Whether you’ve always wanted to write a book or it’s a new idea (and you should write a book, by the way), there’s an ever-present problem for would-be-authors. It’s not a lack of writing talent. It’s definitely not a lack of knowledge. And for sure it’s not a lack of desire. If you asked most people why they have not finished their book, the answer is simple: time.

Entrepreneurs are busy people. You have clients to serve, a business to run, a family to care for. Not only that, but you’re spending time creating new training courses, marketing on social media, managing your team…the list is nearly endless (by the way – here’s how you can get it all done without losing your mind!) So, when would you have time to write an entire book?

You’ve Probably Already Written It

It’s true. If you have a blog and you’ve been maintaining it for more than a few months, then you very likely have already written all the content your book needs. All that remains is to organize and give it a light edit.

If you don’t have a blog (why not?), or your blog is young, blogging your book is even easier, since you can plan your content around your book topic, then you can write a book one blog post at a time.

Here’s how it works. Think of your blog categories as sections, and each blog post as a chapter. You can loosely organize your book by sorting all your blog posts by category, then listing them in logical order. Your book may only contain a single category, or it might contain several. The choice is yours.

Remove self-serving, time-sensitive, curated, or other content that doesn’t fit into a book. Remove the calls to action. It won’t make sense to promote your paid programs—or worse, affiliate offers—within a book.

What you’re left with is a rough draft of a book. All that remains is a few passes with your editor engaged:

1. For flow: Books should follow a logical path from one chapter to the next, so you’ll likely have to add or edit the beginnings and endings of your posts.
2. For spelling, grammar, and punctuation: Don’t skip this part. In fact, get someone else to do it. It’s too difficult to spot our own mistakes and book readers are less forgiving than blog readers.
3. For content: Enlist the help of a few friends or colleagues who you trust to share their honest opinion with you. Ask them to read through and note any content that is confusing or that could be explained in greater detail.

That’s it! Revise and you’re ready to publish.

People Will Actually Read It

Think no one will read a book that’s repurposed from your blog? Think again. Bloggers have used this method to write books for years and some of them are spectacularly successful. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net fame wrote and published his wildly popular blogging guide based entirely on the content he’d already published on his blog. He found that even though the content was freely available, people bought the book because they wanted the convenience of having it organized for them in one document.

Even fiction writers have discovered the power of blogging a book. Andy Weir, the author of “The Martian,” first published his book one chapter at a time on a blog.

Don’t continue to let excuses hold you back from publishing your book. Use the content you’ve already written, or strategically plan your blog to turn it into a book, but either way, write a book and get publishing!

As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to watch the lack of progress of so many promising business owners and coaches. They’ve dreamed for so long about creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet, all they do is dream.
You know the people I’m talking about. They attend conferences, sign up for free webinars, buy paid training, and sometimes even work with a coach or two. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, they fail to make any progress toward their dreams.
Are they just lazy? No. It’s something worse. They don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan and they’re stuck. How do you prevent the same fate for yourself? Keep reading.

Start With the Long-Term

If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, “Where do you want to be five years from now,” you might have thought it an odd question. But as a business owner, that might just be the most important consideration you can have.
Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there. You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure you’re still headed in the right direction.

Create Milestones

Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.
For example, if in five years you want to be free to travel for 8 weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can happen:

• Enough income to cover travel costs
• Passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working
• A staff who can manage the business while you’re away

With this list, you can then work backward from your five-year goal, and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $150,000 annually in order to fund your travel plans, and right now you’re earning $60,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this:

• Year 1: $70,000
• Year 2: $85,000
• Year 3: $105,000
• Year 4: $125,000
• Year 5: $150,000

With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

Create Small Goals

If you say to someone, you need to move from $60,000 to $150,000 in five years, that’s a pretty overwhelming task. After all, it’s a $90,000 increase and most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as impossible.
But when you break it down as we have above, and then again into smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t look so daunting.
In the first year of the plan we have outlined here, your income needs to increase only by $10,000. That’s less than $1000 per month! Surely that’s easy enough to accomplish!
You can further break that down by week: $1000 per month is just $250 per week. If you sell just one more group coaching package or five more of a $50 training program, you’ve already reached your milestone.
That might mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an additional $20 per month in Facebook ads, or perhaps reaching out to one more affiliate partner. The point is, reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than thinking about that five-year plan.

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can) then you can achieve anything in business and in life.