Blog to Book to Business: How to Live Your Dream

Do you dream of writing a book?

Are you wondering how publishing a book can help you grow your business?

To learn how you can combine your passion with your business, I interview Jeff Goins for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jeff Goins, a blogger who followed his passion and amassed 200,000 monthly followers and published three books—all very quickly. His books include You Are a Writer, Wrecked and The In-Between.

Jeff shares how he achieved his dream of becoming a writer, while building a successful business.

You'll learn what it takes to jump from blog to book and why you should start now.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Blog to Book to Business
What do you tell people you do for a living?

Jeff typically tells people he's a writer, although he does a lot of other things. He finds it easier to tell people that, and it allows him to own his identity.

Jeff called himself a writer well before he was writing. It allowed him to step into the title and it reminds him of how far he has come.

Listen to the show to hear why many aspiring authors don't own their dreams.

The story of dreams and fears

Jeff explains that he went solo about 8-9 months ago, but it has taken him about 3 years to get to this stage.

He originally started with a blog, which turned into a side business. It wasn't until the end of last year that he realized he was making enough money that his wife didn't have to work anymore. He eventually quit his job at the beginning of this year to become a full-time writer, blogger and speaker.

Jeff's blog, Goins Writer, isn't his first blog. Up to this point, he had attempted eight other blogs, all of which failed.

It was these failures that prepared Jeff to persevere. He eventually set up his personal blog, where he talks about writing and his own struggles. This was an attempt to learn how to build a platform so he could get published and share his journey with others.

You'll hear why Jeff forced himself into writing a personal blog and why he made the decision to give it two years.

Listen to the show to find out what fuels Jeff's writing.

The importance of writing for more popular blogs

When he started a blog, Jeff did the relationship thing first. You'll discover what he did to reach out to the people he admired and why they were a huge influence when it came to the launch of the Goins Writer blog.

Once he had seen the power of this in action, he was able to partner with communicators who had audiences that he wanted to connect with.

Within the first year of his blog's launch, Jeff wrote over 100 articles on 100 websites. He believes it was the single best strategy for building his audience.

Every multi-author blog out there constantly looks for exceptional talent and it's a win-win for both parties. It was one of the keys to Jeff's success.

Jeff had listened to people like Jon Morrow, who had essentially done the same thing. Jon didn't have a blog for years. Instead he established himself first as a guest author for other blogs, including CopyBlogger and ProBlogger. So before he even wrote a single post on his own blog, he already had an email list of about 13,000 subscribers.

Listen to the show to hear what Jeff discovered when he gave away his best content.

Making money

When Jeff launched his blog, he had a day job working for a nonprofit organization. His blog at the time was not making any money.