You published that blog post a year ago, and the traffic spike came and went. A few comments trickled in, presuming you still believe in allowing comments on your site. However, that spike in interest will remain a spike, and the blog post will forever carry the burden of being subconsciously tagged ‘outdated’, unless it lands on someone’s search results for a specific keyword search.
Isn’t that something we’ve all gone through as writers?
If you’ve been blogging for a long time, the challenge will only compound over time. We all know about the power of compounding, whether it is with good practices reaping benefits over time, or bad practices turning into a ticking time bomb for your business or personal life.
Each blog post or article may have taken hours to research, write and polish. Each one represents expertise you’ve spent years accumulating, but is generating a fraction of the impact it could otherwise have achieved because of its time bound nature.
The standard content marketing playbook tells you to share old posts on social media, update them for SEO or turn them into email sequences. These approaches definitely work, but they all share the same limitation of keeping your content locked in the same format it started in.
What if you choose to follow the path of repurposing WordPress content into eBooks?
The Time-bound Format That’s Costing You
You could take a dozen blog posts on a particular topic and combine everything into an eBook, and the result will be a masterpiece with an entirely different value perception.
An eBook can be a lead magnet, a digital product you sell or course material for your students. It can be a professional PDF your team sends to clients. Same content, but packaged in a way that opens doors your blog posts simply can’t.
The content creation and massive research that went into creating it is already done. There’s only one step left for you to unlock value that will turn your content evergreen.
Will repurposing content really boost its impact?
When you look at how blog content can be monetized and distributed, the math becomes visible.
When blog posts are limited to their original format, they primarily generate value through avenues like advertising or affiliate links. However, data from marketing reports shows that expanding content through repurposing, such as into eBooks, can significantly amplify returns. For instance, content repurposing strategies have been linked to 40-60% reductions in production costs and 2-3x ROI gains, as they allow existing assets to reach new audiences.
Specific to eBooks, 65% of B2B businesses incorporate them into campaigns for benefits like improved lead quality and authority building.
Lead magnets like eBooks can achieve conversion rates of 20-40% in targeted scenarios, compared to 1-3% for general sign-ups, though these figures depend on factors like audience targeting and content quality.
As digital products, eBooks might sell for around $29, adding direct revenue streams, while also enhancing course value or positioning as an expert guide. As high as 94% of marketers using repurposing to boost reach and ROI support the idea that much of a blog’s potential remains underutilized without format diversification.
The Traditional Approach Is a Productivity Bottleneck
If transforming blog posts into eBooks were easy, everyone would do it. In reality, the process is painful because of the lengthy copy-pasting process and the dozens of tabs you will need to open.
By the time you finished, you will have taken half a day, battled friction around formatting and worried about maintaining multiple versions across tools.
External Tools Create Their Own Problems
Dedicated eBook creation tools like Designrr, Canva and Beacon promise to simplify the process. However, if you’ve been writing with WordPress as your platform, you’ll know that your content doesn’t live on these eBook creation tools.
Something will be lost in the process of hopping across tools, and there will be chaos around permissions and document versions.
When WordPress already handles your content editing workflows, why jump across to another tool?
A Simpler Path Forward
What if the eBook creation process happened where your content already lives, without requiring you to leave the WordPress dashboard that feels like home?
That’s the question I had in mind when I started building the tool I wish existed, something to help writers create an eBook in WordPress.
The tool I’m talking about is called eBook Crafter, and its workflow follows three steps – Gather, Craft and Publish.
Gather involves searching and selecting posts from anywhere on your site. These will be in the form of blog posts, pages and custom post types.
Craft means editing within the Block editor you already know. You could add introductions between chapters and rewrite sections specifically for the eBook format, without touching the original posts.
Publish means generating an eBook, currently in PDF format, with custom fonts, cover pages, and consistent styling. The file will be saved in your WordPress Media Library, ready to link to a WooCommerce product, embed on a landing page or provide through an exclusive membership page.
The Non-Destructive Editing Method
Here are some use cases that could benefit from the non-destructive, friction-free method of creating eBooks.
Recipe collections are a great fit. A food blogger with dozens of seasonal recipes can create a “Holiday Baking Collection” in an afternoon from the recipes they’ve already published over many years. They just need to be gathered and edited for relevance without modifying the original posts.
Educational handbooks solve an ongoing challenge with learning management platforms. Students hate clicking through dozens of lesson pages to review material before a crucial exam. A downloadable eBook that compiles an entire course or provides a mock exam will give them something they can reference distraction-free on a tablet or print out to review everything away from screens.
Agency portfolios can transform scattered case studies into beautiful portfolio collections. When you’re pitching a new client, handing them a professionally done PDF of your past work carries more weight than sending a list of URLs.
Annual reports and compilations can turn a year’s worth of content into a single resource. News sites and industry analysts can package their best coverage into premium downloads.
Lead magnets can convert scattered expertise into an exercise for email list growth. Ten posts on a specific topic become a “Complete Guide” that visitors will happily trade their email address to receive.
Dealing with the Friction
Is it worth eliminating all the friction you might encounter to unlock the hidden potential of your site’s content?
I built eBook Crafter because I believe the answer should be yes, and that the friction should be close to zero. When gathering posts takes seconds, editing happens in an interface you already use daily, and publishing produces a result within a few clicks, the calculation changes.
Click here to explore eBook Crafter.
