I was listening to an interview that Problogger had on his site (I would link to it but it was his ‘thank you’ for signing up for his newsletter), and he was interviewing a blogger about the success he’s had with his blog. The blogger said that part of his success was due to a popular ebook he had created that he had achieved monthly sales of up to $30,000! Impressive, but then the blogger told Darren that roughly 85% of the ebook had come straight from his blog posts.
My mouth literally fell open. Then Darren remarked that he’d had similar success with an ebook, and that about the same percentage of that ebook’s content had come straight from his blog.
Seriously?!?
But then I thought about it, and it made total sense. A lot of people would likely pay $9.95 or more for an ebook in order to get the convenience of the information all neatly organized and combined for them in one place. I think too many bloggers have the mindset that once they blog about a topic, it’s ‘off limits’ for them to ever discuss again.
In reality, I think it’s much safer to assume that most people MISS our blog posts. Or really any content created via social media. I think social media participation has ‘trained’ us to scan and release. We give all the content a few seconds to catch our attention, then quickly move on. When I was creating the recent #Blogchat survey that many of y’all took, I assumed at I could get 250 responses within a couple of days, and eventually get 500 after about a week. I’d tweet it once, maybe twice a day.
Yeah, not really. It took 10 days to get 315 responses and that was with me tweeting out begging for responses up to 5 times a day! At one point within a 90-min period, I tweeted the link and then @MarketingProfs, @ChrisBrogan, @Barefoot_Exec, @JessicaNorthey, @JayBaer and @JasonFalls all RTed the link to the survey, as well. That’s well over half a million Twitter followers, but do you know how many survey responses I got from that flood? About 20. Also, what I noticed every time I tweeted a link to the survey was that I would get about 3-5 responses within 3-5 mins, and then nothing. This really hit home for me that if something isn’t RIGHT IN FRONT OF US on our social media channels, we miss it. Plus it also suggests that Twitter isn’t the best medium to drive survey responses, but I digress…
Often I have blogged about topics more than once. Never once have I had someone tell me ‘Yeah Mack, you blogged about this before, why are you covering it again?’
Now that doesn’t mean that you should simply repost an old post. But it DOES mean that you should dig into your archives and find your ‘old’ popular topics, and resurrect them. Remember yesterday when I talked about your blog’s analytics and using Pageviews and Search Keywords to help you discover popular posts? Do that, find the posts that others are enjoying, and see if you can write a new post or two about those same topics. Just this afternoon, I went through the Archives for the posts I wrote here back in 2009, and found 10 posts I can update and expand and republish as new posts. If I can do the same for 2010 and 2011, I’ve suddenly created a new 30 or so posts for myself to publish here!
There’s no reason why you can’t do the same. Dig in your archives and see if you have any buried blogging treasure in there that you can share again (or really for the first time) with your readers. It will also lighten your blogging workload, and who knows, you may even find enough good stuff to make your own ebook and get your own $30,000 a month income!
PS: I’ve written about this topic before as well, and I’ll forgive you if you missed it the first time 🙂