Is this the golden ticket to writing your book quickly?
I was thinking about the advice that you get to stick blog posts together to make a book.
Now, that can work really, really well and it can really suck.
I want to tell you how you can make it work and how it….well… sucks. I would tend to use the stick together blog posts thing as more for a lead magnet so people can get to find out a little bit more about you, rather than thinking hey, this is going to be the great book that’s going to get me the glory.
When it does work well is when you share a lot of little tips. If you think of a book like 37signals and Rework, there are lots of standalone tips in there that had a lot of value, they work together, they don’t repeat themselves, they don’t leave anything out. It’s been very well-structured. It’s a lot of short items that together create the whole, rather than say 10 chapters, and I’m cool with that. That’s fine, that works. If you can share lots of little snippets of stuff that makes a difference, it will work.
However, if you’re going to glue together blog posts, you’re going to be in trouble because blog posts are there to … They’re also there to persuade people to work with you, but in a slightly different way. The book builds trust over a long time. Whereas the blog posts are there, to get somebody to click to join your list, or go through to your booking page to join up on the course, or they’re going to download the seven-pound thing that’s going to give them an answer, whatever it is.
Those blog posts are a lot shorter and they’re there often to get a special result at the end. They’re not the sort of thing where you put a hundred of them together to make this big “whole” and that’s when people come unstuck.
To be honest, a lot of people don’t put much effort into a blog post, they just put something on their site so that Google refreshes their search engine rankings and stuff like that.
There are some very poor quality reasons for putting information together and that’s obviously toxic to a book. We don’t want that happening. That was a just bit of advice for you on how you can get blog posts to work and sometimes how they don’t.
If you want to chat about your book, I’d love to help you.
