I’m going to show you a really simple and quick way to convert your blog post into a PDF document. But first let me tell you why it can be a good thing to do.
Your blog as a content upgrade
A content upgrade is a type of lead magnet whereby you provide something of value to your audience in exchange for their email address. A content upgrade is directly related to a piece of content and it offers some kind of extra bonus.
There are lots of different types of content upgrades, one idea is to offer your blog post as a PDF for download.
Why would somebody want a PDF version of your blog post? Well…you’d actually be surprised, many people will find that really useful.
For example, some people may have found your post really interesting and want to print it out, which is a lot easier if they can download a PDF document and print that. They might just like to save PDFs as opposed to bookmark your page. Or, they may want to email it to somebody who they think might find it useful.
More ways for you to share your post
A PDF of your blog post is not only useful as a content upgrade, it can also be useful for you to be able to share your post in more ways than one. Not everyone will go to your site and see it.
You could email the PDF version of your blog post to your subscribers, or you might be able to collaborate with someone relevant to your business who will email the PDF of your blog post out to their subscribers.
A client of mine shares his blog post as a PDF when he’s meeting with new potential clients. He emails them his articles, and asks them to have a read of them to understand his business a little bit more. This is proving to be a really successful method for him — his potential new clients enjoy receiving the PDF, they print it off, and it sparks interesting discussions when he meets with them…which in turn has led to sales.
Share your PDF in different locations and improve your SEO
Another great reason for having a PDF version of your blog posts is that you can share your PDF on document sharing sites. For example, you can put it on SlideShare.
PDF documents can be read by search engines and they rank in search results. What is also great is that your PDF can have clickable links in it, leading back to your website. This is all good news for SEO.
Of course, you can also share your PDF on social media as well.
It’s all about reaching more people, in different places and in different ways.
How do you convert your blog post into a PDF?
Maybe I’ve convinced you, but it sounds quite time consuming doesn’t it? Well it really isn’t because there is a brilliant free site/tool called printfriendly.com that enables you to convert your blog post to a PDF in a minute.
Here is a short video of me showing you just how easy it is.
In a nutshell, you go to printfriendly.com, and you just put in the URL of the blog post that you want to turn into PDF and it generates a PDF for you. It brings over some formatting, links, and images, but it also gives you the opportunity to make changes too (e.g. there might be some images that you want to remove). It looks nice and isn’t anything like a screenshot of your blog post page — e.g. the sidebar isn’t included. When you are happy you just hit download et voila. Or, you can email it or print it.
It gets even better because they also have this free browser extension. With that, you don’t even have to go to the printfriendly.com website.
TIP: If you’re going share your PDF on document sharing sites like SlideShare, then you might want to just slightly change your post before generating the PDF to include a little bit about you, who you are and have links back to your website.
In Conclusion
It’s really simple to repurpose your blog post into a PDF. There are some really good reasons why you might consider doing this — why not give them a go — offer your PDF as a content upgrade and why not upload to a few different places online as well as your own site.
Thanks for reading!
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Originally published at www.content10x.com.
