5 Tips to Keep You Publishing Posts After You Finish Blogging a Book

Carefully pick your blogged book topic. I always offer this bit of advice first when I teach people how to blog a book. Why? Because you have to continue publishing posts long after you finish blogging your book.

How do you keep coming up with ideas for posts after your book is complete? These 5 tips should keep a stream of blog post ideas flowing.

1. Create a blog plan.Once you have chosen your topic, you need a blog plan, first, for your book, and, second, for your blog in general. Initially, you will just blog your book on a schedule. The second plan comes into play to keep you blogging for years and years after the book is published. This keeps people buying the book, and possibly anything else you provide related to the book (or more books). Revamp the plan every three or six months, or even yearly. How often is up to you. Some people like to plan in smaller increments, some in larger ones.
2. Use an editorial calendar.Once you have a blog plan, transfer it to an editorial calendar. The calendar eliminates the struggle to find something to write about each time you are scheduled to publish a post, whether that is twice a week or seven days a week. By planning out your content in advance and actually scheduling the posts, you allow yourself to just show up and write.
3. Find annual and monthly events and holidays.An editorial calendar also allows you to draw on a variety of elements that can generate post ideas. This provides evergreen content and drives traffic to your site as you tie into holidays and popular events. For example, you can write posts about Martin Luther King Day, the Super Bowl, Christmas, National Novel Writing Month, Grandparents Day, or Kwanza.

   You might also have product releases or courses you run periodically, and you can plan content around these as well.

4. Brainstorm or mind map ideas.I like to brainstorm ideas for several months at a time. I then look at the calendar and see how many posts I need and come up with titles or specific subjects for each date. I often use mind maps for this purpose. I can easily move my ideas around and organize them into a sequence that makes sense. The mind map I like is called Freemind by Soundforce.com, and it is free.

   Of course, once I’ve done this, I place the ideas on my editorial calendar.

5. Pick monthly or quarterly themes.I also like to pick themes, for example one per month or three months of related themes. This allows me to write a series of posts on one topic. I can later go back and mine these posts and make turn them into a short ebook if I like. This means I’m constantly blogging short books—or potential books.
   You might decide to repeat these yearly. In this case, you would want to place these on your editorial calendar, too.

Do you have other methods that help you come up with ideas to blog about your book?

Photo courtesy of David Castillo Dominici|freedigitalphotos.net