They say everyone has a book in them, but, if writing isn’t your primary skill, it can feel like an impossible mountain to climb. However, you don’t have to write 50,000 words to become an author.
There are many ways to deliver your content, besides actually sitting down to plan and write a book. My advice is to start with the baby steps.
Baby step 1: Plan to succeed
You don’t have to have a massive creative mind to write good content. Much of it is about planning, whether you’re writing a blog, a speech, a proposal or an academic dissertation. A good structure to get you started comes in 5 parts:
- Introduction: what is this about?
- Key point 1: your first point with associated explanation.
- Key point 2: your next point with any supporting facts/data
- Key point 3: your third point with information that helps people to understand
- Conclusion: the ‘so what’ of your item, why it’s important to the reader, how they can use the information, the benefits of applying it, etc.
As you get into writing regularly you’ll find you can create different structures, but this is a good place to start. It makes writing your blog or article easy for the reader to digest – and easier for you to write as you have a framework to work with.
Baby step 2: Get the blogging habit
Writing is a discipline and a habit. If you find it tough to tackle writing a big project, start with a small one. A blog doesn’t have to be a thousand words, it can be just 300 words as long as it makes a point or explains a useful process.
Baby step 3: Create a lead magnet
A lead magnet is a document that potential customers will find interesting, so it needs to have real value. Whereas a blog may be your opinion, a lead magnet needs to have a solid ‘how to’ in it, to educate people and help them do something they don’t already know how to do.
Typically a lead magnet can be anything from a single page to around 20 pages, but there are no rules that say it has to be a particular length. Plan your lead magnet as a longer article and ensure it delivers something you’re an expert in. It might be 5 tips or 7 steps or 3 things to avoid, that will help you to get your structure in place.
Baby step 4: Write an ebook
If you’ve used planning strategies, written a regular blog post and created a lead magnet you’re ready for the next step – writing an ebook.
The good thing about an ebook is that it doesn’t have to be any particular length. You go about this in exactly the same way as your blog and your lead magnet, it’s just longer.
The big tip is to review all your current blogs as you have almost certainly already got material you can recycle into a book. I once wrote a blog every day for a month and then recycled them into a book – editing, reordering and adding action points every day.
Baby step 5: The final one!
Now you’ve created an ebook – and you know you can do it. Writing that full-length book is no longer a big step, it’s just another step along the way.
Of course, if you really find writing difficult you can get help with all of these activities – that’s what we do for our clients.
