You’ve worked on your blog for months, maybe years, putting sweat and tears into every post. And as soon as you’ve finished one, it’s time to start on the next. As your posts fall off the front page, their popularity drops and they can quickly feel forgotten. It might seem like that content is buried forever, destined to be read by only the occasional visitor from a search engine query—but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can easily take your content and make it into a beautiful ebook which will remain current far longer than any individual post.

Refashioning your blog posts as an ebook can have many advantages:

• It rescues content from obscurity and gives it permanence
• It expands your reach beyond readers of your blog
• It allows you to trace the overarching stories you’ve explored through time
• It can help you make money in new channels and find new readers

Here are Vook's recommendations on how to succeed:

Choose a theme or structure

Some of the most popular ebooks published by bloggers are those organised around a theme. Chances are, there’s at least one subject you’re passionate and knowledgeable about—start here. In collaboration with Vook, online culture magazine Thought Catalog used their trademark personal essays and narrative nonfiction to create a series of themed ebooks. If you publish several different types of posts—say, recipes, commentary, and photos—then consider collecting them in separate ebooks, or separate sections within one book.

Add value to your content

Readers may not be as interested in buying your ebook if they feel they can easily find the content on your blog. Accordingly, it’s often useful to revise your content before it is published as an ebook—look out for new developments since the time of writing, or repetition across posts. An introduction can also help give a reader perspective on the collection. Don’t forget to create a snappy title and an attractive cover, both of which which should clearly reflect your blog's look and feel.

Take advantage of ebook capabilities

Collecting your work as an ebook doesn’t have to mean cutting out all your media, links, and other enrichments. Modern ebook formats are flexible and can incorporate much of what makes the web great: you can embed videos, images, or audio for offline viewing, link to web addresses, and even tie content together with internal hyperlinks. Check out Social State, an ebook that social media thinker Esteban Contreras created with content adapted from his blog and enhanced with images, videos, links, and other media. Think about the media that makes your blog unique and how you can best place this in an ebook, and remember that ebooks have automatically generated tables of contents which can help you arrange your content.

Connect existing readers with your ebook

Bloggers have one enormous advantage over other publishers of ebooks: an established readership. Make the most of these existing relationships. Link to your book on social media, put excerpts on your blog, and spread the word among other bloggers. Consider giving review copies to influential bloggers in your network. These people are the easiest to connect with your book, and can be enormously helpful in generating publicity by word of mouth.

Attract new readers

Building on your existing readership is a great start, but the truly exciting thing about ebooks is how far they can expand your reach. Selling a book through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Apple Store can expose your work to thousands of new readers. Readers of ebooks are among the most tech-savvy consumers of information, and chances are a satisfied reader of your ebook will quickly become a regular reader of your blog. Adding an ebook landing page to your blog and emailing newsletter subscribers will also boost sales.

Make the most of your content

If you’re going to put in the effort to make an ebook, make sure it’s just as high quality as your blog. To avoid formatting problems and get the most out of your blog, make sure you use a service which can customize your ebook to fit the content, your blog's style, and your branding needs. If you write a business blog, make sure your charts and graphs will transfer to the ebook. The same thing goes for cooking blogs: a book of recipes should never be without great pictures of the food.

Start now!

Vook has plenty of experience helping bloggers turn their work into ebooks. We can lead you through the process and help you create a beautiful, lasting book that will grow your reputation, drive sales, and introduce new readers to your blog. To get an idea of what we can do for you, check out some of the ebooks we made for Thought Catalog.

Excited about making your own ebook? Don’t wait any longer! Sign up for a free consultation now at Vook.com.