This week's Content Marketing Tech Tool of the Week involves a great method to keep your skills sharp, and to keep yourself up-to-date of what's going on in content marketing and in your industry. Meet the Amazon Kindle. Amazon just released its new tablet, the Kindle Fire, and both would make an excellent tool to improve your content marketing and business blogging.
Amazon Kindle is this week's Tech Tool of the Week because it is one of the easiest ways to keep your mind fresh while staying up-to-date with industry leaders. True, those things can still be accomplished with news articles and blog posts, but an e-book offers several benefits that a blog or an online publication may not.
First, an e-book can go much more into depth on specific topics, much more so than a blog post or article. For example, one of the books that I bought on the Kindle was How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit: Your Guide to Writing and Publishing Books, E-Books, Articles, Special Reports, Audio Programs, DVDs, and Other How-To Content, by Robert Bly. Yes, it's a lengthy title, and a fairly lengthy book. But, imagine a how-to article or blog post on how to write how-to content. It couldn't nearly provide the same depth and instruction as this book did. Bly was able to provide examples of good how-to content versus bad how-to content. The author was able to go into different genres of writing all in one place, instead of having to break it up into a series like you would have to in a blog or online publication. In a very nicely packaged e-book, Bly explained how to very nicely package information meant to show someone how to do something. Very hard to do in a blog or online publication.
Second, an e-book can offer insight from an industry leader that you might not be able to find in a blog or on a company website. A good example is a book by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (New Rules Social Media Series). Shah and Halligan are both with Hubspot, an inbound marketing software firm. Sure, Hubspot also publishes a lot of white papers and case studies, but you wouldn't get any specific insight from Shah and Halligan like you can in their e-book. I'm currently reading the book now and it shows you the basics of inbound marketing, something that could be used as a way to reinforce what you can do with the Hubspot software. The book also offers a new perspective on marketing, and new perspectives are increasingly hard to get as search engines tend to give us what we like, which may not necessarily be a new perspective.
Third, e-books sometimes come with free goodies. Ann Handley's Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series) did just that. Those that purchased the e-book were provided with links at the end to free blog templates and content planning worksheets. It's a great launching pad for the reader to apply what he or she has learned in the book while adding an extra incentive for folks to get the e-book instead of simply reading blog posts.
How has your Kindle helped you in your career or daily life? What other benefits of e-books do you see?