 I'm here to tell you guys that those individual blog posts while engaging and hopefully great traffic drivers of their own can be turned into not only a thing that makes you say at parties I'm an author and something that you can also use to market whatever you are blogging about. I'm not on the screen I'm not on the screen technical difficulties. Well anyway so I can at least talk to you without my slides up there. So basically what I do for a living is I write content for my clients and eventually we end up doing a lot of similar content. A lot of our clients are attorneys personal injury divorce things like that and you end up writing very similar topics as individual blog posts. We got to thinking wow these could actually be turned into chapters of an e-book and so that's what my company started doing. We started taking our clients pre-written content and repurposing it into an e-book. That's not to say that we just publish a bunch of blog posts as an e-book because not only does that not have as much value as a full-on new e-book but that's also not giving our clients a lot of value. So what we do is we take very well performing blog posts on their site and we'd say okay we'd organize them in a very logical format such as if you got into a car accident here's seven steps to take after a car accident you know call the police get your injuries treated document all of your medical expenses and whatnot call an attorney call your insurance company so on and so forth. We would flesh out their blogs that we've already written and rewrite them maybe update some statistics if we use car crash statistics or if legislation changed about the local insurance laws we would update everything and then we would make it into a digestible format. Our e-books usually run somewhere between 20 and 30 pages could be a little longer if we throw in some images or some graphics but it's to say that you don't need to write Lord of the Rings again and have you know hundreds of pages in this e-book if you want to go that gung-ho I'm not going to stop you but is this autoplaying now I don't want you to autoplay stop no okay well actually that brings me up to speed here so let's pause and go back one there we go um so like I said you look for well-performing blog posts and in this case this would be your content audit you can do this very easily in both WordPress itself as you can see the top posts and pages here your views or you can do it through Google Analytics by going into your behavior and seeing your um pages in your content so talk to your analytics person if someone else handles your web traffic or if you use there's a ton of plugins that do that as well I'm not here to talk about that um but basically find what's working for you and utilize that as your momentum to start your e-book the next step is to organize your e-book as I was saying before if you have a step-by-step thing like if you have a cooking blog uh you might want to do step-by-steps for how to repurpose garbage left over from making a dish so like when I do a chicken I always butcher a whole chicken and I always have like wing tips and the backbone and whatnot I save that and I make soup stock so you would do you know different steps for things like that if you're a car nut and you like to do tutorials on how to replace an engine you could do step-by-step on how to replace an engine in some kind of car um so you want to organize logically in that case if you're doing step-by-steps or if you just have blogs about the same kind of general topic like if you talk a lot about um like I'm from Orlando so we do the disney parks if you talk a lot about how you have a child with a peanut allergy and you're always saying oh well we don't only you know this restaurant because they're all you know peanut allergy friendly you could do an entire blog about where the best places are for people with allergies to eat in the disney parks um don't be afraid to add extra chapters too when it helps the flow of your book so if you haven't blogged about something yet but you have three other blogs about that topic make that fourth blog into part of your e-book and then a marketing point there is you can market extra content not found on my blog already that's something that's always a good enticing thing when you're trying to actually sell a book because no one wants to buy a book of blogs that can already read on the internet but if you add in extra content that's fresh in the book that's a better sell then you write like I said before you can just copy your blog post as the e-book chapters people have done that before it does work but you want to always give your reader something of extra value because that shows you're invested in what you're giving is more than just trying to get another buck out of it um as I said before 20 to 30 pages don't try to write a novel you can even be as short as 10 pages if you're giving substantial information you don't just want words on paper you always want to enhance I always design a cover for my e-book because if you end up in someone like amazon marketplace on the kindle marketplace or um on iphones uh books uh newsstand and whatnot you have a cover and I'm sure all of you have seen like the 99 cent or the free ones that just have like text on white and or maybe some really bad graphic put a little thought into it you can even go on fiverr.com and say hey someone designed me an e-book cover I wrote a book about making soup stock so you know just a picture of a pot and some nice text and bam you're done um you can add images within the content to provide natural pauses and breaks so it's not just wall after wall of text especially if it's images that are from your own experiences so if you blog a lot about personal stuff use your own photos because not only do you not have to pay for stock images or worry about copyrights but that's also just giving a better connection to what you're doing adding video and e-books is possible will it actually animate no but you can do hyperlinks and qr codes that will link to your youtube videos that also drives traffic to your youtube page if you have a youtube page then you publish most e-book reading platforms love pdfs so does everyone's personal computer your cell phone pretty much any digital device can read a pdf so that is the easiest and stressless format that you can publish to if you want to get on i-books kindle or nook um you can learn how to format them just honestly just google it uh those are links that um I assume our slides are going to be available publicly so you'll be able to click through them but like i-books if you actually search apple's service database they'll tell you how to do it in their thing um nook is a little harder to find actual instructions on so but that's because they have their whole proprietary format and then marketing uh not to say that you really have to market your e-book you could just put it on your own site and say hey look if you like my blog you can read it all right here in this nice little neat book I would always start by offering your book for free we do that for our attorney clients where we say hey download our free guide to what to do after a car crash because that's giving their potential clients valuable information and then at the end it's basically a marketing ploy that says reach out to me for more information because this isn't actually legal advice this is more common sense advice and if you really want legal advice obviously I can't give it to you for free so call me schedule an appointment and we'll talk always write a blog post to announce your new e-book because the cycle of life blogs turn into e-books e-books turn into blogs and so on and so forth plus that's also something that people can pick up and re-sindicate for you so on and so forth um adding a widget to your homepage that shows off your awesome books is a great idea because it's always right there front and center I've got a free e-book so someone goes to your blog and they're like oh yeah she's a blogger oh she's got an e-book whoa we got it we got a publisher here you know we got an author um you can now promote yourself as an author because you have published an actual e-book and you can also distribute it using some great um wordpress plugins easy digital downloads is my personal favorite they make selling any kind of digital content whether it be a theme or um a pdf of instructions super easy they integrate with like everything I love them beyond your book you're now a published author people have downloaded your book presumably when they download your book you will ask them for like their name in their email address because that's just good practice when you're offering something as a download you now have their email addresses you can start an automation follow-up sequence with MailChimp or some other email platform but I love MailChimp because they have the cutest mascots and they sponsor word camps so yay um and I'm not affiliated with any of these companies by the way I just have love uh so automation uh if you are selling any kind of product like if you run a cooking blog and you have your own line of secret spice that you sell you can use that to say hey you downloaded my e-book on recipes for making soup stock so now buy my you know spice mix or whatever uh you can also start an automation sequence to let them know about new blog posts that you have or if you have a speaking engagement coming up at a word camp something like that um you also have the opportunity to just start a newsletter which would integrate them into getting your blog posts on a regular basis so some final thoughts um if you're looking to increase blog exposure definitely start out with the free e-book and then you can eventually put it up for sale once it gains some momentum um you can use your email list to your advantage for newsletters social networking etc but don't forget to include an opt out always you know you're selling them a product or giving them the free product and let them opt out because that's just good practice and release revised editions is necessary if you included statistics or whatever don't feel bad about putting out a version two when you have something new because then you're gaining a cult following uh so if you have any questions about e-books and whatnot find me out in the hallways I'll be here the rest of the weekend and I hope you have a great rest of the word camp