Your ebook has finally hit the digital shelves, and now you’ve entered into the never-ending process of promoting it. One of the best ways to get the word out about your ebook is to publish “teaser articles,” or guest posts on relevant industry blogs, that introduce your ebook.
Writing a teaser article for your ebook isn’t as straightforward as you might think. It’s a new breed of a blog post, somewhere between promotional and informative, and needs to be crafted with care.
1. Begin by identifying where your audience hangs out – do they read Inc.com or are they more of a TechCrunch crowd? If your ebook reaches both types of audiences, identify different angles for each that are highly tailored to the blog and niche-specific. To weed out unqualified blogs, research your prospects based on traffic, page rank, engagement, and social presence. If you’re promoting the ebook before it’s published, you may even consider offering exclusive sneak peeks to influencers in your industry so that a blog post can go live the day of launch.
2. Your title should be the bridge between the ebook and the site’s theme – it should be non-branded, non-promotional, and inviting to readers. Avoid dry titles like “New Ebook Discusses Roles of Cats in Technology” and lean towards more colorful titles such as “Cats: What Can Tech Gurus Learn from their Curiosity?” Remember, even though you are promoting the ebook, you still need to be aware of the conventions of the blogging medium.
In the introduction, tell the readers exactly what you’re going to tell them. Establish a claim or argument about how the facts you are going to present from the ebook are relevant to them and their industry. Don’t introduce the ebook specifically just yet – give them some time to become curious about what you have to say.
3. After the introduction, make a smooth transition to the ebook. For example, “In Cats & Company’s new ebook, How Felines are Revolutionizing Technology, they explore how these popular pets continue to teach us new lessons about the Internet.” The title of the ebook should be your anchor text for a link to the download, Don’t hide the link in a single keyword later on in the post; make sure readers can easily identify it.
The meat of the article should be full of facts, figures, and analyses that are applicable to your targeted niche. “Did you know ______?”, followed by a brief analysis of trends or facts is a great way to integrate the ebook into the post naturally. Bulleted lists are fine but don’t leave them hanging without real-life applications or key takeaways. This analysis should serve to support the claims you made in the introduction, and if they don’t, it’s time to revise your argument.
4. Stop sharing. For a teaser post to be successful, it’s essential that you not share every bit of information from the ebook. You know those movie trailers that are so intensive that you don’t even need to watch the movie anymore? Don’t spoil the content by oversharing. Grab your audience’s attention with a decent chunk of interesting information and move on with the post.
5. Finally, your conclusion should offer some sort of call-to-action: perhaps another invitation to download the ebook? Make sure the anchor text includes the CTA (a phrase such as “Download the complete version of How Felines are Revolutionizing Technology” works).
Ultimately, teaser articles should include just enough that your readers want more, but not too much as to spoil your full ebook. Finding that balance will be the most difficult part of writing your teaser article, so run it by colleagues before submitting it to the editor or blog administrator.
Don’t forget the rest of the best practices for writing successful blog posts! Download our Blog Post Optimization Guide and start moving forward with successful promotion.
