If you have been blogging for a few years, or even 4 or 5, then you have accumulated a huge amount of material on your subject matter. And presumably, covering every possible facet and related topic.
If it is properly indexed, they you have 300 or 400 pages of material which is a huge boost for your rankings and traffic. Beyond that, it is just sitting there.
What you do with this accumulation is compile it into an ebook which you can sell! Here is what I did with a 5-year old blog, plus several years of article submissions and masses of site content.
First I hired a guy who was referred to me by a client as Editor and Project Manager. He had a Masters degree and was unemployed and agreed to work of $20/hour. First I got him to come up with an outline or table of contents. I asked him to research every single possible topic for the book (in this case on how to study) so that the book would be the complete guide on how to study and cover every conceivable aspect and topic.
Once we had the table of contents, I zipped all of the material together (which was quite a lot) and sent it to him together with a quick index of the material.
The first step was for him to go through and inventory everything and compile a list of topics that are missing. Once he gave me the list I hired my usual freelance writer to write up the missing parts,which was about 40 pages total.
While that was being written up, the Editor was putting the existing content together as well as writing transitions. A book is more than just a collection of blog posts and articles put together, and putting them all together into a cohesive whole was harder and more work that I expected.
Simply copy and pasting a huge collection of blog posts together feels very disjointed. As well blog posts tend to be quite short, and often just give a cursory coverage of the topic. Often blog posts had to be taken out or used as a basis for a more in-depth article which was then integrated into the larger document.
Still, a successful project, although it took longer, cost more and was more difficulty than I originally planned.
The result? 3 ebooks, on related topics, 200 pages, 110 pages and 50 pages respectively. Hooked them up to paypal, linked everywhere internally on the site and re-couped my investment for the freelance editor and writer in just over 1 month. From here on in it is all pure profit.
One of the ebooks, here, was so successful, I had my main writer, add another 50 pages.
All of the ebooks are undergoing extensive multi-variant testing to determine price breaks, and sales copy. So far, it looks as though my original guess at price was too low, and tweaks to the sales copy have increased conversion by 57%.
Very Nice!
