From Blog to Book: Everything You Need to Know
Repurposing is a buzzword in the online marketing and online business world these days. Create something once and use it over and over again. Makes sense, right? Bloggers often ask me if there’s any way to repurpose content from a blog into a book — and if so, how to do so. The short answer is YES! Chances are, you won’t have everything you need in blog post form, but I bet you’ll be surprised by how much you DO have once you take inventory. Here are some ideas to get the wheels turning.
Structure: Apples to Oranges?
If you think of a longer blog post — maybe one of your capstone blogs, for example — the title of the post might be the general idea/subject area for your book. The subheads, then, could be translated into chapter titles. If you have a section with bullet points, perhaps each of those bullet points becomes a section title within a book chapter. I’m not suggesting you won’t have to expand on points and add text (unless you’re writing blog posts that are tens of thousands of words in length, which I truly hope you aren’t doing!), but you should be able to create a fairly complete framework for your book based on blog content. Then it’s more a matter of filling in than creating entirely new content. Does anything in your content vault come to mind?
Blog Categories
Another idea is to base a book outline on one of the categories you regularly blog about. Your blog probably has at least three or four categories, yes? Select one, and review all the posts you have. Copy and paste the titles into a blank Google Doc or into Evernote or Trello and then see what you have. Just like when you do a traditional brain dump, you should see rough groupings that might form book chapters.
Base a book outline on one of the categories you regularly blog about. - @jodibrandon
Quick Check
Ask yourself these four questions when you think you’ve found a piece of content to repurpose:
Can I expand on this and make additional points supporting my assertion/statement?
Can I pull out one aspect of this point to do a deep-dive on?
Can I apply this point to a different audience?
Is there enough material to write follow-up content, or have I covered everything? (Spoiler alert: You haven’t covered everything!)
If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you can probably repurpose whatever that piece of content is into a part of a book. If you answered yes to several of the questions, even better!
Spoiler alert: You haven’t covered everything! - @jodibrandon
Want more info? Check out this video.