If you’re a coach, a speaker or an expert in your field, it can feel like having a book is becoming a ‘must have’ if you want to build your expert authority.

But writing a book feels like a huge challenge, right? Where do you start? How do you source your material? What on earth do you write about? You’ve may lots of ideas buzzing around in your head, and it can be a bit overwhelming.

What if I was to say that starting with your blog is a great way into writing your book? There are some good reasons to approach it like this:

Your blog already contains a lot of the material that you need for your book, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

If your blog is well read and loved, you know that the advice you’re giving is relevant and that your insights are appreciated. What better material to use for your book?

Your blog audience will be primed to want more from you. They want something meatier, more thought provoking and more educational from you than just your individual blog posts. They want your book.

Before I go on, I need to state a caveat. Using your existing blog posts to write a book means more than just going through your posts, getting them into some kind of order, joining the dots and then making them into a book. Your blog can save you time and provide a huge amount of inspiration for your book, but there’s more to it than that.

Here’s a step by step guide to the process:

Laying the groundwork

1) First of all, decide why you want to write a book in the first place. Is it to build your ‘expert brand’, or to sell specific products and services, or to spread the word about your business? Of course it may be all three, but it’s worth deciding which is the most important to you before you start. Once you know, you are much better placed to write your book with the end in mind.

2) What’s the big idea in your book – what’s it about? This should relate to the central benefit you offer to your clients, so that it supports your business. Once you know the answer to this question, you can begin to sort through your blog posts, picking out the most relevant ones.

3) Who are you writing to? Hopefully your book audience will be the same as your blog audience, but if not, you will need to bear this in mind when you decide how to incorporate your blog into your book.

4) What angle are you going to approach your book from? This will relate to your audience’s biggest question (which is the question your book sets out to answer). For example, is it a starter guide, an all-encompassing ‘bible’, or an inspirational book?

If you get stuck during this process, take a look back through the blog posts that you’ve written in the past and make a note of the ones that resonated best with your readers. Which got the most comments, retweets and shares? This will give you a big clue as to what topic your book should focus on

Getting your material together

Once you know what you’re setting out to achieve, you can start the juicy process of looking back through what you’ve blogged about. Again, here’s how to do this step by step:

5) Grab yourself a cup of coffee and go through all your past blog posts, one by one. Sometimes we forget how brilliant we are at what we do, so now is your chance to be impressed by your insights and remind yourself how much you know. This will also give you a confidence boost for writing your book.

6) Print out (or save) the posts that you think would be relevant for your book. This won’t be all of them, so try and be selective as it will make your life easier.

7) List out the topics on a separate piece of paper, or in a spreadsheet, and organise them into a logical order for your book. Think about what your reader would need to read first, then second, then third, and so on.

8) Highlight the gaps which you will need to fill in yourself. This could be via more blog posts (killing two birds with one stone), or with standalone book material.

Don’t forget that your videos and audio material are also relevant; you may want to consider getting them transcribed so that it’s easier to incorporate them into your writing.

Writing your book

9) Use your blog to actually write your book! Depending on your existing material, you’ll need to do a fair bit of work here to make sure that your book doesn’t look disjointed. You want the reading process to flow nicely, which will entail adding connecting material. Readers’ expectations of a book are higher than of a blog post; they expect to see a better standard of writing, grammar and punctuation. Errors which could be forgiven in a blog post will come back to haunt you in a book, so please don’t underestimate this part of the process.

10) You’ll also need to assess your blog posts for the angle they’re coming from so that the different chapters of your book are consistent with one another. For example, if one blog post is about encouraging novices in your audience to get started with something, and another is about coaching experts through a more advanced level, be aware of this so that you can adjust the two approaches for your book.

While you’re writing your book, you’ll no doubt come up with many more topics to talk to your readers about. Use these as inspiration for more blog posts!

I hope I’ve given you inspiration to use your existing materials for a book. It doesn’t have to be a question of starting from scratch – you’ve almost certainly got more to work with than you think.

Do you think you could turn your blog into a book?

Please let me know – with any questions – in the comments below.

Author Bio: Ginny Carter – The Author Maker – ghostwrites books for speakers, coaches and experts, and also coaches aspiring authors who would love to write their own book. You can get a free copy of her guide How To Stand Out as an Expert With Your Own Book right here