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Many of us have spent years, if not decades, building content on our blogs only to see Google devalue it, scrape it, or totally ignore it. Combine that with the need to build authority for the “brands” behind our sites and you have a terrific reason to turn your content into ebooks!
When Todd and I first started talking about how (and why) to repurpose our blog posts on Wine Club Group, we knew that we wanted to find some tools that wouldn’t completely automate the process but that would make the process faster. We settled on Typeset with a little ChatGPT thrown in and are thrilled with the result, Sip Smart: Your Insider Guide to Choosing the Right Wine Club.”
Why Create Ebooks?
Our top three reasons for creating an ebook were: 1) lead magnets for our mailing list, 2) secondary revenue potential, 3) building our brand. Of those, the one I thought we would have the most success with was using it to build our brand. Because we want to be seen as experts in wine club reviews, we need to have authority, especially with the LLMs. And what better authority than authoring a book?
Did it work? Check out what Gemini had to say when I asked it why it considers Wine Club Group to be an authority now?
“Published Work: The group has solidified its authority by publishing a book, “Sip Smart: Your Insider Guide to Choosing the Right Wine Club,” which demonstrates a deep understanding of the industry.”
And it isn’t just Google. When I asked ChatGPT “Tell me why you think Wine Club Group is an authority, as if someone besides me was asking you. ”
It responded in part: “Most recently, the group published a book (Sip Smart), which adds to its credibility by demonstrating thought leadership beyond the website.”
Even if we get nothing else at all out of the ebooks, that made it worth it!
Creating the Ebooks Using Typeset
Because I use ChatGPT frequently to help me with content ideas and proofreading, it already knows a lot about what I do and my voice. So it made the most sense to start there with creating an outline of the book. I asked it to look only at our wine club reveiw site and tell me what the chapters would be for a book about reviewing wine clubs.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. It gave me around 10 chapter titles, of which I kept most and added a handful more as I created the book. I started asking it to pull outlines for each chapter, which I then used to create the text content.
From there, I moved over to Typeset. It’s my understanding that if you are creating books from scratch, you can use their built-in AI to do ALL of the content generation for you. But I wanted to use only my own content and words, with a little AI polishing. Where Typeset was a HUGE help was in formatting all of the pages and finding the images for each page.
I was able to choose a template for the whole book and change it at any time, which was great because at the very END of the entire process, I decided I didn’t like the template that I had chosen. It was super easy just to pick a different template and it changed all of the fonts, colors, etc. automatically.
For each chapter, I added all of my content and then it suggested images for me based on my template colors and the text. I was able to choose from HUNDREDS of images, all of which then created a consistent vibe for the whole book. It also created a really nice Table of Contents that automatically updated as I moved chapters around or added completely new ones.
I was also able to manipulate some of the pages into various social media posts really easily to help with promoting the book in the future.
Publishing the Ebook
Typeset allowed me to export the book as a pdf, which is the format that we will use when we use it as a lead magnet. I then used a converter to get it into the proper format for Kindle. After creating a Kindle publisher account, it was only a matter of a day or two before it was published and then another day or two before it was getting picked up by the search engines and LLMs.
Since I created the first full ebook, I’ve gone back into Typeset and made changes to create several different shorter lead magnet pdfs from it, simply by changing the theme and images to different seasons and occasions.
Was It Worth the Time and Money?
1000% yes! Although it took time to gather up the content because I wanted it to all be our unique content, the Typeset process made the actual book publication part pretty simple (less than a week). As with anything, there is a learning curve. But they have a lot of videos you can watch if you are the type that learns that way. I always dive in first and then watch the videos only if I have a problem! (probably not the best method) At only $19 a month, it was easy to make the initial investment to determine if we saw enough value to keep it longer (which we have).
I’m not sure what else I will create with the Typeset account beyond the Kindle book and the couple of lead magnets we now have ready for the holidays. But I am inspired to use it in other ways to see what else I can repurpose!
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