I think it was David Meerman Scott who first inspired me to think about the power of ebooks, from his experiences in 2006, when he created “New Rules of PR,” an ebook he offered on his blog. Scott says, “I expected just a few people to read it…and a few thousand people read it the very first day, 50,000 in the first month.  Anne Holland of Marketing Sherpa says it is the one of the most read business white papers in history.   The ebook was later published as a print book as well, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

In the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about content, the material which comes in all shapes and sizes which so many of us write for our work; and the countless hours we spend reading, researching, writing, editing, and last but not least, formatting. Put all the hours together and it quickly adds up.

When I came across Lee Odden’s recent post, “Green Online Marketing: 5 Ways to Repurpose  Content”, I thought yes, this is exactly the mind-set we need to take: think of content as multi-purposed, and envision all the ways it can be used.  Odden says, “Content can be repurposed or customized from one format to another or be updated to deliver value to a different distribution channel.”

5 Ways Businesses Can Repurpose content for marketing

Lee Odden offers these suggestions:
1. Turn powerpoint decks into articles/blog posts and vice versa
2. Aggregate email interviews
3. Break up a long article you’ve published
4. Repurpose press releases
5. Revise old blog posts

Then, I came across recommendations from Amanda Fazani who says the single most successful technique she has used to increase her blog’s readership has been through “the creation and free distribution of relevant ebooks.”

Fazani says, “An ebook (especially a free publication) need not be exhaustive or take months to write.”

4 Ideas for Creating ebooks from Blog Content
Amanda Fazani offers 4 examples of ideas you could use to create an ebook related to the content from your blog, in a short amount of time.

1. Collect your 10 most popular posts and repackage with a little extra commentary
2. Expand on the concept of your most popular blog post
3. Create a directory of resources which are useful for your target audience
4. Write an FAQ to answer popular questions from readers of your site

Creating ebooks
While a number of people suggest that you can create an ebook in something as simple as a wordprocessing program, there are tools which can offer a much more effective solution by bring bringing content in through rss feeds.  One such tool I came across this week, is zinepal, created by Frank Worsley, who suggests that not all blog posts will be of interest to a larger audience and that by working as an “editor” you can pull in specific posts of yours, as well as from other websites.

Zinepal brings the content in and formats it into two column pages. You can customize them with your own logos and masthead. Within minutes I created a nicely formatted ebook.  Zinepal makes the process very easy, and I highly recommend checking it out.

I had the distinct pleasure and opportunity to discuss zinepal with Frank Worsley this week, in a Q & A.

DH: How long have you been working on zinepal?

FW: I’ve been working on zinepal off and on for about a year and a half now. It took a while to figure out some technical challenges and come up with a good web design. The site has only started to get serious users in the last six months.

DH: What was your inspiration for creating the tool?

FW: I thought it would be cool to enable bloggers to create custom magazines for their communities, for example neighbourhoods, special interest groups, schools, etc. It would give the bloggers another distribution medium and at the same time provide quality content to readers. I also thought it would be a good way to reach people that only read the mainstream media with alternative content they would otherwise not see. The idea of spreading alternative content is really what I was most excited about.

DH: Have you built other web-based tools? If yes, which one(s)?

FW: I’ve built a few other web sites and web applications in the past. However, zinepal is my first serious independent web project.

DH: Who do you see as your target audience(s)?

FW: Initially I was focused on bloggers and hyper-local blogs in particular. Since then I’ve refocused on professionals that need to reach an online and offline audience. For example, realtors, financial advisors, marketers, etc. Using zinepal saves them a lot of time, since they can just write on their blog and still create a nice paper printout to give to their clients in person.

Another user group is individuals that want to consume web content in print form or on their eBook reader. While zinepal works very well for that it is not my main focus right now.

DH: You’re currently working on new features; where would you like to see zinepal in 6-9 months? What needs to happen to bring it to fruition?

FW: I’m still working on polishing the service and adding more functionality for formatting the PDFs and creating better eBooks. I plan to finish that work over the next few months. At that point I hope to have gathered a good number of satisfied professional users and continue growing the service from there.

DH: Do you have presences on social networking sites?  LinkedIn? Facebook? Other?

FW: zinepal is on Twitter.

DH: When you’re not working on zinepal, where else do you spend your time and energy?

FW: I’m generally a pretty active guy. In winter you can find me hitting the slopes around Vancouver and in summer I like to play beach volleyball.

DH: Here’s your opportunity—tell us, why should users choose zinepal?

zinepal is a real time saver when you want to distribute content both online and offline. While you previously had to create a separate paper newsletter, now you just blog and with a few clicks you get a printable PDF and eBook. Anyone that has spent time reformatting copy and pasted content in a word processor or e-mail can appreciate the huge time savings.

Thank you Frank for your contributions, and best of luck with zinepal.  And thanks go out to David Meerman Scott, who helped put ebooks on our radar screens, Lee Odden, and Amanda Fazani who help us envision the ways in which they can be used.

What are your experiences with ebooks, and how have they been received by your clients and target audiences?

photo credit: Feuillu