How do these “commercial” eBooks differ from the PDF eBooks we marketers advocate? Three ways:

1. PDF eBooks are not sold through Amazon and other online stores.
2. PDF eBooks do not lend themselves to sharing on social networks.
3. PDF eBooks provide a poor user experience on smartphones and tablets. They require too much pinching and panning to be easily read.

In fact, as screens get smaller…

• Smartphone adoption reached 49.7 percent penetration in February 2012 and is expected to climb to 70 percent of all mobile phones by the end of 2013. (Nielsen)
• The number of Americans owning at least one digital reading device (tablet, Kindle, Nook, etc.) jumped from 18 percent in December 2011 to 29 percent in January 2012 (Pew Internet)

… digital reading is going more mobile (according to Pew Internet’s 2012 study, The Rise of eReading):

• 41 percent of readers of eBooks consume them on an eBook reader such as a Kindle or Nook.
• 29 percent of readers of eBooks consume them on their cell phones.
• 23 percent of readers of eBooks consume them on a tablet computer.

If the goal is to produce content that gets found, read, and shared, then content marketers can’t ignore mobile devices and online bookstores. Further, this adoption rate creates new opportunities for engagement and revenue generation.

Here’s a look at a few examples of the redefined, modern eBook.

The revenue opportunity

Making your eBook available in retail stores can expand your audience, and maybe even your bottom line.

Apple released its Lion operating system in July of 2011 and Ars Technica reviewer John Siracusa was ready with his detailed 27,000-word review. But instead of confining the article to the web, where it was available as an advertising-supported, 19-page, free document, Ars Technica formatted it for Kindle and sold it on Amazon for $4.99. Ars reported selling 3,000 copies in just the first 24 hours, which netted $10,500 ($4.99 x 3,000 x 70 percent royalty). 

The marketing opportunity

Content marketers can convert their free PDF eBooks into regular eBooks to reach new readers.

The McKinsey Global Institute and the American Society of Golf Course Architects are examples of eBooks for marketing. Both create free content (as a PDF) to promote their organizations. These PDF eBooks are available for download from their website for free. But they take it a step further by formatting their content as eBooks and selling them on Amazon.

Making their information available in an online bookstore helps them reach an entirely new group of readers — readers that may not have otherwise stumbled upon their website or information. This raises the question, “Is Amazon becoming the Google for information products?”

For these publishers, repurposing their content as paid eBooks is more about finding a new audience than it is about revenue generation. It also demonstrates that eBook buyers are willing to pay for the convenience and improved functionality of these eBooks.

Remember, you don’t have to charge

There are two major eBook file formats used by eReading devices. Amazon’s proprietary Mobi format and the “industry standard” ePub format, used by virtually all other eBook retailers (including Apple, Sony and Barnes & Noble). Like PDF, both Mobi and ePub are free of distribution licensing fees.

If you plan to make your content available for free you can create a version in each file format — Mobi, ePub and PDF — and place them on your website to be available as downloads.

One great example of this implementation is the collection of free user guides published by MailChimp. Each of its 28 guides is available in all three formats in addition to being readable via a web browser.

Simply download the zip file and transfer the appropriate file to the eReading device of your choice. By including a PDF, your readers can also print the document (do people still do this!?).

Amazon’s Kindle eBooks can be shared via social networks

Has this happened to you: You’re reading a book and you come upon an interesting passage that you wish to share with your friends. With Kindle books (and perhaps others soon, too), you can share that passage on Facebook and/or Tweet it.

Ever wonder what other people highlight in their books? Visit a Kindle book page on Amazon and look for “Popular Highlights.” You’ll see a list of favorite phrases and the number of people that highlighted them. What author wouldn’t love to find out what passages her readers found most interesting? (A great market research tool!)

The last social media benefit I’ll mention is Reading List by Amazon, a LinkedIn application that shares your reading list with other LinkedIn members. This is an opportunity for your readers to tell others that they are reading your book. 

How to convert your content to Mobi and ePub formats

While not as painless as creating a PDF, this process is relatively straightforward for content marketers when you follow a few best practices. The good news is that new tools are coming out all the time, and there are third-party professionals skilled in producing eBooks.

But if you want to try to do it yourself, there are seven basic steps:

1. Using Microsoft Word, follow best practices in formatting your document. Use style sheets, avoid extra lines, and don’t use spaces for tabs. Also, make sure graphics, charts, and tables are stored as jpeg or gif files. Insert these into the document where they belong. Keep in mind that text does not flow around images, so create your layout appropriately (text, then image, then text). There are no headers and footers in eBooks, so make sure to remove these in advance, so as not to create formatting issues.
2. Most eBooks benefit from a linked table of contents to help the reader navigate the material. In Word, select Insert, then Bookmark to name the destination. Then link to it with Insert, Hyperlink. (Word’s table of contents auto-generator also works but could cause conversion problems later.)
3. Download a copy of Calibre, a free (donations welcome) eBook library manager. This tool will help you convert your document to Mobi and ePub file formats.
4. Save your Word document as a filtered HTML file. If your document includes images, you’ll need to combine the resultant HTML document (.htm) and image folder into a zip file before importing into Calibre.
5. Invest in designing a professional-looking book cover. It is true what they say about judging books by the cover. It’s also important for branding.
6. Download one of the free software eReaders from Amazon or B&N, or load your eBook on your eReader to see how it looks and check it for typos, layout problems, etc.
7. If you plan to sell your eBook, you will want to set up a free account with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and/or Barnes & Noble’s Pubit.

(Note: You can click here for a free checklist of the steps necessary for publishing an eBook.)

Leverage your content investment by redefining the eBook

In today’s consumer-driven media landscape, the word eBook has a very different connotation. Creating mainstream or modern eBooks may not be relevant for every content project, but for the right ones, it can make a huge difference. 

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Cover image: Yutaka Tsutano

But alas! It must be done. Why?

1. Your blog is the most important pillar of your content marketing strategy. Blogs can serve as a very powerful portal through which your company’s mission, values, voice — in short, your content — are distributed. Plus, despite what many companies think, blogging can actually be a low-cost activity that, in turn, provides you with incredible rewards.
2. Your competitors are probably already blogging. In 2011, B2B marketers increased their use of blogs by 27 percent according to the B2B Content Marketing 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Report, making it the third most common content marketing activity out there.
3. It’s easier than you think. Implementing a blog is so simple, you’ll probably wonder why you hadn’t done it earlier. Plus, even if you’re already blogging, there are some easy ways to re-vamp your strategy and maximize your blog’s impact.

Thanks to the amazing contributors here on the CMI blog, we’ve gathered a great deal of insights and expertise on the subject; insights that we think will forever change how you feel about blogging.  Whether you’re a novice content marketer or seasoned blogger, we think the tips in this Ultimate Guide to Blogging will help support your efforts.

What’s inside the Ultimate Guide to Blogging?

Stats, for starters, and then a host of resources including:

• The costs of blogging
• Developing your blogging voice and strategy
• Organizing your team
• 8 tips for writing REALLY amazing content
• Getting your content seen, and shared
• Measuring your impact, and ensuring success

Plus we’ve gathered information on what types of blog posts perform best, and give some examples of successful initiatives from across the web to inspire your efforts.

Do you have a blog? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Blogging and tell us what we’ve missed, or share your own lessons learned in the comments below.

Thanks to all our amazing contributors from the CMI blog, Joseph Kalinowski and Jodi Harris for helping pull this guide together!

Download The Ultimate Guide to Blogging now.

Right now, marketers are coming to terms with the fact that a financial transaction is no longer the end-all, be-all of the customer relationship. Sure, achieving a sale is an undeniable win. But it isn’t always enough to drive the loyalty, evangelism, and repeat business that a durable business thrives on.

That’s what engagement is for.

So how can marketers crack the engagement code in content marketing and determine the role it should play in a campaign? And, more importantly, how can we develop a process that helps us engage with customers and prospects more reliably and successfully, time and time again?

There are no magic formulas — after all, we are talking about connecting with something as unique and unpredictable as the human being. But there are many tips that content professionals have picked up in the marketing trenches, and CMI’s latest eBook is loaded with them.

Take a look at Your Kick-Start Guide to Engaging Content, where author Thomas Clifford, and a host of other experts and CMI bloggers, share their perspective on engagement, including:

• What it means and why it is essential to marketing
• The four qualities that must exist for content to be engaging
• How to use content to pump excitement into even the most common product
• Ways the experts engage the mind by appealing to the heart
• The five main categories of engagement tools, and great examples of each
• Knowing what to measure, and ways to use what you learn to determine your next steps

Whether you are looking for some guidance to boost your success rates or need to get up to speed with some useful information and easy-to-implement techniques, we found a lot to think about here, and we hope you will, too.

If you aren’t familiar with Eloqua’s series of Grande Guides, they are intended to be consumed in the time it takes to enjoy your 16-ounce morning coffee. This guide is a bit heftier and may require a Venti, but it’s packed with good information:

• An explanation of what content marketing is — and why your company needs to care
• Fundamental tactics used by content marketers
• An explanation of why content marketing is so important in B2B
• 10 reasons why a content marketing program may not be working with suggestions on how to overcome each
• 5 reasons you shouldn’t be a content marketer
• How to measure content marketing
• A case study from OpenView Venture Partners
• A bunch of additional content marketing resources

The guide was written by Eloqua’s VP of Content Marketing, Joe Chernov and me. Ann Handley and CC Chapman (authors of Content Rules) also contributed.

Enjoy…and let me know what you think.

The base: Curation, creativity, and coordination

These three concepts form the base of the pyramid because without all of these elements your content marketing efforts will fail.  Here’s what I mean:

Content curation: You’ve probably heard content marketing referred to as “thought leadership.” To be a thought leader, you’ve got to know what everyone else is saying, make sense out of it, and then add something original to the conversation. This means your entire content team will need to spend time reading industry blogs, following industry hashtags on Twitter, and keeping their eyes open for new ideas and trends. Sometimes, this research and reading doesn’t seem to accomplish much, but without soaking in industry content it’s hard to create anything notable yourself.

Content creativity: At the beginning of each content marketing engagement, we hold a brainstorming session to get everyone to think creatively about content. However, content creativity goes far beyond the initial brainstorming session. Creativity  may come in the form of getting through that first sentence when you’re facing a nasty case of writer’s block or finding the perfect way to fix that awkward sentence when you’re in editing mode. You can’t consistently create quality content without creativity.

Content coordination: Content marketing is complicated. If you’re doing it right, you’ll have several blog posts a month, drafts flying back and forth, and several writers fighting for space on the schedule (or begging for a deadline extension). Not to mention that you also have to distribute that content, report on whether or not it’s working, adjust your next efforts based on those reports, and incorporate whatever new social sharing site has come out that week. Content marketing flounders without an organizational maestro to take charge and coordinate efforts.

You might think it’s weird that there is no actual content on the base of the content marketing pyramid. Yet without curation, creativity, and coordination your content will not be supported by a sound foundation.

The middle: Blog posts and website copy

The middle section is a huge part of any healthy content marketing menu. Without quality website copy and blog posts, your content marketing program will be malnourished.

Blog posts build your brand’s following, secure SEO results, help nurture prospects along the buying cycle, and provide fodder for social media outlets. They catch attention and draw readers back to your website. For many content marketers, blog posts represent the bulk of content marketing efforts. Compared to other types of content, blog posts are relatively quick and easy to create, and if one blog post isn’t the best thing you’ve ever had on your site, that’s OK — you’ve always got the next one.

However, blog posts do not stand alone in the middle of the content marketing pyramid. Without thorough, compelling website copy, the chances of your blog’s readers turning into qualified leads are low.  Sure, potential clients may fill out your contact form because they loved one of your blog posts, but I’ll bet they took a look at your website copy first. Fail to reflect your organization’s unique value proposition in your website copy and you’ll fail to capture leads from your content marketing efforts.

The almost-top: Videos and case studies

Videos and case studies earn their spots on this level for two very different reasons, so I’ll break it down:

Videos. Everyone learns in different ways, and while one person may be content to read blog posts all day, another may want to watch a two-minute video to get a sense of how you think and who you are. While videos aren’t absolutely essential, they give site visitors a sense of the legitimacy of your business. Creating quality videos can be time consuming and expensive compared to drafting a blog post, so you might not be able to create one every other week, but you should definitely consider video as a way to complement your text-based content offerings.

Case studies. One of the most compelling ways to sell is by showing off the good work you’ve done for others. No matter how brilliant, informative, and interesting your blog posts and website copy are, potential clients or customers are going to want to know who else has worked with you successfully. Short, simple case studies are a good way to show this whether you’re mentioning them in a blog post or sending them to a potential client when responding to an initial inquiry. However, be wary of overwhelming your audience with case studies because it can come off as too hard a sell. Instead, choose the absolute best work your company does, and showcase it when it’s relevant.

Videos and case studies aren’t the only types of content that fit in this category — you could throw infographics and interactive portfolios in here as well. The point is, website and blog copy isn’t always enough. You should have different kinds of content for the different kinds of thinkers whose attention you hope to attract.

The top: Webinars and eBooks

Content such as webinars and eBooks are essential for capturing leads. People are generally willing to submit their contact information in exchange for significant content like this. Once you have that, your sales team can contact any qualified leads.

However, you’ll be hard pressed to get people to sign up to download a webinar or eBook if you haven’t already convinced them of your expertise by giving them quality content that is easily accessible as well. Build a readership with your blog, and then turn that readership into leads by requiring information in exchange for the content on the top of the pyramid.

What does your content marketing pyramid look like? Have a content marketing food group to add? Please comment below!

What is the Content Marketing Playbook?

This year’s Playbook consists of 42 different content marketing tactics, all ranked in popularity by the CMI community.  The top 10 include:

1. Blog
2. Enewsletter
3. White Paper
4. Article
5. eBook
6. Case Study
7. Testimonials
8. Microblogging (i.e., Twitter)
9. Webinar/Webcast
10. Video

New for 2011

How about Case Studies?

Content leverage

Content leverage is using every  piece of content  in multiple ways to get the highest return on investment from each piece of content. Obviously, content is not valuable unless buyers are aware of it and are engaged with the material.  This requires marketers to deliver the content in new, interactive ways and channels. Borrowing from Newton’s first law, content in motion will tend to stay in motion and be more effective as a result.

Let’s track the life of a single blog article to bring these practices to life and show how a marketer can leverage content to its best use.

Developing content derivatives

An executive writes a compelling blog article based on new research from a survey of customers and prospects. The blog post explains how the research findings uncover an important buyer issue, validates the market need for the vendor’s solution, and highlights that solutions exist to address the issues identified in the research.

A research-focused post helps in the early stages of the buying cycle to inform  buyers that  solutions are available  to  make improvements.  In this scenario, marketers can develop content derivatives such as:

1) Research White Paper: The marketing team develops additional content based on the original blog post to create a white paper. However, keep in mind that research indicates buyers prefer shorter white papers; the recommended length is four to six pages.

2) Infographic: Research and best practices recommend converting content into an infographic to illustrate data that can be  quickly understood and enhance a call to action.  The elements of an infographic can be weaved into the white paper and other materials to make the data “come to life.”

3) PowerPoint: The presentation is an overview of the research findings on the market opportunity, a summary of the white paper and the executive’s best practice recommendations, which can be uploaded on Slideshare.

4) Live and On-Demand Webinar: The executive leverages the PowerPoint to present a live webinar, which is also recorded for on-demand playback.

5) Video and Podcast: The executive is interviewed in Q&A form to create a series of short and compelling videos and podcasts. Creating transcripts of each interview can provide additional content leverage.

To improve the connection and engagement of today’s busy buyers, more marketers are moving beyond traditional options to leverage interactive media such as:

1) Microsites: The marketing team develops and publishes a collection of related research and advice to a best practices microsite, providing buyers with a single resource to facilitate each step through the buyer’s journey.

2) eBook: The team  converts the key white paper content and PowerPoint into a visually compelling eBook, an interactive overview of the research, and key points  that an executive can quickly read  to understand main concepts and recommendations.

3) Mobile Content / Applications: The team converts the research into content optimized for mobile devices and creates a “Solution Finder” application to help users find the right solution  based on which piece of the research matches customers’  specific priorities / pain points.

4) Multi-media White Papers: The team enhances the white paper presentation with embedded video and podcast recordings, helping buyers feel more connected to the executive.

5) Interactive White Papers: Today’s buyers demand content be more relevant and concise. To deliver a personalized white paper, the marketing team should consider assembling and customizing the content for each buyer. This content customization can be developed on pivot points, which matches content to the buyer’s industry, location, size, role in buying cycles and pain points. The content is put into an interactive software application to survey the buyer on his profile. From there, a customized white paper is delivered with content precisely matching the buyer’s profile.

6) Interactive Diagnostic Assessments: Most buyers struggle to understand whether research issues are  relevant or applicable to them and whether addressing the issues should be priority.  The marketing team may consider a diagnostic assessment to gather and benchmark the prospect’s opportunities against industry peers and leaders. This can illustrate to buyers the competitive costs of maintaining the status quo versus the competitive advantages of adopting new solutions that can address priority issues.

7) Benefit Calculator: Without a business case, today’s economic-focused buyers are hard pressed to allocate budget and pull the trigger on an investment. The marketing team can tap the research to create a customized, interactive benefits calculator that will quantify potential benefits for prospects.

Putting the content in motion

The traditional ways to connect and engage buyers with valuable decision-support content is evolving to incorporate more channels and social sharing.

Traditional channels use promotions, excerpts, and links to the content in order to increase awareness and engage buyers.

Some of the traditional channels that the marketing team leverages to promote content include:

1) Website(s): Promote and link to the content from the main company website and microsites, not forgetting to promote the content via portals in support of sales / channel enablement.

2) eNewsletters: Include excerpts and links in regular newsletters as value-added content.

3) Banner Advertising: Use banners to promote the content as a call to action for users.

4) Paid Search: Use targeted keywords and content as a call to action.

5) Traditional Advertising: Place promotions and links from traditional advertising to the online content.

The one issue with these traditional channels is that they are paid advertisements and have a low trust rating.  However, social content placement is often earned and is trusted more than traditional advertising  by today’s skeptical buyers.

Using social media-focused channels, marketers connect and engage with influencers and the buyers’ communities via:

1) Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Posts and Links – Beyond just links to promote the content, marketers post key excerpts of compelling findings and advice. These posts are liked and forwarded by other members.

2) YouTube & Slideshare Posts: Based on the type of content, the marketing team leverages specific social channels for sharing content such as YouTube for videos and Slideshare for PPTs and PDFs.

3) LinkedIn Discussion Groups and Quora: Marketers determine what key questions would be compelling to discussion groups  to attract group members’ comments on the research and findings as well as to  collaborate on additional opportunities, best practices and solutions..

4) Influencer Links: Marketers make influencers aware of the content and findings / advice, prompting several influencers to write about the content and pass along excerpts / links.

5) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search engines prioritize links to content that are seen as  timely, relevant and valuable to the community. To optimize SEO, marketers still need to be sure that content is tagged properly and contains important keywords. Additionally, marketers must ensure that content is back-linked,  liked, promoted and linked to/from other independent and influential sites.

6) Article Syndication: Marketers convert the blog post and other content into article form, and get digital and print publishers to feature / promote the article because they feel it will help their readers.

The bottom line

When an author develops a blog article or other  piece of marketing content, it’s key that the marketing team leverage the content in multiple ways by creating derivatives to put the content in motion. This strategy should include creating multiple traditional and new interactive media derivatives that engage buyers with content through traditional and social channels.

This graphic illustration of  a single piece of content from a research oriented blog post can be used to derive multiple pieces of content to connect and engage buyers via multiple channels  and facilitate the buyer’s journey that can help drive content marketing effectiveness.

Have you tried this approach? Anything you would add to the graphic above?

You run around looking for your car keys.
You could’ve sworn you just saw them right there on the counter.
But now they’re gone.

Then you hear that familiar jingle.
You slide your hand into your pocket.
Tada!

Your keys were right under your nose the whole time.
Chances are your e–book is sitting right under your nose, too!
If you’ve been writing articles and other forms of content for even a short while, you probably have untapped content just waiting to be repurposed into an e-book that is unique, valuable and shareable.

Repurposing content is simply taking existing content and using it in another way.

If you have a few published articles (or even a few rough drafts), you can repurpose them into an e-book for your customers, prospects, blog readers and other potential subscribers. But how?

How do you create a free e-book?
Once you realize how simple it is to create an e-book, you’ll wish you’d have published one sooner. It takes only four simple steps:

1. Discover a common theme.
2. Write an introduction.
3. Hire a professional proofreader.
4. Create a cover page.

1) Discover a common theme.
Go through your existing articles and find three, four or five articles with a common theme. You’ll probably find that a few topics naturally pertain to your area of expertise.

If you have three to five articles, you’re in great shape. The articles may be used “as is” or you may need to finesse the intro’s and outro’s  to flow seamlessly. If you have more than five articles, you can publish them; however, you should think about choosing the top five that best fit your theme.

2) Write an introduction.
Once you’ve found a theme and compiled the articles, it’s time to write an introduction. It doesn’t matter if it’s short or long, just remember to include why you published your e-book in the first place. Think of the introduction as your back story: Use it to take the reader behind the scenes of the creation of your e-book.

In addition, you can choose to end your introduction with a call to action for the reader.

3) Hire a professional proofreader.
Now that you’ve assembled your e-book into one document, it’s time to have it proofread. Proofreading catches common grammatical mistakes and ensures that the multiple articles flow together smoothly to form one cohesive e-book.

Your best bet is to have a professional read your e-book. Take your pick from the many professional proofreading services offered online. The many benefits you’ll receive by hiring a professional proofreading service far outweigh its small cost.

If you’d rather not use a professional proofreading service, ask a friend or colleague to proofread your e-book.

The bottom line is that another set of eyes needs to check your work. You may be surprised by what those eyes find!

4) Create a cover page.
If you want to spice up your e-book, add a cover page. If you’re a Mac user, Pages offers several creative solutions for a cover page. If you’re a PC user or prefer Microsoft Word, a few neat options in Word can help you create a cover page. In the Word toolbar, click “Insert,” select “Document Elements” and choose “Cover Page.” You’ll see several templates to choose from to get you started.

Once you’re done, save the file as a PDF.

What if you can’t find a common theme among your articles?
You might struggle to find something that your articles have in common. What if there just doesn’t seem to be one idea that ties your articles together?

Try this: Create a “toolbox” of solutions that solves a variety of common challenges by grouping them under one “roof.”

I ran into this problem when I published my e-book “5 (Ridiculously Simple) Ways to Write Faster, Better, Easier.”

I had written five articles loosely related to improving one’s writing skills, but they didn’t solve just one problem; they provided five solutions to three different problems. What to do? I created a “toolbox,” or a mini-manual, for solving different writing challenges and put it under one “roof.” Problem solved.

Summary
Writing a free e-book for your audience is a lot easier than you think. You don’t have to start from scratch. Review your articles (or potential ideas and drafts) to see what interesting content you can offer your audience.

With a little creative digging, you just might find your next e-book sitting right under your nose!

What are your thoughts?

• Share with us your tips on how you created an e-book.
• What resources did you use to streamline the production process?
• Did you start from scratch or did you pull together existing content?
• What would you do differently from the first time?

We’d love to know what’s working for you.

To learn more about what makes readers actually click through, Outbrain, a content discovery platform serving content recommendations on top publisher sites, looked through data on 150,000 article headlines or titles that were recommended across our platform. The purpose of this research was to offer content publishers and marketers insight into headline characteristics that get the desired click-through. Here are our findings.

Length matters

A title with eight words performed best. These titles received a 21% higher click-through rate than average.

Pics get clicks

Outbrain’s data analysis showed readers are attracted to content with images. Thumbnails worked better than logos and increased click-through rates by 27%.

Lists with a twist

Lists and photo galleries typically drive more page views, but they get more click-thorughs as well. Headlines that contained odd numbers had a 20% higher click-through rate than headlines with even numbers.

Going deeper

A colon or hyphen in the title — indicating a subtitle — performed 9% better than headlines without.

Questions work

Titles that ended  with a question mark had a higher click-through rate than those that ended with exclamation marks or periods. If you really feel the urge to use an exclamation mark, our studies have shown that three (!!!) received almost twice as many clicks as all other punctuation marks.

I hope these simple tweaks will help your headlines really click with your readers. After all, they worked on you didn’t it? (Odd number…eight words… sound familiar?)

What are your thoughts? Tell us what types of headlines grab your attention and why?

First up: eBooks. If you are new to eBooks, here’s a quick definition from the Content Marketing Playbook (which, coincidentally, is a great example of an eBook):

Think of it as a white paper on steroids (the sexy white paper): a report, generally 12 – 40 or more pages in length, that presents complex information in a visually attractive, reader-friendly format. The content is both informative and entertaining; the tone, collegial; the format, “chunky” rather than linear, to facilitate skimming and scanning.

Here, Doug Kessler shares two of his favorite examples.

B2B Marketing Manifesto

I don’t want to over-plug, but our B2B Marketing Manifesto exceeded all our expectations this year.

It’s a 48-pager on the new challenges of B2B marketing and the things we all need to get good at.

Four reasons I think it worked for us:

• It presented the right messages for the market at the time
• Strong design really ‘sold’ the content
• A bit of attitude and energy made it fun to read
• The generosity of some top influencers in the market who gave us great reviews, linked to us and tweeted with intent

The fourth of these is by far the most important — but I guess we wouldn’t have earned that without the first three.

It didn’t hurt that the eBook title included a good search keyphrase for us (B2B Marketing), so backlinks tended to include valuable anchor text.

Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring

Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring is another winner (Velocity helped with sub-editing and design).

It’s so effective because it draws on Marketo’s real expertise. No one knows more than these guys about lead scoring, and they really rolled up their sleeves and shared their ‘chops’ with the market. At a time when content is getting shorter and shorter, a ‘definitive guide’ can be exactly right.

More examples

Looking for more examples? Here are some of my favorites, which I recently wrote about at Savvy B2B Marketing when my “Savvy Sisters” and I shared our favorite eBooks:

• B2B Blogging eBook: Basics, Best Practices and Blunders (MLT Creative)
• The eBook eBook (Jonathan Kranz)
• B2B Email Marketing Best Practices (Proteus B2B Marketing)
• The Content Marketing Workbook (Velocity Partners)
• What Matters Now (Seth Godin)

You can also check out this CMI post from David Meerman Scott that covers essential characteristics of eBooks and provides a sample of each.

We’d love to get your thoughts. What other examples would you add to the list? Share them in the comments below.