From Blog to Book: Writing a Book One Blog Post at a Time

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. 183. Writing a Book One Blog at a Time Erin Ollila: [00:00:00] What if you could write a book without ever sitting down to write a book? I know that sounds a little contradictory, but hear me out. Most people completely freeze at the idea of writing a book because. It’s a lot. It’s a big undertaking, but writing a blog post that feels a lot more manageable, it feels like something you could just schedule on your calendar for a Tuesday afternoon between clients. So what if I told you that you could use that exact feeling that I can write a blog post Energy to actually get your book written? Not someday, not when you have six months of free time that you can dedicate to this. But now while you’re running a business serving clients and living your life. Today we are talking about books, but not in the way that you might think, because here’s the thing, when most people think about writing a [00:01:00] book , they picture this massive undertaking where they’ll have to take a sabbatical from work or stop going to the gym or, whatever it is, to dedicate their precious time to now white knuckling their way through writing 40,000 plus words while the rest of their life and business weights in the wings. And honestly that actually sounds terrible. No wonder why so many people have the goal of writing a book on their bucket list, but they never actually start writing it. There is a different way that you can write a book in small pieces at a time, a way that will serve your business while you’re building toward the book in a way that takes pressure off and lets you create something substantial without abandoning all the rest of the things that you’re doing. Today I’m gonna walk you through two real life examples of how I have done this in the past. They are two completely [00:02:00] different methods, but they both are accomplishing the same exact thing. They let you create short form content that builds into something. Much bigger. Method one is what I call the forward approach. You start with a list of topics and build forward into a book, and method two is the backward approach. You start with the end result that you’d like for the book and work backward to determine the categories or sections that belong in the book. Then the individual topics that you need to write about, and then start the writing at a topic level. Both methods work, both have been used successfully, and both create content that will serve you now and build toward that bigger goal of writing a book. Okay, let’s start with method one. This is the forward approach. In my last traditional job, we had a system for creating content for our business. So this was marketing content [00:03:00] that was honestly very brilliant and here’s how it worked. We each picked our own specialty and we’d sit down as a team and map out related topics that fit within the realm of what we wanted to write about. You know, they weren’t random blog posts, ideas by any way, shape, or form. They were strategically connected. They all could kind of ladder up to a, a bigger theme or concept that we knew our leads needed to understand, or that we knew would attract leads into the business to become clients of ours. Let’s just say as an example, that we were creating content about SEO for small business owners, and this wasn’t actually what we were doing. So this is a true, uh, made up example. What we could do is just map out some of the first things that come to mind when it relates to SEO, specifically for small business owners, like keyword research basics on page SEO off. [00:04:00] Page SEO, local SEO, how to use Google Search console, image optimization. And you get the idea The list could go on. These could be multiple topics. What did, what did I name right there? 10 that are related, but each topic stands alone as its own helpful piece of content. Once we, I ideated on our topics, we would write individual blog posts for each topic, not worrying about how it related to the next topic at all. We would sit down, write the blog post and publish them on our company blog one by one. This happened over the course of months. But from day one, we knew our end goal was not simply just to have 10 blog posts for each of the writers. The goal was always to compile them into something bigger, like an ebook or a white paper once all 10 were actually written. So every single post that we did publish was [00:05:00] doing double duty. It served our audience in the immediate time, helped us with SEO, gave people a reason to come to our website, positioned the company as experts in our field, but it was a building block for something bigger. When we finally had all 10 posted, written and published, we didn’t have to start from scratch on the ebook because we had the content we just needed to edit for cohesion. And once that editing was done, that was a downloadable resource that we could use consistently for years into the future. that lesson paired, of course, with my experience of getting an MFA in creative writing is what I have taken into my own business working for myself as well as helping my clients. Let’s move on to method two. Again, this is working very similar to what I just said, but it is the backward approach instead of the forward approach. This method I used within the past couple of years when I ghost [00:06:00] wrote two books for a fellow business owner, and it is one of my favorite ways to approach long form content projects. Here’s how it works. First we started with a strategy session and in the strategy session, our job is to figure out what the heck the end result is going to be. What did we want the book to be about, and not just what we wanted the topic to be, but we needed to get really clear on what the book was supposed to do. So was there a transformation that was being offered? What result did we hope for the reader to have? What was the start to finish in the sense of, if I’m going to talk about, , making a pizza, make this a really easy example from scratch, I’m gonna have to talk about a few things. One, making dough two cheese type, like what type of cheese do you would use at a pizza? Three sauce, four toppings, and five actual heat preparation for this pizza at [00:07:00] minimum, right? So. Starting backward means coming up with the final idea. This book is about making pizza from scratch. Then developing the categories, which could also be synonymous with things like the main points, uh, the chapters, the outline, because once we get that end result, end result here being pizza, it’s important to ask what does someone need to understand? To learn this and as I just explained, they need to know about how to make the dough sauce choice, cheese choice topping choice, and how to cook it. In that example, what’s that five potential chapters? It could be five, it could be 12, it could be 30. ’cause the number doesn’t actually matter so much as understanding what the overall category of content that we need to create is. Now once we know what the categories are, that’s really where the magic happens, because we’re gonna look at each section and ask, [00:08:00] okay, now that we know what we want to say, what are the individual topics within that category that could work as standalone blog posts. So let’s try a different example. Let’s say we’re writing a book on small business finances. If one chapter or section is about pricing strategy, that could be broken down even further into a few things such as one, how to calculate your baseline. Two, how to price based on value instead of time. Three, how to present your pricing to your clients. Four, how to handle pricing objections. Each one of those things could easily be a 1500 word blog post. So if you’re still with me here, what we’re doing is we’re starting from the end result, what we want the book to be. We’re breaking that into sections or main categories of topics that we need to discuss, and then we’re breaking the sections down either even further [00:09:00] into specific discussion points. Those specific discussion points end up becoming our blog size topics. Now it’s time just to start writing them, not the book, the blog post. We write them one at a time, and as each one gets finished, we publish it. It goes on the website, it gets sent out to the email list shared on social media, and each post that gets published is very valuable in its own right because it helps to attract the right audience. It helps to build authority to better serve the business. And. In the backend, we knew that these blog posts were building up into what could be a chapter of a book. Additionally, we could add calls to action, especially as we got closer to publication that said something like, “interested in this topic? We’ve got an entire book coming out about X, Y, Z. Join the mailing list and we’ll let you know as soon as it publishes.” So this [00:10:00] is a long term marketing effort that is serving you in the present and in the future. Erin Ollila (2): So let’s talk about what happens. After the blogs are written because if we are being real here, blogs are not book chapters and they’re not meant to be book chapters. When you compile the blogs to build out the book, you need to smooth out maybe some rough transitions and make sure that the whole thing flows. Like one cohesive piece instead of 10 separate articles that are just stitched together and there’s a couple other things that you have to pay really close attention to: specifically filling gaps, removing repetition, and again, just arranging things strategically. Sometimes I’d realized that there was a gap, which is something that wasn’t covered in blog posts that really needed to be in the book. So I’d have to write new content to fill it in. Other times I would notice that [00:11:00] I was saying the same thing, for a good reason, but I was saying the same thing in different ways across multiple blog posts. In a book, if you’re just being told the same thing over and over and over again, it’s annoying. So it’s important to find the repetition to map it and then determine what fits where. Books have repetition, that’s fine, but there are some references that might be stronger than others. So part of the editing job is knowing what is right to keep and what needs to be removed. Now speaking of removals, let’s talk additions. The next thing that we would do in editing once the original content is, adjusted as it should, is to look at the arrangement. Just because we wrote the blog post in a certain order or sequence does not mean that that is the best order for the book. So I would [00:12:00] rearrange things to make the flow make better sense for the person who is reading straight through. This is another point in time that you would take the collection of content, and you would edit and adjust and make sure that there were transitions where they needed to be and things explained in detail as they needed to be before getting to the point where you were ready to almost finish the book. Now you may be asking me what to what point is that? Well, before we finish a book, we need to write the introduction and conclusion. You cannot write a good introduction until you know what the book is actually about, Erin Ollila: this is something I learned when writing my own thesis in graduate school. This is something I have talked with my published author friends about many times. And as living proof, this is something that I have absolutely learned with both of these methods in writing larger [00:13:00] forms of content. You need to know what the actual book is, not just what you want it to be. In order to know what to say in the beginning and the end of the book. Erin Ollila (2): Why? Because over the course of however long it took you to get to this part of the process, you are thinking evolves. You might emphasize things differently than you thought you would. You might discover a through line that you didn’t even see at the beginning. So I saved the introduction and conclusion for last because. It was a lot easier to write an intro that accurately set expectations and a conclusion that tied everything together. Once the middle of the book was done, you might be asking yourself, now, “how do I choose between these two methods that you’re sharing?” Method one, the forward approach is great if you’re not really sure what the book will be yet, you just know one that you want to create one and two, you have a general idea of [00:14:00] what the topics are that you would like to discuss within the book. So pick the topics. Create the content and then the book will reveal itself as it as you go. Method two is the backward approach, and I think that’s great if you have a really clear vision for the book, you know what transformation you’re going for, you know how you want your reader to feel and what messages you want to share, and you are able to spend some time in the beginning strategically reverse engineering the content that you need to get there. That’s a great place to be, but both methods are resulting in the same thing. Published content that is useful right now and a book at the end. You’re just starting from different places or different angles of doing the same thing. Now that I’ve walked you through the two different ways that I have written a book from smaller pieces of content, I wanna talk about why I think this approach works so well. Because it’s not just [00:15:00] about making a book easier to write, though it definitely helps. There’s some real strategic advantages here, some of which I have already referenced, but I’ll be repetitive here so that I can drive my point home first. Doing it this way takes the pressure off. We’re gonna throw some air quotes here, writing a book, right? I cannot overstate how paralyzing that might feel for some people. I’ve gone to graduate school for creative writing. I, I did my undergrad, the same thing . So I get. I get how to do this, and it still feels overwhelming for me, but just the idea that you can write this shorter form content as compared to a blog, it feels so much more doable. And when you string together this shorter form content, you can end up with the book, but you didn’t have to carry that weight of , again, quote unquote writing a book the entire time you’ve done it. Another reason is because each [00:16:00] blog post that you do published is immediately useful for your business. And this is the part that I think makes this method so smart from a business perspective, especially for creatives, solopreneurs, and small businesses. You are not disappearing for months to work on a book that isn’t. Helping your business in that moment. Every single blog post that you write works for you right now and continues to work for you in the future because of SEO New people are coming to your website. The blogs are showing up in search results. They’re showing up in AI overviews. They’re showing up in AI conversations. It is something that the published blog content that you can. Linked to in your email campaigns that you can share on social media, you can even send some of this to potential clients that are asking like, oh, how can you explain your approach to this? Or, [00:17:00] what is an A process like working with you, depending obviously on what you’re, you’re writing about. So you build your book and you build out more visibility through your business at the same time. Third, it gives you an idea to test out your ideas with a real audience. Now, Jessica might have done this slightly differently, but she did the same thing when she wrote her book Leaving the Casino, and I will link to that episode from a couple weeks ago in the show notes. Jessica’s approach was instead of sharing blog content. She scheduled regular free round tables and workshops for her audience. So she was providing real value, she was getting more people in her sphere, in her business, uh, audience, and she was testing out her ideas, uh, honing in on what was important and figuring out how to speak on the things that she wanted to write about. Because when you’re writing a book in [00:18:00] isolation, you don’t know if all the explanations make sense until honestly it’s too late to change them. But publishing as you go gives you feedback just like live presentation did for Jessica. Depending on how open you are to it you can even let people know you’d love follow up questions. They can tell you what clicked for them, what didn’t, and then you can use that feed book to make both the book and the blog Better. Blogs are editable at any point in time of the day of the night you can just go on your website and adjust the blog. Your book becomes better because you are kind of test driving it first. Maybe I will add one more fourth reason here. Not to sound like I’m picking on anyone, but I think what happens is that most people who say they want to write a book don’t actually write that book because they keep thinking, “well, I’ll do it after this project ends. Or once I have, , this change in my life and I have more time or [00:19:00] whatever. It is easy to keep pushing, write a book on your to-do list, like to the next day or the next week or the next month, but when you commit to publishing just a blog post, , maybe you do just two blog posts a month. Whatever cadence works for you, what you’re doing is forcing function. You can finish the post because you know it goes live on whatever day. And then when you commit to doing that, let’s say 5, 10, 12 times. Guess what? Your book is almost written. The momentum of publishing regularly keeps you moving forward instead of stalling out and pushing it further along in your schedule. And momentum’s really important because I’ve said this a few times, writing a book in one intensive push can be exhausting and overwhelming. It’s not wrong per se. If you have the time to take a sabbatical or you have dedicated space in your life where you [00:20:00] can write in one set chunk of time, that’s lovely. But I don’t think it’s as realistic for business owners as it might be for creatives. However, if you just make it a task of your business to write one blog post at a time, with even breaks in between, you are staying fresh. You stay excited about the ideas, and by the time you get to the end, you still have the energy left to actually edit, which is a huge undertaking in itself. Publish it, which is also a big undertaking, and promote it to your audience, which is. Potentially a ginormous undertaking. So it’s not just the relief of it being over and done, it’s a buildup that feels approachable. And it doesn’t matter whether you choose the forward option or the backward option that I shared with you because all of the benefits still apply. The through line is still the same. You create useful content now that can build [00:21:00] into something bigger later, and that strategy works no matter which direction you start from. Okay. If you’ve gotten to this point and you’re thinking, oh, I might actually wanna try this, let’s talk about how to get you started. First, as I’ve said, don’t wait for time to finish or start. You’ll never have the time. There’s always gonna be client work or life stuff, that is competing for your attention. But make the time now to, or at least ideate , a publishing cadence where you can write one blog post, even if it’s one a month. Start there. Choose your method. What appeals to you more forward or backward? Having a clear vision in reverse engineering or just coming up with topics that are loosely connected that you can build on later? Neither of those are better than the other. I’ve done both. It’s just really, I think about what works best for your brain and then [00:22:00] identify those topics right. It doesn’t matter what you start with. I’d say maybe eight to 12 blog posts depending on how long each one is a really great start. I mean, that could get you anywhere between 16 to 24,000 words, which is a good start to a book, especially one that doesn’t even have an intro, a conclusion and needs some transitions built in. And then once you have that just the get to work time. You need to publish regularly. It’s not a race, but you should have a cadence to the effort that you’re putting in. If you can publish once a month, great. If you can publish once a week. Cool. Just be consistent and realistic with your own schedule and don’t commit to something that you can’t sustain. I hope this episode was your push to start small. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to write one really good piece of content and then another and then another. And before [00:23:00] you know it, you’ll be coming to me to let me know that you’ve written your book. All right, that’s it for today, friends. I’ll see you next week where we’ll keep talking. Copy.