How To Blog A Book by Nina Amir Review

How To Blog A Book is a book by Nina Amir on how to set up your blog in order to transform it into a book or books. In it she covers the basics of how to blog your book, making a business plan for your blogged book, the best way to make content that transfer well from blog to book, driving traffic to your blog, repurposing of content (a must know for those who want to make money from their blog), and what to do once you’ve finished your blogged book among other things. This is a great primer for those who want to write their book in blog form first and then transfer to it book format.

Essentially you are killing two birds with one stone. Nina Amir has written a number of books all having to do with writing and specifically how to make money/a living from one’s writing. Not an easy feat unless one knows what they are doing and when it comes to making money from writing Nina knows what she is talking about. I first picked up this book because it’s my intention to make a full time living off this blog. This isn’t a hobby to me but rather a business. While I knew the old Ziglar quote “Help enough people get what they want and you can have everything you want” was a good start I knew I would need more than that. So I turned to this book and here’s what I found.

Book Blogging Basics

The book starts out with talking about the basics of blogging and more importantly finding the right niche to dig down into. While going too broad can be a bad thing (in it takes you longer to build up your audience) going too narrow can be a bad thing as well. For example starting a site for men lifters in their 20’s who’s biggest concern is looking good for Spring break (among other times) probably has a sizable following and offers some specificity. However targeting men aged 20 who into underwater basket weaving may leave a lot to be desired. You get the point. Don’t go too wide so that you never get anywhere but don’t go too narrow because you’ll end up with the same result.

Why Blog A Book?

Nina also covers the advantages of blogging a book as opposed to writing it out separate from your blog. Having done both I can attest to blogging your book being a much better option. Nina talks about how you can test the market out to see how receptive they are to your ideas, which ideas to pursue and which ones to give up on, blogging works like a giant testing ground where you can see what interest people and what doesn’t and then build on your book from there. Also writing your book as blog posts first allows you to add and adjust things depending on the comments and feedback.

A blogged book also allows you to build audience as you write. For example if I took all of my posts that I have here at CharlesSledge.com and had instead put them in book form while I’d have a lot more books out no one would know about them other than through the keywords and anything I could drum up through Twitter or another social media site. However this way I can build an audience while I write my book at the same time. Which works out great. I get my book completed quicker and more readers get to read it.

How To Book A Blog

Nine breaks down the process of booking your blog into detail here. First things first determining if you blogged book is marketable. Simple meaning is there a market for it. We covered this above so you get the gist of it. Then decide on a topic for your book. So if you were a men’s fitness writer maybe the focus of your book could be on how to use diet and exercise to maximize your testosterone levels. You’re picking a topic within you general category that is also marketable. The next thing you do is crate a title for your book. Titles are incredibly important and other than the cover the most important factor that determines how well your book sells. You want to spend as much time in this as possible. Not mentioned in the book but using Google Trends (just something I do) to compare different keywords is a must.

Then you are going to have to map out the content for your book. You don’t want to just mash a bunch of random posts together that have no flow. You want there to be a central theme of the book and the posts to have some sort of flow to them. Once you have the basic outline the next thing that you are going to do is comb through your blog for posts that are going to fill in the outline. Then after that you simply fill in the gaps with new writing. That way you are repurposing your blog’s content while also writing a book that flows. Then you have the edit and then publish of course.

Repurposing Content For Profit & Promotion

Nina also writes about getting your blogged book to a publisher. Something I highly recommend against. Modern publishing houses are scams and are a guaranteed way to make no money even if successful while completely relying on your own marketing to be successful (so successful marketing = little to no money with a publishing house) stay away from the plague that is modern publishing. Alright now for repurposing content for profit and promotion. Nina talks about different ways you can use old content in new ways to increase revenue or to further promote you website and expand it’s reach.

Things like special reports for download, tip sheets, booklets, e-books, home study courses, coaching, consulting, and regular books as well. Old content can be used for all of them. Some can be just copied and paste and then tied together while others can be used as a base and then you add in what else is needed. You want to make sure that you are getting the most out of all of your content. Even the most dedicated of readers isn’t going to sit down and read all your stuff. So you want to get it to them in multiple ways.

Summary

Nina talks about some blogging success stories in the back of the book. Overall if you’re someone who is looking to make good money off their blog (even a living) or looking to write a book and looking for the best way to do it then How To Book Your Blog is a great place to start. There’s no point in writing a ton of content that will simply rot away in the back corner’s of your blog. Repurpose it to get it to a new audience as well as make money off of it. Don’t let your posts go to waste. You’re losing money and people are missing out on potential solutions to their problems when you do this.

So if you want to make the most out of your content and blog your book to make money then check out How To Blog A Book to figure out how to do this exactly.

Charles Sledge