Content Generation Idea: Using Written Tutorials

Content Generation Idea: Using Written Tutorials

Now where as best practices are great for helping people know how to conduct themselves when doing something. A written tutorial tells you exactly how to do something. And you can use making up tutorials for all manner of things related to your niche industry. For content for your site, blog or affiliate site or whatever!

And that's what we'll be delving into in Content Generation Idea 24: Using Written Tutorials.

And written tutorials are usually a little harder to do than creating a video tutorial (which will be our next content generation idea) since with video you can record your screen and show how to do something step by step visually. But you can't really show people that way with a written tutorial. You can and should include crucial images, pictures, photos, screenshots etc. But you may have to write in a special way to fully explain what people need to do step by step and each step broken down into at the very least, a basic overview of doing that step.

Think about it like this, imagine if you was trying to describe how the inner workings and mechanisms of a watch look like. Simply just explaining that it's made up of lots of different sized cogs and springs wouldn't be as affective or as helpful as backing up what you can see with a photo picture of it.

And tutorials are always usually very helpful to people in some way. And sure it could as well just be a How-To post. But tutorials generally have a more step by step description that tells and shows people how to do something in particular specifically.

How to come up with Tutorial Content Ideas?

Depending on your niche, in lots of different ways! This just takes some brainstorming and you can come up with tons of these which could keep you busy for a while trying to make all!

But for what to think about and focus on in your brainstorming. Is those things that the people who are your target audience would like to know how to do. These can often be found from just the most general questions that those people ask you most frequently. Or just think about what some things that you would like your targeted audience people to know how to do. And then subtly tilting it towards your site or business within or at the end of the tutorial. Because tutorials can be really helpful to people, they present a problem of not knowing how to do something and the solution; knowing how to do it! And that's where your business or service can come in.

A lot of smart businesses do this today and make up or have made for them, written tutorials that can have more than one practical use. Let's look at some of those reasons.

Practical Reasons for Written Tutorials

• - They can be great for coming up with an almost unlimited amount of content.
  
• - They are helpful to people to know how to do something in a guided step by step way.
  
• - They make for great content for your site that can be ranked for keywords within it.
  
• - You can probably create many of them and make a whole tutorial bank for many of them.
  
• - They can be used to subtly but powerfully direct people to your site as the solution.
  
• - They can be created into PDF, PPT's etc for reading on mobile devices and computers.
  

How To Find Tutorials to Make?

Everything can be turned into a tutorial! From waking up to brushing your teeth. From making breakfast, lunch and dinner. From getting dressed, to having some fashion sense! If people do it, it can be tutorialised! What you need to think about is what are those things that the people you want to target do, or want to do, that could be made Info a tut. Every niche will be different in what you can creat a written tutorial on. But at the same time, they all share some of the same things too. Like having to pay and or sending an item back or something. Where as some only have things you can do within that niche you know? Like how to fit snowchains on a car for a business that sells snowchains. Or how to safely dispose of a broken window for a double glass sales company. You get the idea right? It's just basically looking at the things that the people who buy your product or service have to do that's connected to that somehow.

So what you'd do is, create the written tutorial, and presents a problem of some kind like not knowing how to do something and then just tell them how to do it in the tut itself, and also present your site as the creator of that tut and as a fix to some problem they are having with something in life and give them option if coming to you for help instead.

A great example I can say that would put it into a little more perspective for you is how recent my my hdd crashed on me. I'd read a lot of tutorials on how to fix it but they all mostly involve opening the drive up and if you're not in a clean room when they do that and get dust on the platter, it could mess it up even more. Also I was warned about a couple things like how it could damage the drive even more or that the screws should all be the same torque else it won't work right. But I think that might just be made up stuff mostly by salesmen to scare you into not doing it yourself from the tutorial and hiring them to do it for you!

That's a theme I've come across in the last few days when reading written tuts on fixing a clicking hard drive. And it's just how written tutorials can be so effective not only for the content they can create but also for the extra business they can drum up for you if you do them right.

But that's basically content generation idea #32: Using Written Tutorials.

Do you make tutorials for the content you can create from them?

Do you make use of scare tactics in your tutorials and highlight risky steps and offer to do it for them instead for a fee?

What other ways do you come up with ideas for written tutorials?