What if you could take your website message, your brand, your very best thoughts and articles, your About page and some information about how you can be of service to the world PLUS your contact information, bundle it up into a neat little package and send it off into the blogosphere?

Would you do it? Sounds like a great idea. Especially if that neat little package had a chance to get passed around to a whole lot of fresh new faces who never would have stumbled on to your homepage just sitting still in your neighborhood.

Would you send that traveling representative out into blogoland dressed in tattered wrapping with hastily thrown together content , fuzzy graphics and a boring design?

Hopefully not. Not unless your goal was to actually keep new business  and subscribers away from your site.

Hopefully you would pay just as much attention putting together a professional high quality package to represent you out there as you did your business cards, brochures and other forms of marketing.

You did do that, right? (If you didn’t,  no worries, come see us, we can help you with that)

What would be the simplest way to bundle up a traveling version of your website and send it out the door?

An E-Book is Your Traveling Website

When you think about it, an E-book is exactly that. A traveling representation of your website and you, sent out into the world to share your story and tell everyone who you are, what you stand for and what you look like.

People are going to form an opinion about you based on it. When they look at your cover they are going to consciously or unconsciously register a decision about who you and your business are.  They will decide if they think you have taste, or perhaps are cheap, or if you are a person who settles for nothing less then quality, or you slap things together willy-nilly, or that you care a great deal…or maybe you just don’t give a damn.

And by the way? They make this decision whether they buy the book or not. Every single person who looks at your book cover is registering something about you and your style. You’ve sent out your calling card.

Did you use affiliates? That’s wonderful! All the more places for your calling card to be seen. Please. Do yourself a favor. Take the time to make a good impression.

You Can’t Always Judge a Book By it’s Cover

Let’s say you passed the first test. You made a decent to great impression with your cover and you got the public  interested enough to want to open the cover and look under the hood.  Congratulations!

Mission accomplished?  Not a chance. Would you be satisfied if that same public came to your website, took a look at your homepage, clicked on one quick link and then buzzed away? NO! Not if you knew what was good for business you wouldn’t.

You want to engage them, grab their attention on the first page, draw them in, get them to settle in to a comfortable armchair and not come out again until the last page is turned and they are desperate for more.

Does your book do that? Do you know? How do you know? Did you ask? (Your mother doesn’t count. Neither does your significant other) It wouldn’t hurt to get a professional opinion.

There are two very important aspects of drawing in the reader between the pages of a book.

Content, of course, is always King and a book with poorly written content is doomed from the start. However there is a great deal of difference between disastrous content and content that may need a few rewrites, a little tweaking and an occasional bit of inspiration. Even the greatest writers benefit from a second pair of eyes and professional editing. Did you?

The King of Content  goes nowhere without his Queen by his side, however, and to neglect her is to provide your reader with a glaringly amateur and uncomfortable reading experience. She is the Queen of layout, typsetting and design.  From adding in clear crisp graphics to typesetting and formatting, it is difficult to produce a finished professional product without a skilled designer and quality programs at your disposal. Can it be done? Sure. Be prepared for a lot of blood, sweat and tears. (And cursing. I’m told lots of cursing. That’s what I’ve heard.)

If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything at All

There’s a big craze out there for everyone to write their E-books right now. It’s a nice bandwagon to want to jump on to. Let’s face it, we’re all writers, or many of us.  The lure to want to see our name in print is very tempting and when everybody else is doing it…well, as Mama used to say-that doesn’t necessarily mean we should be jumping off that bridge too.

The more important point to be holding on to is that we need to represent ourselves with quality. That everything we send out with our name on it needs to be a representation of who we are, what we stand for and the level of expectations that our clients can expect to receive from our businesses. If you aren’t in a position to send out that level of quality in your E-book yet…maybe its not time to jump off that bridge.

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