Own Your Niche by Becoming An Author — How To Blog A Book

[Guest blog post by Nina Amir]: An enormous amount of content comes across the transom of social networks like Facebook. We share business and personal information, news, entertainment, inspiration, and a whole host of things in between. And we do this for a variety of reasons depending upon our goals. Those of us who engage in relationship marketing for business, however, want to attract potential customers and clients.

Call them friends, followers, tweeple, pinners, or a tribe, it’s all the same. We want our presence on social networks to work like a beacon shining into the darkness and guiding people to our pages on social networks and, ultimately, to our websites. Eventually, we also want the people who connect to us to purchase something from us. For that to happen, though, we first have to have something to say to these people. Actually, we have to have something worth reading.

It’s the words we write on these social networks that make people want to connect with us—to like our pages, subscribe to our updates, or follow us. And it’s by reading our status updates and the links we offer that they begin to trust and like us—and that’s why they buy our products and services.

Many relationship marketers don’t realize they are leaving one important potential product untouched—one they may have created already or could create as they continue their networking activities. It’s a product that also will enhance their trust factor and expert status. What is it? A book.

Stop and consider all the content you produce. It could be repurposed into a book, or, better yet, you could be writing that content as you network with the end goal of producing a book.

Blogging a Book or Booking a Blog

Consider, for example, your blog. Most relationship marketers have one. If you are like most business people, your blog serves as the cornerstone of your social media activities. Not only can you repurpose your old blog posts into a book, or “book your blog,” you can create a content plan and actually “blog a book,” a much more effective plan and use of your time. When you are done, you will have something else to sell to your loyal fan base and one more way to prove your expertise.

Blogging a book is easy to do. Simply choose a topic to blog about that supports your business or that your fans ask you about often, create a content plan, and break that content plan into chapters. Then chunk down the chapters into blog-post-sized bits—250-500-word pieces. Write these post-sized bits in a word processing document first, and then copy and paste them into your blogging program 2-7 times per week and publish them. In this way you create a manuscript as you publish the blog posts. You can later edit and revise this manuscript before you actually turn it into a published book.

Repurposing Status Updates Into a Book

Your constant flow of Facebook (or Google Plus) status updates probably spark comments and questions from your followers. These can be repurposed into a series of blog posts that could become the foundation of a tip book, which you could give away to build your mailing list. If you are a member of a Facebook or LinkedIn group, the answers you provide to questions in these forums can be used in the same manner.

Go back through your Facebook timeline, your Google Plus pages or your LinkedIn groups and look for questions and comments worthy of addressing. Also look for comments you’ve already added in answer to questions. Create the content plan for a short book based on the most common questions you see or answer, and begin writing a blog series. Then follow the steps above to blog a short manuscript you can produce as an ebook or even a printed book.

Own Your Niche by Becoming an Author

Look around at the people you admire or who are most successful. I bet you will discover that most of them have authored a book. You, too, can become an author, which will make you a relationship marketer with a broader reach. It’s not as hard as you think or as big an undertaking. In fact, if you blog a book you can do it quickly and easily and end up owning your niche. The content you produce on the Internet and share across your social networks will drive your blog up in the search engine results pages, and before you know it you’ll have #1 Google ranking and more friends and followers than before.

About the Author

Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose.

The author of How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), Nina has also self-published 10 short books, including the How to Evaluate Your Book for Success and 10 Days and 10 Ways to Your Best Self. A sought after editor, proposal consultant, book and author coach, and blog-to-book coach, Nina’s clients’ books have sold upwards of 230,000 copies and landed deals with top publishers. The founder of Write Nonfiction in November, she writes four blogs, including Write Nonfiction NOW!, How to Blog a Book and As the Spirit Moves Me, and appears weekly on the Dresser After Dark radio show.

Follow @NinaAmir

Readers, share with us below your ideas for blogging your book! We’d love to hear from you.

Mari Smith

Often referred to as “the Queen of Facebook,” Mari Smith is widely known as the Premier Facebook Marketing Expert and a top Social Media Thought Leader. Forbes describes Mari as, “… the preeminent Facebook expert. Even Facebook asks for her help.” IBM named Mari as one of seven women that are shaping digital marketing. Mari is an in-demand keynote speaker, corporate social media strategist, dynamic live webcast host, and popular brand ambassador. She is coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, and author of The New Relationship Marketing.

More Posts - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn