How to write a tutorial to attract customers

Tutorials are a staple of content marketing and an effective way to generate leads. In general, a textbook is an example-based learning method. It shows the individual steps to complete a task.

In marketing, tutorials are a form of “support” content – ​​especially internally framework Hero-Hub-Help. They can create a sense of reciprocity where the person using the tutorial feels obligated to your brand because of the helpful information you’ve shared. Also, tutorials are useful for search engine optimization.

Textbook Characteristics

Tutorials should be short, clear and repeatable. Your audience should be able to follow steps to a predictable outcome, such as completing a task.

Sometimes it will be specific and prescriptive. For example: how to cook lazania. Or it could be more general, like this article: Tutorial on Creating Tutorials.

Textbook structure

Recognizing a number of possible textbook designs, we can identify three main parts that are common to any decent textbook, including:

• A description of the task or problem,
• An overview of the explanation,
• Demonstration of the task.

Here’s a quick example: how to create a “Tweet this” link to share an article on Twitter.

Description. We’ll start by describing the task: how to make content easy to share on Twitter.

Create a “Write this” link to allow readers to share your content on Twitter and increase your content’s reach.

Review. Next, give an overview of the explanation.

A “Tweet this” link is an encoded URL that contains the content to be shared, the associated web address, and a Twitter description. The link consists of four parts that you can easily write.

Demonstration. Finally, demonstrate the process.

1. The “Write this” link starts with a Twitter URL.

http://twitter.com/share?

This link points to Twitter and tells the social media platform that something is about to be shared. “?” shows that the following parameters are the URL of the source, the content and the Twitter handle of the source.

2. Add the web address for the source before the “URL” parameter and the equal sign (=).

url=https://www.example.com/some_path

3. Enable encrypted text. Here, “encoded” means that special characters, such as spaces, replace a series of standard characters to make it easier for servers to parse the content. For example, a space replaces %20.

To help with text encoding, you can use an online tool, e.g Eric Meyer’s Free URL Encoder or manually encode a copy using an encoding link, e.g ASCII school W3.

In the “Tweet This” link, the content to be shared is preceded by an ampersand (&) to add it to the URL string, a “text” parameter, and an equal sign (=).

&text=Tutorial%20articles%20and%20videos%20are%20a%20staple%20of%20helpful%20content%20marketing%20and%20a%20good%20way%20to%20attract%20potential%20customers%20to%20your%20business

4. Give credit to the author on Twitter, which can help increase your Twitter followers. Similar to the “text” parameter described in the last step, this part of the link started with an ampersand (&) to concatenate this new section; the name of the parameter, in this case “via”; and an equal sign (=) followed by the parameter value.

&via=ecommerceboy

As a result link will open the Twitter Tweet Editor.

An example of a textbook

The Tweet This tutorial above walks you through the process of creating your own tutorial. Now let’s take a look at our favorite textbook article, “How to “Make” Product Descriptions for E-Commerce”, and identify these sections.

Describe the task. First, let’s take a look at how the article describes writing eCommerce product descriptions.

Writing product descriptions can be one of the biggest challenges that eCommerce businesses face. Some entrepreneurs or managers may find it uncomfortable to write. How about a pair of shoes, a fishing reel, or something like a hammer or a screw?…

Even worse, a poor product description can hurt your e-commerce business. Damage can be done in several ways.

First, a poor, bland product description may not inspire a buyer to buy or give them enough information to make a good buying decision.

Second, if you copy the product description from the manufacturer, your page or even your website may not show up well in search engines. At the time of writing, Google does not penalize sites for duplicating content unless it believes the duplication has been used fraudulently. However, when faced with duplicate product content on multiple e-commerce sites, Google may choose only one site to display in search results.

This tutorial article explains the task at hand. It should be clear to the reader that the product description is very important.

An overview of the explanation. Further, the article tells how to solve the task of writing a product description.

Given the challenge of what to write (author block form) and the dangers of posting poor product descriptions (lower conversion or duplicate content), some online stores may want to take a mechanical approach to creating (writing) product descriptions.

The idea is simple. Instead of sitting down at a keyboard, staring at a picture of your product, or trying to rewrite the manufacturer’s description, follow the process.

Demonstrate how to complete the task. The product description tutorial article outlines a seven-step process—two of which he calls optional—for consistently producing good e-commerce product descriptions.

At each step of the process, the article provides an example of a product description, specifically for a soup spoon.

After the first “Focus on One” step, the description of the spoon is one line.

This soup spoon has a large bowl.

At the end of step three, Refine and Refine, the description of the spoon begins to take shape.

This soup spoon has a large bowl. In fact, this soup spoon holds about three times as much soup as a regular tablespoon. That way, you get more soup with every bite.

The final product description grew significantly before the eyes of the reader.

Craving a hearty chicken noodle soup or creamy clam chowder? This soup spoon has a large bowl to scoop cookies and broths into your mouth. In fact, this soup spoon holds about three times as much soup as a standard tablespoon. You can eat three times as many bites or buy that soup spoon and drink a large one.

In addition to helping customers

Tutorials like this are a key type of content, regardless of purpose journalism or marketing. When your business creates tutorials, you’re not just helping customers. You provide a marketing tool that attracts potential customers and introduces them to your business.