Collecting your posts into a product

Feb 28, 2012 | Writing A Book

David K. Waltz has been running a series of posts on his Treasury Café blog about basic financial terms and strategies. The response has been good because he explains important terms clearly. I suggested that he could leverage that success by creating a product based on the posts.

You can do the same thing with popular posts from your blog. Here are some guidelines.

Add Value

The product should add value to the content of the posts themselves. Add an introduction and conclusion. Sort the posts into logical groups and add some “connective tissue” that explains how the posts relate to each other. You can add even more value by adding a story to illustrate each one.

Free or For-Sale or Both?

You can create a free product that you can use to promote your business. All that takes is putting the posts and connective tissue into PDF format and letting people download it.

You can also create a product for sale. That can be a full length paper or e-book or a shorter Kindle Single. For an example, check out Art Petty’s Leadership Caffeine collection based on his blog posts.

But wait, there’s more. You can combine free and for-sale products. David could give away the e-book, but sell a collection of worksheets and spreadsheets to go with it.

Blogger’s Bottom Line

Any product you create from your blog posts should add value to the posts.

Consider free, promotional products, for-sale products, and combinations.