See What Happens When You Turn Your Best Blog Posts into a Book

It’s possible that you’ve been blogging and blogging, without knowing why. Maybe writing is fun for you. Maybe you’re pouring your heart out and treat your blog like a journal. Or perhaps you enjoy the silence. In any case, you could decide to have a bigger purpose for your blogging and turn your best blog posts into a book.

That’s right–a book!

In case you didn’t know, writing and publishing a book is now easier than ever. You can turn to YouTube University (I made that up, so don’t go looking for it, literal friends) and find out a lot about how easy it is. But I’ll give you an outline you can use right here, to give you a headstart. If you’d like to read a good book about blogging, might I suggest friend Randy Clark’s book How to Stay Ahead of Your Business Blog Forever?

Here’s an example

Before I was a social media marketer, I helped people organize their lives and their spaces. This was before Marie Kondo came along, by the way. Anyway, let’s use organizing as an example. Could you write ten blog posts about organizing? Of course you could! I mean, if I could, then you could, too! And people love to hear about how to organize their lives.

Ten blog posts = ten chapters

Here are ten possible chapters for our imaginary organizing book:

1. Entryway
2. Bathroom
3. Bedroom
4. Kitchen
5. Garage
6. Living room
7. Deck/patio
8. Paperwork
9. Photos
10. Digital organizing.

You could add an intro and a follow-up chapter, too. And maybe talk about psychological barriers to organizing, or whatever your heart desires.

Beef up the titles

Now, go back and tweak the titles, making them juicier and more specific. For instance, kitchen could become Finding Space for All Your Cooking Supplies in Your Kitchen. Use your imagination. Also, what would you like to read about? What would you like to write about? Realize that you’ll also learn some things while writing this or any book. So if you decide what you want to learn about, you could write about that.

Look for inspiration

There’s inspiration everywhere. For instance, I just found a fun video about organizing that talked about unpopular organizing ideas. The woman was funny and talked about popular organizing ideas that she hated. Could you do that? Sure you could! Those hangers that give you more space, for instance. She talked about how inefficient those are. And how cheap the Dollar Tree organizing products are, and how they create food deserts. Here are some ideas for finding content ideas for your social media.

Write two sentences about each title

Stay with me here. Start with a general idea and then get more specific. For instance, for the kitchen, you could say Your first step will be to remove everything from your cabinets. And Don’t be afraid. After all, everything will return to those cabinets (except for the things you don’t want to keep, that is). Now go onto each of the other nine chapters, and write two sentences for each of them. Then write two more, and so on.

Make a bigger plan

The idea is to get going, have a bigger plan, and to use your writing in more than one place. As you know, repurposing your social media posts is one of my favorite things to do. In fact, here’s a link to Repurposing Your Social Media Content is the Ultimate Time Saver. More on writing a book next week!