Whether you consider blogging a pleasure or a necessary evil, you may sometimes wonder how you can get more mileage from your efforts. There are many ways you can repurpose your blog content, including turning some of your posts into an e-book. Mishka Tolentino explains how.

Bloggers are some of the most influential people on the web. With more bloggers providing helpful and quality content, netizens are getting more information from blogs.  If you’ve been blogging for a long time and have been thinking how you can earn from it, there are many lucrative options for you! You can have advertisements, do guest blogging, and the easiest of them all is publishing your own electronic book or e-book.

The advertising route requires high site traffic and can take a lot of time to achieve. Meanwhile, guest blogging requires extra effort from you, as you need to tailor fit your blog to fit another blogger’s theme. It is also quite challenging to find bloggers who pay for guest blogging. Publishing your e-book is pretty much just a piece of cake because you make use of what you already have. Not to mention that there are now a lot of companies offering e-book conversion services that specialize in EPUB, the format that is widely used by e-readers. To help you get started, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to make an e-book from your blog. To make it easy to recall, simply remember the acrostic BLOG.

1) Begin with a Theme

With so many entries in your blog, you need to narrow it down to one theme. There should be cohesiveness in your e-book. If you’re using WordPress, you can use its Anthologize plugin. Simply download it and upload the zip file to your dashboard. From there, you can filter by category or tags. If your entries are pretty random, you can arrange it chronologically so that it shows certain milestones in your life. The key is giving a smooth transition from one blog entry to another. It’s about taking your reader on a journey with you.

2) Layout with Character

By this we mean your layout should be attractive and impactful — from the cover to its inside pages. Use fonts that are easy to read. Highlight certain points in your blog that you want your reader to remember by putting them in text boxes. Place striking photos, but make sure that they don’t have copyright restrictions. If you don’t have any experience in graphic design, better ask someone to do the layout for you so that it looks professional.

3) Offer it to Multiple Channels

Aside from putting it up on your blog, offer your book to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Kobo, Payhip, Smashbooks, Lulu, PubIt, Mye-book, and other sellers. Remember that some of these sellers have requirements in terms of cover and content. Make sure that you have both aspects covered. Have a designer help you with the cover and an editor to proofread your content. Your aim is to sell your e-book, so make sure you distribute it to as many channels as you can with high quality content to back it up. You can also promote your e-book on your social media sites like Face-book and Twitter.

4) Give Some Free Copies

A good marketing strategy is giving away free copies of your e-book. If you want more people to follow your blog, you can give your e-book as an incentive. If you want to increase your social media followers, you can apply the same strategy. You can also give your e-book to other bloggers who can promote your e-book. Usually, these are bloggers who write about the same topics as you do. If you belong to a network of bloggers, you can give free copies to that group and use it as a giveaway for a promo.

The blog that you have right now is full of potential. Once you make it into an e-book, you’ll be able to reach more people. The more e-books you sell, the more people will be interested in your blogs. It could even be a springboard to more e-books in the future! Look at your blogs now and see which ones are most helpful and interesting. People buy books (i.e. print or digital) because they get something out of it. May it be entertainment, inspiration, tips and tricks, or general information, your e-book should be beneficial to your readers.

Publishing your e-book is easy. Having an e-book worth reading is the one that takes time and effort. It’s all about relevant content, so to speak. If you already have an anthology of blogs that is rich in insight and useful information, then you are well on your way to potentially becoming a bestselling author!