Instead, carefully edit each blog post again, making sure each can stand alone as a chapter and pulling them together in an order that will make sense in a book. It'd look amateurish, and ruin your chance of making your content look more professional in a book. To do so, you could just open each page in a separate tab, hit Print, export the page as a PDF, then merge them all together and you're done-but that's far from ideal. Soon enough, you'll have enough published chapters to start assembling your first eBook. With a bit of work, your blog becomes a cog in the machine, faithfully publishing the articles that your team puts through your planning, writing, and editing process. The Ultimate Guide to Forms and Surveys is the result of eight blog posts (chapters 2-8) and an original introduction (chapter 1). You've set your goals, and now it's time to write. Your book's still an idea at this point, but it's an accomplishable one. Then, you'll need to pull the topics together into a cohesive outline, give each one a deadline, and assign out the tasks you'll need to get them written. At Zapier, for example, the content that fits best in with our marketing strategy involves writing about apps that integrate with Zapier, tips on automation and coding, and information on running a remote team. Sound like an idea you'd like pursue? Before you start writing, you must identify topics worth expanding into book chapters-information that will not only be relevant to your readers but will also help your team accomplish its marketing goals, too. Planning helped us make a better book, one with over a dozen chapters that in just over a month has been read by more than 36,000 people. We then pulled our best resources together-with writing commitments from a survey expert and our on-staff statistician-and set out to make an authoritative guide to forms and surveys. With our later books-especially our recent nine-chapter The Ultimate Guide to Forms & Surveys-our marketing team of four met and outlined the content we'd like to see in the book. That's where we learned planning comes into play. It wasn't perfect, though-we had to edit articles extensively to turn them into book chapters, and didn't have as much unique content as we'd have liked. Our first Ultimate Guide eBook, The Ultimate Guide to CRM Apps For our first blog-powered eBook, The Ultimate Guide to CRM Apps, that's just what we did: we pulled together a meager four blog posts and turned them into a book. We have an active blog with new articles every week, plenty of which are in-depth enough to stand alone as book chapters. ![]() But the authority and new distribution channels a book brings makes it hard to rule out. Writing a book is too much work for less concrete results. It's easy, requiring only a few hundred words and perhaps a few images, and is a reliable way to generate traffic. ![]() That's why blogging is such a popular marketing medium. But it's incredibly tough to find the time to research, write, and edit, and then turn all that into a book. That's the typical way to write a book, and it works. You could set out to write a book, jotting down words page by page until you have enough content to publish on its own. Five Steps to Self-Publish Your First eBook Here are 10 of the best tips we've learned about how to effectively write and self-publish eBooks, so you can promote your content and grow your audience organically. These books have been downloaded more than 15,000 times, have helped us gain more than 10,000 new email subscribers and grow our Learning Center from around 10,000 pageviews per month in July 2014 to more than 100,000 page views in July 2015-and our books in the Kindle and iBooks stores have on average brought in over a dozen new readers per day.īooks work. Over the past year, the Zapier team has on average published one book every 90 days. Books must extensively cover a topic and typically include over 10,000 words, two tasks that take considerable time to complete. Publishing a book-in this case an eBook-is perhaps the most extreme content marketing idea possible. You could plan an entire series of related content, get each post ranked high for its own keywords and shared for its own benefits-and then turn all that content into a book. Or, you could do more than just write a blog post. ![]() With a bit of luck, your article is the buzz of the week day-and that's about it. The best you can hope for is a spurt of interest when it's published, viral traffic as it hits social networks and gets quoted on other sites, then long-tail traffic as Google starts ranking your article for relevant keywords. Author the shortest and sweetest post-or the longest longform-and it's still only one post. It's not enough to write compelling content.
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