3 Steps to Creating an Information Product from Your Blog

Here’s a bit of information the book industry doesn’t like to reveal: Books don’t provide a huge source of income. In fact, most authors, with the exception of those who consistently hit the bestseller lists, supplement their book royalties with additional sources of income that may or may not be related to their publishing efforts. As an author and a blogger in the process of producing amazing amounts of content, you have a great advantage: You can turn all that content into money-making products. These “information products” can provide you with multiple streams of income and a business that revolves around your book—and around your blog. You can become an authorpreneur or a blogpreneur. Many nonfiction books lend themselves to this.

You may be considering blogging your book from start to finish. Maybe you’ve been blogging for a while and achieved some success, which led you to wonder, Could I turn my blog into a book?

It could be that you began blogging a book on a new blog after you created a successful blog on another topic. Now you have more than one source of valuable content. Or you haven’t blogged a book, but you have an existing blog with a lot—a whole lot—of blog content you could put to use and that may not fit into just one book.

Now you need to figure out how to recycle, or repurpose, all that content for profit as well as for promotion.

Each time you create an information product, you can sell it and advertise it on your blog and through all your social networks. Plus, you can create products, like a special report, and give them away as enticements for readers to join your mailing list or subscribe to your blog. Thus, your information products become promotional tools as well as income producers.

Create Related Information Products for Multiple Streams of Income

Information products provide consumers with the information they need or want, solve problems, offer expert advice, educate, or in some way provide a service, tip, or tool. The information is packaged in a variety of ways and sold, usually on the Internet, via a website. This makes your blog, which is a website, the perfect place from which to promote and sell these products.

Your blog provides a treasure trove of gems to turn into information products. You can turn the jewels—in this case, posts—into special reports, videos, recordings (MP3s, CDs, or DVDs), e-books, workbooks, teleseminars, webinars, home-study courses, or online courses. You also can create related services, such as coaching and consulting. If you’ve finished blogging your book, are currently blogging it, or even have simply been blogging with no thought until now of a book, information products can provide you with great income sources. Often they provide passive income—the products sell “while you sleep,” and you wake up to money in the bank.

Your blogged, printed, or digital book shouldn’t be your only source of income; if it is, you might find yourself earning less than you’d like. Instead, think like a businessperson or entrepreneur. Become an authorpreneur or blogpreneur.

3 Steps to Becoming an Authorpreneur or Blogpreneur

Here’s how you start:

First, you need a mechanism for selling your information products. You can create a page on your website (blog) with a shopping cart system so readers or visitors can purchase these items any time, day or night, by downloading them. You may want to sign up for a service like 1ShoppingCart.com so an auto-responder sends the purchased items immediately, or simply use www.PayPal.com and send them out manually. There are ways to hook up PayPal with mailing list services, like www.AWeber.com, and use their auto-responders to send out products, but it’s more complicated. You also can use E-junkie.com or www.ClickBank.com. These services deliver digital downloads. Like PayPal, they provide a code you place on your site that creates “buy buttons,” and the rest is handled via their services.

Second, look at your manuscript or blog and look for topics or content to expand.

• What blogged-book posts, or posts in general, might be subjects of their own?
• What topics could be made into a series of posts?
• What topics have you blogged about that generated a lot of interest from your readers in the form of comments or queries (or traffic)?
• What topic did you want to cover that didn’t fit into the scope of your blogged book or of a particular chapter and that you could craft into an article, blog post, or some other type of content?
• What questions do you frequently get asked?

The answers to these questions all might generate ideas for good information products.

Third, look at your manuscript for topics you already have covered as a series of posts. Maybe you wrote five posts on a particular subject that lends itself to a special report or to a course of some sort. Do your readers want to learn how to do whatever you were writing about? If so, this could work as a product.

To learn more about how to become an authorpreneur or blogpreneur, purchase a copy of How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition.

You might also like my e-book, Authorpreneur, or my course, How to Build a Business Around Your Blog.