The 13 Business Blogging Master Post Templates You Can Use, Part 6 – How-to Posts

You know the old saying.

An educated customer is the best customer.

Of course, when we say “educated,” we mean “everything I teach them leads them to the conclusion they must hire me or buy my stuff.”

The basic “how to” post is a must. You need to be willing and able to throw one of these down once in a while. The problem with how-to posts is that they’re trickier than you think. There are a few mistakes to watch out for, which most people make without realizing it. I’ll get to those in a bit. The point is that a how-to post is more than 1-2-3, A-B-C.

But that’s the place where we’ll start.

1-2-3, A-B-C

Most how-to posts try to teach you how to do something by going through a series of actions in a certain order. The worst thing in the world is to try to understand instructions when they are all sentences one after another in long paragraphs. For the sake of all that is holy and precious, break up your steps with sub-headlines and use numbers.

Don’t use numbered lists for the major steps in your how-to. You need to visually break up the space and you want the steps to be easily scannable, and a regularly-formatted numbered list from clicking on the numbered list button on the toolbar won’t give you that.

Further break up your instructions if you can under each sub-heading by using short paragraphs and bulleted or numbered lists.

Oh, and by the way, how-to posts certainly are not only going to be the instructional, 1-2-3, A-B-C type of post, but I don’t want this post to become too long, so we’ll leave it at this for now.

Learning Objectives

I spent over a decade as a computer and software trainer. I’ve undergone extensive training in how to teach adult learners. You can benefit from my experience by applying the tips I’m about to share with you.

If you’re gonna teach someone how to do something, you need to have a very specific and limited idea of what that something is. Otherwise, you’re in danger of trying to do too much and of “driving all over the road.” Consider the following two headlines:

• How to Create an Awesome Photoshop Image
• How to Create a Stunning Depth-of-Field Effect in Photoshop CS5

The second one is better because it’s specific and it’s limited. Who knows what the hell could be included in an “awesome Photoshop image”? You know exactly what you’re getting with the second one. You know exactly what you’re going to be able to do when you’re done.

The Three Ts

In a training program I have undergone many times over the past ten years or so, called Train the Trainer, I learned about the three Ts:

1. Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em
2. Tell ‘em
3. Tell ‘em what you just told ‘em

In other words, list the objectives first so people have a mental road map and proper expectations, then present the material and, finally, review what was learned.

Choice of Media

A How-to post can be bitch to write. It can be a long and laborious undertaking. For something which involves a lot of steps and which is difficult to describe in short bursts of text, I will use video. It’s a million times easier for me to create a screencast video than to generate and annotate a ton of screen capture images.

Of course I’m familiar with learning modalities: everyone learns best in a certain way: some people prefer text, some prefer audio, some prefer to watch and some prefer to learn by doing (kinesthetic). You can’t make everybody happy but often you can have both text and audio/video.

The SEO Connection

One of chief benefits of doing how-to posts is the search traffic you can get from them. Make your post headline the exact words most people would use to search for how to do whatever your post is about. Use the Google auto-suggest or Wordtracker’s free question keyword tool.

To this day I still get tons of traffic to posts I wrote in which the headlines were exact-matches for search terms. For example, How to Wrap Text Around a Video in WordPress.

Google auto-suggest (click to enlarge)

Question keyword tool (click to enlarge)

Two Deadly Mistakes to Avoid

The reasons for creating how-to posts are the same reasons for why we create any post on a business blog: to show your ideal clients why they should hire you or buy your stuff. This is a critical difference between business blogging and “pro” blogging.

So, with how-to posts, it’s easy to make these two mistakes:

Mistake #1: Teaching people how to do something to such a degree that they don’t need to hire you or buy your stuff. If someone feels like they can get everything they need by just reading your free stuff, you’re doing it wrong.

You know how much you’re holding back, but they don’t. It’s tricky, because you want to be helpful, but not too helpful. For example, this series of posts on business blogging post types is pretty damn helpful, but you might notice that they’re often short on specifics or how-to step-by-step information. There’s a lot I’m not revealing in these posts which will be in the ebook I make out of them later.

Mistake #2: Being blinded by the “curse of knowledge” and failing to connect with your people because your assumptions and what you take for granted is over their heads.

If you’ve ever talked with a computer nerd who can’t seem to get you to understand what he’s talking about, you know how badly this can go wrong.

The opposite of the curse of knowledge is what the Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” Another key to succeeding here is having a keen awareness of what your ideal clients need to hear and when. You need to be in their heads, speaking their language.

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Image by pasukaru76 (busy with portal 2)