Passive Income from your Blog

Have you considered how to turn your blogging platform into a passive income generator? Yes we all know about affiliate programs and they’re good up to a point. But a more proactive way to earn some passive income is to use your blog content to create some ebook ideas.

You love writing and you create a steady stream of content, but over time that content can become buried and hard for your site visitors to find or follow. This is especially true when you’ve written lots of content on the same topic. Make it easy for your readers and followers to consume your blog content by consolidating it into an ebook and making it available on popular self-publishing platforms like Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Nook, Smashwords or Draft2Digital.

4 ways to generate ebook ideas

1. Check your Blog Stats

Check your most viewed and visited pages. If you don’t have a plugin or blog traffic service tracking this, you should get one now. You should see popularity trends surfacing, and this will provide you with a shortlist of potential ebook ideas.

Here’s the monthly stats from my blog that showed my how popular my “Welcome to the Best of” articles were. I realized that my travel website visitors were interested in an overview of the travel niche I wrote it, so used this as inspiration to write my “Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide”

2. Poll your Readers

Just ask. People love being asked for their opinion – it makes them feel important and valued. If you have a blog following, email/newsletter list or social following, use any and all avenues open to you to poll them and ask them their preference for a topic. Best not to leave it completely open-ended. Instead, offer them a choice of 3 topics you’re considering, and leave the option for them to add a topic that you haven’t covered. Facebook polls are a free and effective way to get feedback like this.

3. Use your Blog to Test ideas

Create new content that features the topic you’d like to write about and gauge the reaction of your followers. Does it resonate with them? Are they engaging with you on the topic in your social streams? Does the blog post get lots of comments? If you’re creating blog content that is attracting attention, it’s a candidate for an ebook.

My blog post “100+ Travel Websites Accepting Guest Blogs” is far and away the most popular post on my Roving Jay blog. I get lots of comments, and use this list to get email sign ups. I have also used bit.ly links to track it’s popularity on social media, and know it gets the most amount of shares.

So this is an example where I used my stats to identify a potential topic and then tracked it’s popularity by monitoring the comments and reaction on social media, and then generated this book idea (currently in an editing phase)

4. See what books are selling on Amazon in your niche

Online retailers like Amazon make it really easy for you to find books in your niche. Start with a shortlist of potential ebook topics based on the content you’ve already written about. Then visit Amazon’s Kindle pages and drill down on the categories you’ve identified until you find your niche. Here’s the easiest approach:

• Type your generic topic in the search bar
• Find a book you like the look of
• Click on it and scroll down to the PRODUCT DETAILS section and choose the most relevant category that is displayed.
• Click on that category to visit that page and look at the Top 20 books displayed on the page.
• Use these books to inspire you to find your own ebook topic.

As an example, I typed in “Solo Travel in Vietnam” and I clicked on the first book in the search results, and then scrolled down to find the link to the categories it appeared in, and clicked on the category to be taken to this link, which shows the Top 20 books in the category relevant to “Solo Travel in Vietnam”.

The goal of these four options is to leverage content that you already have available on your blog, so that you have some foundational content to build on and you’re not starting your ebook from scratch. Make sure that you’re passionate about what you write, so that you’re inspired to create more content on the topic and will be able to get your ebook written, published and marketed.

Do your search, and let me know what topic you’ve chosen for your first ebook.