How to turn your blog posts into ebooks and make money from your content

It’s more and more common for people to buy ebooks instead of the physical copy and this creates a great opportunity for writers and also for bloggers.

Here’s an example, best-selling authors, such as Malcolm Gladwell (What the Dog Saw) and Seth Godin (Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas) have already started compiling their best articles and turning them into ebooks (and also physical books) thus, being able to make money from content that had already been created, without the need to write everything from scratch.

If you’re a blogger who has quality content and liked the idea, know that there are already a few options to turn your blog posts into ebooks to use your marketing strategies or sell this content through platforms such as Hotmart.

That’s what will let you know on today’s post!

The advantages of using ebooks in your strategy

If your goal is to create an ebook to sell, one of the main advantages of this format is how easy it is to distribute.

Nowadays, anyone has a smartphone or mobile device with a connexion to the Internet, and most people already consume information on smaller screens, which makes digital books a popular accessible format.

Ebooks have both the advantage of having great potential to bring new business, and being simple to create.

Now, if you have other digital products in different formats, such as video lessons, for example, you can also use the ebook to generate leads and nurturing them with content until you turn them into clients. Next, we list how ebooks can be useful in an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Capture emails

Since you’re making rich content available for free, you’re entitled to ask for people’s information who are interested in downloading it, to make your first contact.

To do so, you can create a landing page, presenting the advantages of the ebook and invite the page visitors to download the content through a persuasive call to action. If the visitor sees value in your offer, she won’t mind providing her email.

Remember that this is only the first step in the relationship. From there, you’ll look for smart and attractive ways to communicate with your prospect to make her move towards the next stages of the sales funnel. You can even use other ebooks to do so.

Strengthen your authority

Ebooks are rich material, therefore, really useful to help your audience solve problems, educating them to find the solution they need.

When you deliver value to your reader, you reinforce your authority, which makes the person to always look for you when she has a question on the topic.

Add value

When you provide the solution to a recurring problem, without asking for anything in return, you establish a trust with your potential client that can lead to the purchase. The mental trigger of reciprocity, when used right, is a powerful instrument to boost your results.

The step-by-step to turn your blog posts into ebooks

To produce an ebook, you need to be sure the topic is interesting for your audience. To do so, there are some simple steps you can follow.

Keyword research

Researching keywords is essential to understand which are the most searched topics in your market niche and make a priority out of the ones that have most to do with your buyer persona.

Tools such as Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SemRush are useful to help you with this analysis because they give you information such as: terms that take traffic to your blog, keyword search volume and demographic profile of your visitors.

We also recommend you search on Google Trends to identify if the topic is a fad or a persistent topic because chances are people will engage more in the second scenario.

Posts with a higher engagement

If the post has a great number of accesses, it means your audience is interested in that topic so, that can be a great option to create your ebook.

To know the most accessed posts on your blog just access Google Analytics dashboard > Behavior > Website Content > All pages.

If you’d like to know how many of these visits were organic, select Add segment > Organic traffic. This stage is important if you have ads leading to your blog.

Besides, it’s important to assess the number of comments and sharings that post got and, especially, the questions people are asking the most.

Select your content

It’s almost impossible to cover the entire subject in an ebook, so, we suggest you cut out some of it to optimize your production and act straight on your buyer persona’s pain.

A company that offers email automation services, for example, can create many ebooks, such as “How to create creative titles”, “Copy for emails”, “How to choose images for emails” and so on, instead of creating a single content on email marketing and facing the risk of being shallow.

Content update

In the globalized world, where everything is constantly changing, information that was true a month ago is not always true today. In many cases, that specific data has already changed or the technology you recommended a month ago is now old-fashioned.

Because of that before you select the blog posts to turn into ebooks, make sure that content is updated so you don’t misinform your reader.

From blog posts to ebooks: tools that can be helpful

There are many ways to turn your blog posts into ebooks:

By hand

Yes, that’s right, the good old Word can serve you well at this time. Analyze the best posts, copy and paste into Word (or your favorite word processor). Format it, design a cover, generate the index and voilá! At the end of this process, you need to save the file in PDF, which is the standard ebook file format.

Zinepal

This is a free tool which can be used to generate your ebook automatically from any blog. Obviously, you can only do that to content produced by you due to ownership rights issues. Access the website, enter the blog address and ask Zinepal to create your ebook.

If your tool doesn’t find your blog posts (called ‘stories’ on Zinepal), you can add articles manually. To do so, drag the button Add to Ebook to your browser’s Favorites Bar. Then, access each article you’d like to add and click the button.

After you select the articles, click Preview Your Ebook and set the final settings for your newest ebook.

Anthologize

Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that allows you to select and set our ebook based on the content that already exists on your WordPress blog. The free plugin is free and simple to use. Just a heads up: it only works on WordPress blogs hosted by their owners, so, it’s not possible to use Anthologize on free WordPress.com blogs.

BlogBooker

With Blog Booker, you can turn your posts into completely customizable PDF ebooks. What sets this tools apart is that it allows you to capture content in the comments section of the blog and use it in edit or cut format.

Bloxp

Blogxp allows you to collect up to 250 blog posts automatically and format this content in one exportable PDF file. To use it, just copy and paste the URLs from the posts you wish to compile and press Start. You can also convert this same content to EPub, which is another format used for ebooks, and both files adjust perfectly to smaller screens.

Promotion

When your ebook is ready, don’t forget to promote in the channels where your audience can be found. As we’ve mentioned in the beginning of the text, the landing page is a great tool to make your content available for download because it has a simpler menu and focus on the user conversion.

You can get more information about promoting your product in the post How to promote a product on the internet.

If your goal is to make sales, choose a platform that focuses on digital products, such as Hotmart, because that increases your product reliability besides automating the entire process.

Conclusion

Many bloggers write quality content, which they have been writing for a long time, post by post, throughout months or even years. They could have been profiting from this content or use it to increase their online influence. In many cases, this content just needs to be put in a different “format” and organized in a different way.

This strategy is useful not only to make the sale but also to boost your blog’s traffic.

If you want a complete guide to create the perfect ebook for online sales, make sure to download our free step by step on how to create your ebook!