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Mike Consol shares an excellent strategy for planning your blog content in order to create an e-book in the future.

This is exactly what I did here with my series on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (link to e-book)

Let’s take a look at Consol’s advice, then I will walk you through the steps I took to create the 7H e-book that has been downloaded more than 5,000 times!

The e-book strategy to blogging success – mikeconsol’s posterous

One method for accomplishing long-range planning and a logical progression of the information your blog writes about is something I call the “e-book strategy to blogging.”

Here’s how it works. You outline an entire e-book on the subject you plan to blog about. Any good book is organized to gradually increase the reader’s understanding of its topic.

Write the table of contents. Then write the component parts of each chapter. Each component part represents an individual blog post. When you have completed all the blog posts that comprise the book, you simply republish the accumulated copy in the form of an e-book.

All that’s required is assembling the blog posts you’ve written and then organizing them into chapters – which you outlined at the start of this process. Format the pages so they look attractive and readable and convert it into a PDF file. Voila! You’re ready to market your e-book.

E-books are normally shorter than paper books, with a range of 80-120 pages, and usually free of charge and used to demonstrate competence in the author’s area of expertise. They are often used as an inducement to subscribe to a blog or newsletter, or register for a website, webinar, conference, etc. Or, you could always charge a small fee and sell the fruits of your labor.

This is an excellent way for a small business to create a passive revenue stream, as well as great content for your blog. The blog posts themselves are a way of building credibility and authority in your field (more)

When tied together in an e-book, they make an excellent resource for you customers. You can give this e-book to your clients that purchase some of your products or services as a value-added bonus (see what Seth Godin did w/ Linchpin).

Turning Blog Posts into an E-book

The first thing that I did was answer a few questions that came to me via email from readers that were interested in knowing my thoughts on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They had read (or tried to read) the book and had trouble. They had trouble because the book is a little bit difficult to apply, because the stories and anecdotes did not fit with their personal situations.

Soon this became part of my FAQ series (at my old blog), because so many people were asking about it. So I decided to write a series of posts on how to apply each of the 7 Habits into your own daily routine. This became a pretty big job! I started out with an outline of what I wanted to say in each post, then went looking for examples and created some worksheets to help with each of the habits.

I build these worksheets into my Weekly Review and started hammering out these posts. Once the first few were ready I started scheduling them to publish and gave myself deadlines to complete the rest. The response was really powerful, people read these articles and gave me some amazing feedback. The thoughtfulness of the responses also led me to revise and refine the later posts to make them even more relevant. The work, the content, the bookmarking by my readers, and a little creative SEO work has made that series at the top of the Google search for “7 habits of highly effective people worksheet“!

At the end of the process, readers started asking if the series was available as a book, or ebook that they could download. Talk about the marketplace providing ideas for a product! This was awesome! So, I copied the posts into my handy-dandy word processor and started putting them together. I added some more examples and clarified some things in response to more reader questions. Then I sent it off to a friend of mine who does copy-editing so that she could clean it up, fix my grammar, and smooth out the spots where I am too terse.

Voila! The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context.

You can do the same thing for your own small business, by writing a series of articles that would provide value for your clients and customers. It doesn’t matter what business you are in, just brainstorm some ideas – dig into your emails from your clients. Figure out what they are asking you about most often and write open letter solutions for your blog.

Ask for feedback, even if you need to email some of your clients and ask them straight out how your solution benefited them. Then revise and refine that series of posts, collect them and connect them. Add more examples. And publish that book!

By the way, I use e-junkie to deliver all of my digital products, and they are fantastic! Click the logo to get signed up and start your own online e-commerce site!