This is how to create a 154-page e-book in 4 hours [Roadmap].

Disclaimer: I obviously did not write all the pages in 4 hours. The content in the e-book is based on existing content.

What is an e-book and what do we use it for?

An e-book is nothing but a kind of digital book. A kind of electronic version of a paper book, in other words.

This does not mean that an e-book should have 100+ pages, contain few images and focus primarily on the text.

Quite the contrary, in fact. E-books should be visually appealing. To the point. And you may already call it an e-book if it has a few pages.

We now have two e-books and are working on number three. Besides using e-books in our email marketing, marketing automation and lead generation, there are a number of other reasons why we write e-books:

• Everything is about providing value. Especially in the online marketing world. The more value you can offer, the better.
• In online marketing, knowledge is everything. Knowledge can be shared in the form of blogs, in the form of case studies, as well as in the form of e-books.
• From moment one, we want to position ourselves as the best in the market. If you write an e-book with so much value and so much free information, people are naturally going to see you as an expert.
• Practice what you preach. For some of our clients, we recommend writing an e-book for their lead generation. Then you have to make sure you have this in place yourself.

There are other minor reasons why we use e-books, but these were the main ones. Now that you, if all goes well, see the value of an e-book, it's high time to tell you how we created a 154-page e-book in 4 hours.

Step-by-step plan for creating your (first) e-book

We have arrived at the roadmap. In these 5 steps, we created our first e-book of over 22,000 words in 4 hours.

Step 1: make sure you already have a lot of content

I've said it before and I'm going to say it again: everything is about content.

Yes, read it again: everything is about content. An awful lot of companies could base their entire marketing on content.

Think blogs, case studies, landing pages, e-book, social media posts and more. Start working on this from day one.

When we had just started Online Marketing Agency (OMA), we blogged once a month. When we saw that this generated more visitors, more clients and more comments, the choice was easy: we needed to blog even more.

First twice a month and then once a week.

By now, we have been blogging twice a week for almost three quarters of a year and as a result, we are often called crazy. My response: how would you like it if you could run your business on writing two blogs a week?

Yes, then everyone says, "I want that too.

In fact, all that content you've already written will come in handy with your e-book (and when creating other content). If you already have a giant bucket of information, then creating new content is super easy.

In fact, you are then sitting on a kind of gold mine that you can use whenever you want.

Step 2: bundle the content you have

There are now 154 blogs on the Online Marketing Agency website(abbreviation OMA). When I wrote my first e-book, there were about 115.

At the time I started the e-book, I first looked at what I already owned and could use at the time.

I came up with the idea of giving concrete SEO tips in my first e-book.

And as it turned out, among all those 115 blogs, there were already an awful lot of those SEO tips.

So what did I do? Picked the SEO related tips (these were 24 to be exact) among my blogs and used them as the basis for my e-book.

I simply removed the introduction and conclusion of each tip and copied and pasted the rest into a Word file.

This took me about an hour and my e-book already consisted of 24 valuable tips, over a hundred pages and over 16,000 words.

Purely and simply because I have always written a lot of content. Nothing more and nothing less.

People often forget that you can reuse already written content very easily. Especially when you are not going to put it on your website (because of duplicate content).

This is why I often say that writing blogs is so important because it brings you an awful lot.

Step 3: get your e-book edited

Once you have all the information from your blogs listed (and any new information written and added), it is time to get your e-book ready to go to a designer.

You can, of course, do this yourself. You can go read the whole e-book and pick out all the mistakes, but I chose not to do that myself. I had already written all the content myself, so didn't feel much like reading it again.

In addition, I wanted to make it a sport to complete this e-book with as little effort as possible from my side. Unfortunately, our copywriter Pelle was up to his ears in work and I had to find another way.

Through freelancer.com I came across a lady who did this work more often. Preparing and editing a Word document so it could go to a designer was one of her products.

We paid about €150 for that, just off the top of my head. And for that amount you can't do it yourself.

Step 4: get your plain text turned into a cool design

During my studies, I had to work with PhotoShop, InDesign and Illustrator. So I knew how much work it was to turn this into a cool design. In addition, I also have some self-knowledge and know that I don't like doing something like this myself and know that others can do it much more effectively than me.

So again, my question was: how can I get this done with the least amount of effort?

Soon I ended up back at Fiverr. A kind of marketplace for service providers/creators.

I already outsource illustrations for my blogs here, for example, but I had never had my e-book created before.

I went within Fiverr looking for e-book designer and was inundated with potential candidates. So then I quickly went back to a blog I wrote earlier called "10 tips for a successful Fiverr adventure" and quickly came across an affordable and good designer.

In the end, again, I paid about €150 to have my e-book completely designed. Again, for that money I really couldn't do it myself.

Step 5 (bonus): promote, advertise and share it with the rest of the world

Basically, your e-book is now finished and you were able to do it in a few hours. In my case, it was four hours because I added some SEO tips.

Once your e-book is finished, it's up to you to start distributing it. Share it with your clients, your friends and, if necessary, have a physical version made of it.

Send it to the people on your newsletter list, create a Facebook ad, promote it on LinkedIn and get people to read your e-book.

Because that's what it's for ;).