How-to content and tutorial content are important additions to almost any website. This content is designed to help consumers with specific problems, which makes it valuable and visible to anyone specifically looking for it. If you can solve those consumers’ problems, you’ll improve your brand’s reputation, and may take them one step closer to purchasing your products and services.
So what steps can you take to ensure you’re creating valuable tutorial content in WordPress?
Types of Tutorial Content
First, you should know there are several valid approaches to tutorial content:
- FAQ and common issues. First, there are articles meant to address a series of related problems with frequently asked questions (FAQs), or a review of potential issues. For example, you might write about common issues homeowners find with dishwashers, and how to correct them.
- Lessons and skill development. You could also write content meant to teach a specific lesson, or develop a skill in your readership. For example, you might write an article that teaches readers how to change a bike tube.
- Step-by-step guides. Step-by-step guides are designed to walk readers through a specific problem one step at a time, and are best reserved for complex problems and procedures. For example, you might take multiple steps to teach readers how to apply eyeshadow effectively.
- Video walkthroughs. Finally, video walkthroughs rely on strong visuals (and typically, a narrator) to coach viewers through a sequence of steps to solve a problem. They may or may not be accompanied by a transcript.
Publishing Better How-To Content
Take these steps to make your tutorial content as effective as possible:
- Focus on specific problems for your target demographics. Your content is only effective if it helps people with a real problem they have. It’s therefore in your best interest to research your target demographics and determine which types of problems they struggle with—rather than making assumptions or relying on your own imagination. Consider using keyword research here to inform your strategy. The more specific your topic is, the better; general topics tend to come with lots of competition, which can make it hard to get sufficient visibility.
- Embed multiple mediums. Today’s audience wants a variety of different mediums to choose from. Some people prefer reading instructions, but may need the help of images to fully understand your content. Others want the convenience of video, and don’t want to scroll through pages of text to find what they’re looking for. Your best course of action, then, is to create articles that offer multiple mediums at once, complete with text, images, and videos. It might take some extra time and effort, but you’ll greatly expand your potential audience.
- Choose the right tiles and descriptions. In WordPress, you’ll have the ability to create your own custom page title and description. These represent the text users will see in search engine results pages (SERPs), so make sure you optimize them with catchy phrasing, and keywords that your demographics might search for. This will improve your visibility and ensure the right audiences are reading your material.
- Enable sharing. Use a WordPress plugin to make sharing your article easy. The fastest way to get more visibility and more visitors for your work is to have readers who have already enjoyed it share it across their social media channels. The easier and more visible this process is, the more people will come to use it.
- Categorize and tag your work. Organize your content with WordPress’s category system, enabling visitors to quickly determine which content is most relevant to them and access it conveniently. Tags work similarly, though you’ll have more flexibility with the number of tags you create. These features are also useful for optimizing for search engines.
- Track and analyze readership. Use your WordPress analytics solution of choice to track how people are accessing your content (and their behavior while reading it). Use this information to determine which of your how-to articles are successful, which ones need work, and which qualities are common in each category. The more data you gather and analyze, the more insights you’ll have to produce your next line of articles.
If you can follow these steps consistently, you’ll produce an ongoing series of high-quality tutorial content, which you can then use to improve your readership numbers and strengthen your brand reputation. Start with one article, and use the lessons you learn in that process to inform your future work.
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