A recent post by John Knight over at his Knightly News blog tweaked by interest because he is in the challenging position of making the leap into more serious publishing activities – one possibility being writing his own book.

You can tell from his posting that he has been planning a book for some time, but seems to be coming to the conclusion that writing a blog gets him 80% of the advantage of writing a book, causing him to take a hard, sober second look.

In my experience, having written many books, reports, ebooks, courses, and help seminars and workshops as well as more than 1000 articles, white papers and publishing a few blogs – it is not an either or scenario but rather an ecosystem of information that one should be providing.

No doubt, a great deal depends on what your business model is.  Some make massive profits selling low-end information products such as books, ebooks, reports – they make their money writing high volume infoproducts.  

Another business model is to develop a seriies of low-end, lead generation products such as blogs, articles, reports and even ebooks – giving them away in order to market a higher end course, workshop, seminar, multimedia information package, etc… With this model, certainly you can argue a blog is just as effective as writing the ebook or book.

Finally, you may publish information with an intent to market other products – example a health book to promote vitamins or an electronics buying guide to market an electronics retail site. 

In term so of marketing information – the role of non-fiction writers – I have found that blogs, articles, viral reports are great for directing traffic to your websites, and gaining a relationship with your market so they are more likely to invest further in you – then offering a range of entry level, back-end and cross-sell products is the best way to build your own publishing business. 

So, you may have a blog on personal development that entices your subsriber to get your free monthly report on a specific sub-niche within the topic which then provides a link to an entry-level book or ebook product – of the people who purchase your entry level product you further market higher-end products and convert a serious group of those buyers to more personalized and expansive products/services. 

What about you – have you thought about how you will publish your information?

Jeff