if your blog posts can extend into longer and meatier ebooks
- Outdo your competitors’ bestsellers with updated, upgraded content
- Pick problems that vex audiences on forum and group discussions online
- Check out BuzzSumo to start with an ebook on a topic that’s trending
- Pick a topic in your niche area you know like the back of your hand
- Search Amazon Kindle to spot gaps where there are no useful ebooks
- Refresh the content of old blog posts that can be compiled into a new ebook
- Look for areas where your target audiences seek more self-improvement
- Pick a paragraph from a blog post and harvest the topics hidden in it
- Curate an ebook on your niche topic where experts have a range of opinions
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1. See if your blog posts can extend into longer and meatier ebooks
Before you begin to think of writing and publishing ebooks, you may have started writing a lot of blog posts. Most online marketers start that way. If you have gone down this route, see if you can track the performance of your blog posts on Google Analytics to see which ones have been the most popular posts.
See if any of your blog posts have excited readers enough for them to leave comments. See if they have spent a lot of time on the blog post. You can do this with a heatmap tool like Hitsteps.
If you can identify your most-read blog posts, see if the topics are extendable into ebooks with at least ten to twelve sub-topics acting as chapters. Most blog posts will lend themselves to such topic extension, especially if you have written list posts, or posts with a lot of actionable steps. Each of the steps can be detailed with illustrations, examples, charts, data, or graphs.
Even if your popular blog posts were mostly about concepts rather than practical implementations, you could easily break the concept into a set of most-asked questions, each of which you can convert into a chapter. Why not check if you already have the basics of a great book in your blog?
2. Outdo your competitors’ bestsellers with updated, upgraded content
Doubtless you may have heard of Brian Dean’s famous “Skyscraper Technique”. Brian Dean, who is the last word on backlinks for SEO, created a concept to get your blog posts well-ranked on Google. He suggested that you should look at the No. #1 ranked post on Google for any topic and then outdo it by miles – you must create an updated, upgraded, 100X version of it, like you’re building a skyscraper next to a single-level house.
If you decide to beat the competition at its game by upping the level of the whole playing field, it will not only be easier to pick your topic and get started – but you’ll find that almost anything can be vastly improved by rewriting it with more substance and solidity.
You can apply the same tactic to writing your first ebook. Pick a topic that is a bestseller for your competitor. See what you can add to it to vastly improve the value of your ebook. Use the competitor’s framework, or break it apart and rebuild the whole book in your own way.
The competitor’s hard work will be the base from which you build a higher product. It’s so much easier, don’t you think, if you pick a topic where the competitor’s existing and highly popular ebook acts as your ladder to greater heights of success?
3. Pick problems that vex audiences on forum and group discussions online
There’s a wonderful pastime marketers online can engage in – and it’s called “social listening”. There are many tools that can aid you in this endeavor. Social listening is about lurking around niche forums or social media chats and groups to see what problems are most vexing your target audiences – these are the people you may want to buy and read your ebooks.
This kind of “silent snooping” can be highly valuable. You may notice that people are talking about things you never thought they’d be concerned about. The whole exercise can be very enlightening, especially if you are doing it for the first time.
When you get some key insights into what troubles your target audiences, it’s then easy to pick a topic for your ebook. The ebooks that sell the most are the ones that offer solutions to customer problems.
Most often, though, marketers write books about what they think are customer problems, instead of asking customers (or slyly listening to them airing their woes). Make sure your ebook topic solves a real problem that many people have – and doesn’t solve an imaginary problem that occurs to you as important.
4. Check out BuzzSumo to start with an ebook on a topic that’s trending
Buzzsumo is a goldmine of a tool for picking ebook topics. When you type in a keyword phrase into the tool, it will spit out a whole load of articles in order of the ones most popular on social media – the blog posts that are most retweeted, liked, commented on, and shared. In a jiffy, you’ll know if a particular topic related to your keyword is “going viral”.
While you check popularity, be careful to see where your target audience usually hangs out on the social media, so you check the popularity ratings on that social channel.
The smartest thing you can then do, if you spot the top five or six articles highlighted by Buzzsumo, is to see if there’s potential for an ebook on any of those topics. Read the blog posts and see if the authors have taken certain positions or slants that have made their articles so popular.
See if you can extend similar angles in your ebook, and add a lot more meat than is available in the article. Nothing like riding a wave that is already cresting!
5. Pick a topic in your niche area you know like the back of your hand
It doesn’t take a genius to know that you can’t write an ebook – or indeed, any book – on a topic you know very little about. If you are in a niche where there are large gaps in your knowledge, don’t take up an ebook topic that is in one of your weak areas. Pick topics where you know the depth and breadth of the whole topic – as they wise say, you must know your topic like the back of your hand.
Shallow knowledge will betray itself. Command over knowledge, on the other hand, will make you sound like you’re writing without killing yourself and making reading torturous for the reader.
If, after searching your own reservoir of knowledge, you feel inadequate to write a whole ebook on a chosen topic, make sure to give yourself enough time to “bone up” on the subject. You must read so much, that knowledge on the topic oozes out of your pores. Go through other books, blog posts, course curricula, and interviews of thought-leaders on the topic. Spend enough time reading until you feel you can write at least ten to twelve chapters on the topic with ease and speed, and without having to refer to sources every now and again.
One more thing to remember here: don’t confuse diffidence with inadequate knowledge. There are many marketers who balk at writing an ebook on a topic, thinking themselves to be still ignorant on the topic. But “feeling ignorant” is different from “being ignorant”, and you won’t know how much you really know till you begin. So make that start, and see how you get on.
6. Search Amazon Kindle to spot gaps where there are no useful ebooks
Amazon Kindle is a great place to buy ebooks – or to shop for ideas for ebooks. I can’t count the number of times I have looked around Amazon for an ebook on a particular subject, only to find that no one has even written a book of the kind I want. Yes, you heard me right.
For every topic where there are thousands of similar-sounding ebooks, there are also huge pockets of “bookless topics”. The only problem is that you have to search hard for topics with a very thin collection of ebooks that match your niche. Searching takes time.
For starters, you can check if the keywords you have used for your search have been highly searched by others. Look for some idea of the demand for the topic. Then check if there are ebooks in topics that are synonyms of the keywords you used. For instance, you may have searched for “calories spent when exercising” and found very few books, but you mustn’t assume the topic is bare of books. Maybe if you’d searched for “fat-burning rate of different exercises” it may be chock-full of ebooks, some of them by renowned fitness trainers.
So, make sure you’ve used various versions of search terms to see if there’s really a market gap on a particular topic. Once you find a real gap, get your ebook in there as fast as possible, because the moment you spot the lucrativeness of the slot, you can be sure others will flock into the same space.
7. Refresh the content of old blog posts that can be compiled into a new ebook
This idea is a corollary to the earlier one where I suggested you look at your blog posts for ebook topic ideas. Here, instead of extending any one of your blog posts into an ebook, see if you have a collection of related blog posts that take various angles of a topic. Compile them as an ebook that presents a series of essays around a topic.
For example, I had various blog posts on different aspects of content marketing – how to do content marketing, how to connect blogging and social media, how to use Twitter for content marketing, how to make content more valuable, how to use content marketing for ecommerce sites, and so on. I pulled them all together into an ebook titled “How To Get More Bang For Your Buck From Content Marketing”.
One important thing to remember when you pull old blog posts together into an ebook is that you must check for content freshness. For instance, SEO has changed a lot in recent times. So have content marketing practices for different devices. So much evolution of technology happens online, often within short time spans, that your old blog posts may be seriously in need of review in the context of the current online realities.
So, before you just copy-and-paste old blog posts into a brand new ebook, make sure the content doesn’t show people you’ve done a uber-lazy book-writing job. Check especially to see that “dates and data” don’t betray your lack of mental application during the repurposing exercise.
8. Look for areas where your target audiences seek more self-improvement
If there is one type of ebook that is guaranteed to fly off your ecommerce store shelves, it’s self-help books. Nobody can resist a book on a topic like “How To Manage To Write On Your Off Days”, or “How to Polish Up Your Marketing Skills”, or “How To Get 24 Hours Of Work Done in Just 8 Hours”. Self-improvement is a bottomless need area.
No matter how many books people read on time management, clutter management, money management, mind management or habit management, they will be tempted to buy every new title on the same subjects hoping to find some easier shortcuts to greater success.
If you are trying to write your first ebook, you can’t go far wrong by choosing a self-improvement topic connected to your niche. The ideas people most like in self-improvement are: how to get more done in less time; how to get things done more easily; how to get greater success; and how to leap towards higher earnings.
All other attractions – like job satisfaction, or greater passion for work, or love of helping people – are somehow tied back to the same four ideas: greater success, via less work and time, done with greater ease, to see more money.
People like to believe their ideals are lofty and noble, but they cannot resist routing these noble ideals via the four basic material parameters of life: money, time, ease and success. So, see that your ebook has a new ring and some new ideas to contribute to the old time-tested formula that always works.
9. Pick a paragraph from a blog post and harvest the topics hidden in it
I love this trick and I’m sure when you’ve heard about this method, you’ll love it too. It’s simple. Just take a paragraph connected to your niche – written by you or any other expert in your field. Here’s an example:
“Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis. Eventually, when customers make a purchase decision, their loyalty already lies with you. They will purchase your product and prefer it over competitors’ options. In contrast to one-off advertising, content marketing shows that you actually care about your customers.”
Notice all the underlined parts. Each one of them can become an ebook topic, as follows:
- 12 Ways To Make Content Marketing a Long-Term Strategy
- Secrets To Building Strong Relationships With Your Target Audiences
- How To Write High-Quality Content That’s Relevant
- 12 Ways To Change The Way Customers Make Purchase Decisions
- One-Off Advertising vs. Content Marketing: What Works And When
Who says we are ever short of ebook topic ideas?
10. Curate an ebook on your niche topic where experts have a range of opinions
Instead of looking at your own blog posts as inspiration-starters, how about picking about 25 passages from the blog posts of other noted authors and compiling them into a curated ebook?
People don’t always want to know only about your own feelings, opinions, and analysis of a topic. They may love reading a range of ideas from different authors on a common concept. It gives your ebook the flavor of a mini-webinar.
To make this idea work, you need to do two things. Take short, meaningful passages from the works of others and give them due credit for their work with links back to their original articles. Don’t pinch large passages. Also make sure to add your own two-bits to annotate their work, so that your ebook doesn’t look like it has nothing from you in it.
Add value to the curated articles by raising questions for readers to ponder about. Offer case studies that enhance the opinions of these other experts with real-life examples. Think of ways to make your curated compilation a cohesive and coherent ebook by making the title clear and crisp. Let people not be misled to think you’ve written the whole book. Find a way to say you’ve curated the “best from the rest”.
Hear These Experts On This Topic …
Kim Garst in the article “10 Tips to Choosing an eBook Topic that Your Target Audience Will Want to Read”:
Simply identifying a topic or niche ISN’T enough. People don’t usually buy eBooks just to learn about a topic…they buy them in order to solve a problem. Whatever broad topic you’ve chosen, how can you turn this information into a practical “how to” guide? What specific problem or problems is your eBook going to help your target audience solve?
For instance, rather than writing a general book about public speaking, how about, “A Step-by-Step Guide to Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking”? Directly solve your audience’s biggest problem, and you’re well on your way to not just choosing an eBook topic but creating a bestseller!”
Rob Steffans in the article “4 Ways to Come Up With the Best Ebook Topics for Your Audience”:
Your competitors are out there writing ebooks, too, and some of them are very successful. If a well-established competitor is doing something that works, they’ve probably invested careful research into it – just like you. While you don’t want to repeat what others have said, you can use existing work as a jumping-off point to make your ebook even better. Start by looking at your top 10 competitors and seeing which ones are using ebooks in their content strategy. When you find one, sign up for it and take a look. Keep an eye on depth, tone, and formatting to fuel your own creative thinking.
Naturally, you won’t be able to tell how many ebook subscribers a rival company has. So, how can you discover which ebooks are winners versus which ones are lying on the proverbial shelf? An SEO suite that focuses on competitor research, like SpyFu, will get you on the right track. Look for tools that generate granular traffic statistics on internal pages so you can spot high-traffic sign-up pages, such as ebook sign-up landing pages.”
T.J. Madigan in the article “How To Select A Hot Topic For Your New Ebook”:
Here is some good news, and if you didn’t already know this then you are going to be smiling big. Drum roll please… ideas are not copyrighted, therefore any idea you see, hear, or read anywhere anytime, is yours to use for an ebook! You can create books around the same ideas that are covered in the Amazon bestseller list, and turnaround and create an ebook on the exact same subject!
Now, copyright law does protect the way ideas are expressed, so you want to make sure your hired author does not plagiarize or copy book text outright. And you cannot use the title word for word either. But there’s nothing stopping you from creating another book or ebook that covers the same subject with a different voice. It’s all as completely legal and guilt-free as nonfat Haagen Dazs. This is why looking at bestseller lists is a great way to get topic ideas.”
So What Are Your Thoughts? Do Share!
This post is incomplete without your input. The community of Knowledge Commerce solopreneurs would feel galvanized to hear from you … so do share your thoughts on this topic with us, in the comments field below this post.
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- How To Format An Ebook In PowerPoint … 10 No-Sweat Steps
- How To Protect Your Ebook From Piracy … 10 Clever Tips
- How To Promote Your Ebook Across The Net … 10 Routes
- How To Price Your Ebook For Long Term Profits … 10 Smarts
- How To Write Your Ebook Fast And Flawlessly … 10 Shortcuts
- How To Protect Your PDF Ebook From Sharing … 5 Ideas
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