For inbound marketing to work successfully, you need to have a process that allows you to regularly find out what questions your target market is asking. Without this crucial information, you will be ill-equipped to give your audience the answers they’re seeking because you’re not familiar with the right questions. Your answers are the valuable information that you give away in your ebook compelling offers to generate leads.
The research process is the essence of focus groups and user panels, but the Internet makes collecting input much easier than using offline channels. The first step is finding where your target audience hangs out online.
Finding Your Audience Online on Blogs and Forums
People with like interests tend to congregate in the same place, and you’re going to have to search them out using Google and other search tools. Blogs, forums, social networking groups, and niche social networks are all areas online where your target audience spends their time. Using your best online detective skills or hiring someone who has the time and energy to perform this research is the only way you will find your audience.
Getting Input from Your Target Audience
Once you’ve found your target audience, you’ll want to learn what kinds of questions they have that you can help answer. The easiest way to find out is to ask them directly. Tell them you’re putting together an ebook on a specific topic and you want to know what is the number one question they would like answered. You can collect the responses in the blog comments or forum, but it may be easier to collect the responses in an online survey like SurveyGizmo.
To help get the ball rolling with responses, promise people that you will send them a copy of your ebook with their question answered along with answers to all of the other questions you receive. After you do this in a few places, you will have enough material to create an outline for your ebook and begin the process of providing answers to all of the questions you received.
Summarizing the Ebook Process
In a nutshell, here’s what you have to do to be flooded with ideas for your next ebook compelling offer.
- Find out where you target audience congregates online
- Ask them the most important question they want answered about a specific topic that’s relevant to your business in exchange for a free ebook containing answers to their question and more
- Create an outline for your ebook using the questions you received
- Write your ebook and send copies to the people who provided you with the initial questions
Follow this process, and you will never be short on ideas for your next ebook compelling offer that your target audience is dying to read.
How do you get ideas for your ebooks?
Free Online Visibility Self-Assessment
Do you need help assessing if you’re doing all you can to maximize your business’ online visibility?
If you want to know what to look for, here is a free self-assessment that will help you review your online visibility so you have all the pieces in place to maximize getting found and contacted by your prospects.
You might also like:
